Clarifying “Blur”: Paradigms, defaults, and inflectional classes

Despite the emphasis placed on paradigms in many recent papers on morphology and phonology, we believe that linguists are, for the most part, using “paradigm” as a convenient cover term for a variety of distinct morphological issues. For example, much discussion within OT of “paradigm uniformity” uses “paradigm” to point to issues of allomorphy between “related” forms of a stem or root that do not crucially rely on paradigms in any demonstrable sense. These discussions employ paradigms to provide a set of forms that might be related via output-output constraints.