Forthcoming: Voids in Morphology: Exploring “Uninflectedness”

Enrique L. Palancar (ed)

Keywords:

morphology, inflection, uninflectedness, uninflectability, defectiveness, typology

Synopsis

If we were to imagine an inflectional morphological system as a galactic universe with its matter and governing laws, "uninflectedness" would mark the outer boundaries of this system, the "voids," zones where the gravitational pull of inflection weakens and different structural principles come into play. Uninflectedness helps trace the limits of inflectional organization and offers valuable insights into how inflection operates and interacts with its periphery. Uninflectedness is thus a complex phenomenon that this book examines in depth for the first time, assembling a collection of 13 edited chapters that explore the phenomenon both theoretically and descriptively with the purpose of building a better typologically informed theory of inflection.

Chapters

  • Introduction to the book
    Enrique L. Palancar, Sebastian Fedden
  • The dog didn’t bark, the noun didn’t inflect: a typology of significant absences
    Greville Corbett
  • Some concepts and consequences of uninflectedness
    Andrew Spencer
  • The conditions of uninflectability in nouns in the Slavic languages
    Ursula Doleschal
  • Uninflectedness as a factor in agreement loss
    Michele Loporcaro
  • Diachronic paths to uninflectedness in South Slavic
    Greville Corbett, Alexander Krasovitsky, Matthew Baerman, Maria Kyuseva
  • Loss of inflection in the diachrony of French nouns
    Louise Esher
  • French voilà/voici: an uninflectable item arising from an inflecting verb
    Katja Friedewald
  • Emerging uninflectedness in French clipped verbs
    Olivier Bonami, Maria Copot
  • On the emergence of uninflectedness: The case of incipient verbal inflection dropping in present-day French
    Vicent Renner, Adam Renwick
  • Uninflectability in Italian nouns and adjectives
    Anna Maria Thornton, Paolo D'achille
  • Uninflectedness as a rule in Polish, an inflected language
    Jerzy Gaszewski
  • The Uninflecting Word Class rentaishi in Modern Japanese
    Victor Köhlich
  • The diachronic stability of uninflectedness in Berber
    Lameen Souag

Biographies

Enrique L. Palancar, CNRS

Enrique L. Palancar is a researcher at the CNRS (France) whose work focuses on the indigenous Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico, particularly the Oto-Pamean branch. He holds a PhD in Philology from the Complutense University of Madrid (2000) and a Habilitation in Language Sciences from INALCO, France (2016). He has held academic positions at the Autonomous University of Querétaro (Mexico) and the University of Surrey (UK). His research combines detailed fieldwork with typological inquiry into Mesoamerican languages, with a particular emphasis on inflectional morphology and morphosyntax, domains in which Oto-Manguean languages display striking structural complexity.

Sebastian Fedden

Sebastian Fedden is Professor of Linguistics at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and a guest professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. He is a typologist with a specialization in morphology, nominal classification, and Papuan languages. His grammar of Mian, published in 2011 with De Gruyter Mouton, won the Gabelentz Award of the Association for Linguistic Typology for the best grammar published between 2009 and 2012. He co-edited the Oxford Guide to the Papuan Languages, forthcoming with Oxford University Press, a comprehensive, up-to-date and forward-looking overview of the Papuan languages.

Book cover

Published

April 28, 2026
LaTeX source on GitHub

Series

Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax

Print ISSN

2366-3529
Cite as
Palancar, Enrique L. (ed.). Forthcoming. Voids in Morphology: Exploring “Uninflectedness”. (Empirically Oriented Theoretical Morphology and Syntax). Berlin: Language Science Press.
Copyright (c) 2026 Enrique L. Palancar, Sebastian Fedden; Katja Friedewald, Anna Maria Thornton, Paolo D'achille, Ursula Doleschal, Vicent Renner, Adam Renwick, Victor Köhlich, Greville Corbett, Andrew Spencer, Olivier Bonami, Maria Copot, Lameen Souag, Louise Esher, Jerzy Gaszewski, Alexander Krasovitsky, Matthew Baerman, Maria Kyuseva, Michele Loporcaro

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.