Heide Wegener

In the first part, the often illogical occurrence of linking elements homonymous with plural markers is explained by showing that the former do not originate in the latter but that both have been grammaticalized in parallel pathways from stem building suffixes. In the second part, the (non)application ofthe linking elements -n and -s will be explained by analysing the form of the first constituents as well as the function of the linking elements. The results are relevant for linguistic theory and for acquisition theory since they call into doubt the Level Ordering Model of the lexicon. mehr