Morphological leveling

In linguistics, morphological leveling or paradigm leveling is the generalization of an inflection across a linguistic paradigm, a group of forms with the same stem in which each form corresponds in usage to different syntactic environments,[1] or between words.[2] The result of such leveling is a paradigm that is less varied, having fewer forms.[3]

When a language becomes less synthetic, it is often a matter of morphological leveling. An example is the conjugation of English verbs, which has become almost unchanging today (see also null morpheme), thus contrasting sharply, for example, with Latin, in which one verb has dozens of forms, each one expressing a different tense, aspect, mood, voice, person, and number. For instance, English sing has only two forms in the present tense (I/you/we/they sing and he/she sings), but its Latin equivalent cantāre has six: one for each combination of person and number.

  1. ^ "Paradigm". SIL Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-03. Retrieved 2019-05-09.
  2. ^ Ishtla Singh (2005). The History of English. Hodder Education. p. 27.
  3. ^ Hazen, Kirk (2014). "A new role for an ancient variable in Appalachia: Paradigm leveling and standardization in West Virginia". Language Variation and Change. 26 (1): 77–102. doi:10.1017/S0954394513000215. ISSN 0954-3945. S2CID 144643510.

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