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date: 25 June 2022

Abstract and Keywords

The word-based model has been fairly stable through most of its history. The Alexandrine model provides the basis for the later Latin grammars and in turn for subsequent descriptive and pedagogical presentations of classical grammar. An essentially classical word-based perspective likewise survives into the Neogrammarian period and remains relevant to morphological analysis in the field of historical linguistics. Although neglected during the early Bloomfieldian period, word-based approaches attracted renewed interest following the proposals of Hockett (1954) and Robins (1959). The explicit model set out by Matthews (1965, 1972) established word-based approaches on the same footing as other contemporary models. From this point of origin, the word-based tradition evolved into distinctive realizational and implicational branches, both of which remain under active development. The evolution of this tradition not only rehabilitated an ancient model, but also reacquainted modern audiences with the types of morphological patterns that had initially motivated its classical variants.

Keywords: WP, word and paradigm, realization-based, implicational information-theoretic

James P. Blevins

James P. Blevins is Reader in Morphology and Syntax in the University of Cambridge. His current research is concerned mainly with the structure and complexity of inflectional systems. These issues are approached from the standpoint of contemporary word and paradigm models, interpreted from a largely information-theoretic and discriminative perspective.

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