Re: THEORY: Verbs go irregular before our very eyes!

John Cowan:
[...]
> 1)      To make the passive voice, apply the suffix "-ia".
> 2)      Remove any final consonant.
[...]
> 3)      To make the passive voice of a verb ending in a vowel,
>         apply the suffix "-a".
>
> But Set III is the kicker:
>
> "Rootless" verbs (those newly invented, or created from nouns, or
> borrowed from other languages) are made passive with the suffix
> "-tia".
>
> Now these verbs cannot all have underlying forms in -T.  Certainly
> not the borrowings, where there was no /t/ in the source language!
> But if the underlying form ends in a vowel, why is not the suffix
> "-a" applied?
>
> The final explanation, I think, is that the rule-based mechanism
> no longer works in present-day Maori.  Instead, there are now separate
> passive suffixes "-tia", "-kia", "-ngia", "-hia", etc., of which "-tia" is
> the regular ending, and the others are lexically specific, just like English
> strong verbs. Of course, only a few verbs, the new ones, have become
> regularized as yet.  We can probably expect Maori, if it survives, to have
> some of the rarer verbs losing their irregular inflections in favor of -tia.
If Set III stems are all V-final, then Set I stems, the C-final ones, can
be made regular by a rule that deletes the t- from -tia. That leaves Set
II as those with unconditioned t-deletion. There could also, alternatively,
be a rule that denominal and borrowed verbs must have stems ending in t
(with passive suffix as per rule 1), though it is harder to suppose that
such a rule could apply to newly invented words. From the learner's point
of view, none of this makes any difference; my point is just that from the
analyst's point of view, varying degrees of ingenuity will find varying
degrees of regularity.

More generally, though, I believe that unless (as in English) regular
and irregular inflection have phonologically different repercussions,
inflectional (ir)regularity is largely an irrelevance to the existing
lexicon.

--And.

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