1 Introduction : Approaching inflectional identity

The topic of this volume is inflectional identity. We group together under the term inflectional the morphological markers that participate in a “paradigmatically-related” alternation to express case, person, number, gender, or class distinctions. Identity covers and classifies a range of identity and similarity relations among the phonological form of these items. We refer, informally, to any n-way classification of verbal or nominal inflection as a paradigm, where the two (or more) dimensions could be tense and agreement (on verbs) or conjugation class and case (on nouns). The primary focus of study here will be on inflectional rather than derivational morphology (e.g., nominalization of verbs or the formation of the superlative form of an adjective), as one of the key puzzles is identity-of-form among items that have no clear derivational history with respect to each other. The overarching themes that emerge in the study of inflectional identity include questions of whether a set of inflectionally-related forms (e.g., all of the case endings within a certain declension class of nouns, or all of the singular stems for a certain conjugation class of verbs) share a common “base” from which identity of form can be understood to emerge, and questions of the division of labor between representational and derivational theories of the phonological form of closed-class morphemes. Effects of the force of identity–in form and in patterning of phonological behavior of inflectional items–have been implicated in grammatical study for quite some time. While historical linguistics has made repeated appeal to such forces (analogy, leveling, functional analogy; see Paul 1880, for example), this