German case syncretism is often assumed to be the accidental by-product of historical development. This paper contradicts this claim and argues that the evolution of German case is driven by the need to optimize the cognitive effort and memory required for processing and interpretation. This hypothesis is supported by a novel kind of computational experiments that reconstruct and compare attest...

Irregular or unproductive morphology and the phenomenon of lexically controlled phonological variation point to a lexicon-grammar continuum which seems more consistent with the gradient properties of connectionist models than with the all-or-nothing properties of traditional approaches. Another class of generalizations pointing in the same direction centers on the notion of representations as a...

Several typological gaps have attracted a lot of interest in the linguistic literature recently. These concern the Person Case Constraint and the absence of ABA patterns in adjectival gradation, pronoun suppletion, case syncretism, and singular noun allomorphy, among others. This paper is the first to provide a unified explanation of all these phenomena, and it does so via weakly non-inverting ...