The Structure of Political Choices: Distinguishing Between Constraint and Multidimensionality

In the literatures on public opinion and legislative behavior, there are debates over (1) how constrained preferences are and (2) whether they are captured by a single left–right spectrum or require multiple dimensions. But insufficient formalization has led scholars to equate a lack of constraint with multidimensional preferences. In this paper, we refine the concepts of constraint and dimensionality in a formal framework and describe how they translate into separate observable implications for political preferences. We use this discussion to motivate a cross-validation estimator that measures constraint and dimensionality in the context of canonical ideal point models. Using data from the public and politicians, we find that American political preferences are one-dimensional, but there is more constraint among politicians than among the mass public. Furthermore, we show that differences between politicians and the public are not explained by differences in agendas or the incentives faced by the actors.

Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics

Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s languages, and it is well-known that languages exhibit many different types of deviation from a canonical ideal in which there is a unique and consistent mapping between function and form. In this paper we present data from Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, northern Australia) that demonstrates a type of non-canonical morphotactics so far unattested in the literature, one which we call positional dependency. This type is unusual in that the non-canonical pattern is driven by morphological form rather than by morphosyntactic function. In this case the realisation of one morph is dependent on the position in the verbal template of another morph. Thus, it is the linearisation of morphs that conditions the morphological realisation, not the morphosyntactic feature set. Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha thus expands our typology of content-form interactions and non-canonical morphotactics with implications for our understanding of morphological structure cross-linguistically.

Introduction

Grammatical gender systems vary widely across the languages of the world. Many conform to the canonical ideal in that each noun belongs to a single gender, and this gender is reflected in the agreement affixes on various words throughout the sentence. Other systems diverge from this ideal, some quite substantially. This chapter is the opening chapter of a unique collection of non-canonical gender systems from a variety of language families across the world. It outlines the theoretical perspective taken in the volume—Canonical Typology—and introduces the individual chapters, highlighting in what particular ways each language discussed in the book has a non-canonical gender system.

Non-Canonical Gender Systems

Grammatical gender is famously the most puzzling of the grammatical categories. Despite our solid knowledge about the typology of gender systems, exciting and unexpected patterns keep turning up which defy easy classification and straightforward analysis. Some of these question, stretch, or even threaten to cross the outer boundaries of the category. These regions are largely unexplored, yet are essential for our understanding of gender, besides being interesting in their own right. The purpose of this book is to explore the outer boundaries of the category of gender and discuss their theoretical significance. Canonical Typology, a cutting-edge approach already successfully applied to a range of linguistic phenomena, provides the ideal framework for this endeavour. In this approach, a linguistic phenomenon—for example, a morphosyntactic feature like gender—is established in terms of a canonical ideal: the clearest instance of the phenomenon. The canonical ideal is a clustering of properties that serves as a baseline from which to measure the actual examples that are found. This approach allows us to analyse any gender system and determine for each of its component properties whether it is more or less canonical. The languages discussed in this volume all diverge from the canonical ideal in interesting ways. Each language is assessed by international experts, who approach their work from a typological perspective. The book explores a wide range of typologically different languages drawn from all over the world, from South America to Melanesia, from an Italo-Romance dialect of Central Italy to Mawng of Northern Australia.

Good subsemigroups of ℕn

Value semigroups of non-irreducible singular algebraic curves and their fractional ideals are submonoids of [Formula: see text] that are closed under infimums, have a conductor and fulfill a special compatibility property on their elements. Monoids of [Formula: see text] fulfilling these three conditions are known in the literature as good semigroups and there are examples of good semigroups that are not realizable as the value semigroup of an algebraic curve. In this paper, we consider good semigroups independently from their algebraic counterpart, in a purely combinatorial setting. We define the concept of good system of generators, and we show that minimal good systems of generators are unique. Moreover, we give a constructive way to compute the canonical ideal and the Arf closure of a good subsemigroup when [Formula: see text].

Multiplicative canonical ideals of ring extensions

We study properties of multiplicative canonical (m-canonical) ideals of ring extensions. Let [Formula: see text] be a ring extension. A nonzero [Formula: see text]-regular ideal [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] is called an m-canonical ideal of the extension [Formula: see text] if [Formula: see text] for all [Formula: see text]-regular ideal [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text]. We study m-canonical ideals for pullback diagrams, and we use the notion of m-canonical ideal to characterize Prüfer extensions.

Inflection Classes

This chapter presents a detailed account of inflection classes and the issues that they raise for morphological theory and typology. Drawing particularly on evidence from Icelandic, the author defines the notion ‘inflection class’ and discusses the canonical characteristics proposed for inflection classes by Corbett (2009); various simple and complex deviations from this canonical ideal are examined. The correlations between a lexeme’s inflection-class membership and its morphology are shown to be quite variable; the same is true of the extra-morphological correlates of a language’s inflection classes. As the author shows, inflection-class systems arise and evolve in response to various kinds of diachronic pressures. He considers the appropriate mode of representation for inflection classes in the formal, synchronic definition of a language’s grammar and the status of inflection classes as a dimension of typological variation.