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Dvandvas, blocking, and the associative: The bumpy ride from phrase to word
- Language
- Linguistic Society of America
- Volume 86, Number 2, June 2010
- pp. 302-331
- 10.1353/lan.0.0216
- Article
- Additional Information
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The oldest form of Sanskrit has a class of expressions that are in some respects like asyndeti-cally coordinated syntactic phrases, in other respects like single compound words. I propose to resolve the conflicting evidence by drawing on prosodic phonology, stratal optimality theory, and the lexicalist approach to morphological blocking. I then present an account of the semantic properties and the historical development of these expressions. The analysis points to a solution to the theoretical problem of nonmonotonic trajectories in diachrony, a challenge for causal theories of change that claim that analogical processes are simplifying or regularizing. The idea is that optimization of such a highly structured object as a language does not proceed monotonically, but via a sequence of local optima.