Morphological Simplification: More than Erosion?

Abstract

This characterisation is based on a priori considerations, noticeable in terms such as "ideal language" and "deviations" (cf. Carstairs 1987: 12ff), but also on empirical evidence from language acquisition and language processing. The interplay of these Principles makes a wide range of scenarios possible. However, the most widely discussed example of simplification in inflectional morphology is the one of the Indo-European (IE) and especially the Germanic languages, where the following developments concurred: