Many languages possess morphological rules which serve to express diminution or augmentation, endearment or contempt; examples are the Breton rule relating potr ‘boy’ to potrig ‘little boy’, the Shona rule relating chibikiso ‘cooking tool’ to zichibikiso ‘huge cooking tool’ and the Italian rule relating poeta ‘poet’ to poetastro ‘bad poet’. Because of the possibility of interpreting diminution and augmentation in affective rather than purely objective terms (Wierzbicka, 1980: 53ff.; Szymanek, 1988: 106ff.), morphological expressions of diminution or augmentation are not always discrete from those of endearment or contempt; that is, diminutives and augmentatives are frequently used as expressions of endearment (such as Italian sorella ‘sister’ → sorellina ‘dear little sister’, donna ‘woman’ → donnotta ‘fine, stout woman’) or disdain (Italian uomo ‘man’ → uomicciuolo ‘contemptible little man’, donna → donnona ‘overgrown girl’).

Algorithms for the assignment of main word stress in Dutch have never been systematically tested against foot-based segmental processes. The assumption has apparently been that such processes do not exist. In this article, it is suggested that Dutch has at least four segmental rules that make reference to the foot, and that Dutch has a chanted intonation contour whose realization is governed by foot structure. The evidence provided by all these processes largely confirms the more recent proposals for Dutch foot structure, including Kager (1989) and Trommelen & Zonneveld (1989), except where they fail to conform to (1).

Japanese, like many other languages, permits numeral expressions to appear in several positions relative to the argument whose number they specify. This article concentrates on just two of the possibilities, the ‘Pre-Nominal’ and the ‘Q-Float’ numeral positions, describing a number of semantic, syntactic and pragmatic differences between them.

1. This article proposes a criticism and elaboration of the theory of Natural Morphology as it relates to inflection and to inflectional change. The theoretical framework I start from is that set out at length in Mayerthaler (1981/1988), Wurzel (1984/1989), Dressler (1987) and Kilani-Schoch (1988). The concept of naturalness involved here combines Prague School notions of markedness (see Andersen, 1989) with more recent typological approaches and a semiotic framework which derives from the work of C. S. Peirce. The goal of naturalness theories in historical linguistics is to identify some constraints on language change (for example, on sound change, analogy and grammaticalization) which are, broadly speaking, functionally motivated, that is, motivated by the nature of human psychology or of human communication. Naturalness theories offer an approach to explanation of Weinreich, Labov & Herzog's (1968; 102, 186) actuation problem. Among other things, Natural Morphology proposes explanatory principles and constraints for analogy.

In this paper we introduce a declarative approach to inflectional morphology, which we call Network Morphology, using the lexical representation language DATR. We show that we can account for a range of (Russian) data, for which previously various rule types were required, and can provide a more satisfying analysis than was previously available. First we outline the essential data (section 2), highlighting the problems they present. Section 3 introduces the basic tenets of Network Morphology. This draws heavily on DATR, which we present in outline in section 4. Next we reconsider the Russian declensional classes from this new perspective (section 5). We show how the approach described overcomes long-standing problems in an elegant fashion; the complexity of the data suggests that the approach adopted has implications well beyond Russian. We then tackle the complex problem of animacy in Russian, which exemplifies interesting regularities extending across declensional classes (section 6).