Syntactic Features in Morphology: General Problems of So-called Pronominal Inflection in German

where each morpheme represents a class of allomorphs from which the proper member must be chosen according to highly idiosyncratic rules.' The principles and details of this conception were worked out most carefully by Harris.' The shortcomings of such an approach have been pointed out by Chomsky:' it prevents one from making the most of the linguistically interesting generalizations. At the same time European structuralists treated the problem in a very different way. Adhering to the traditional concept of inflectional paradigm, they took inflectional categories such as case, number, gender, etc. as more abstract entities. Although these entities were also called morphemes, they must not be understood as classes of allomorphs i.e. of (possibly empty) phonemic sequences but rather as values of certain inflectional dimensions to which phonemic representations can be assigned only in sometimes very complicated combinations. These representations then are often syncretisms of different inflectional categories and the question arises whether there are general principles governing syncretism and differentiation. The concepts of markedness vs. unmarkedness and of neutralization already introduced in phonology were transferred to morphology in order to formulate such principles. Phonemic, syntactic, and semantic aspects of inflectional categories were investigated