Date
March 24, 2025, Göttingen, Germany
Description
Paradigmatic gaps concern words, morphemes, or phonemes that, despite being theoretically permissible in a language, do not exist. Such gaps have been attested in phonology, morphology and semantics. For instance, Thai has several sets of stop consonants that differ in terms of voicing and aspiration. Yet the language has no voiced velar stop (/ɡ/). Also, various instances of affixation do not appear. Why is it possible to say ‘proposal’ and ‘proposition’ but not ‘arrivation’ next to ‘arrival’? And in Greek many nouns lack a form for the genitive plural (with existing forms for all other cells in the paradigm). Finally, semantically, various concepts are not lexicalized (for instance, gender-neutral kinship terms for siblings of parents). Some of these gaps are even universal (for instance, the arguably universal absence of a word meaning ’not every’).
In this workshop, we address all these kinds of gaps and seek an answer to the question why such gaps are attested. For this, we invite submissions for 30 minute talks on any issue related to (universal) paradigmatic gaps. The guidelines are the same as for the main session.