When nobody wins
Kyle Gorman, Charles Yang
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/003614
June 2017
As young children vividly illustrate with their performance on the wug-test (Berko 1958), the ability to generalize linguistic patterns to novel items is a core property of language. It thus comes as a surprise when we stumble into a dark and dusty corner of language where our boundless linguistic productivity has unexpectedly failed. We propose that such lexical gaps arise in precisely those linguistic contexts for which the Tolerance Principle (Yang 2005, 2016) identifies no productive generalizations. We illustrate this proposal with detailed case studies from Spanish, Polish, and Russian.