Complex Left Branches in Frisian Verbs

In Nanosyntax, bound morphemes are stored pieces of syntactic structure (Starke 2013) that may differ in size and shape. This chapter examines the West Germanic language Modern West Frisian and argues that size differences alone cannot account for the variation in the verbal paradigms. Using the theory of Complex Left Branches (Blix 2022), the authors show how the shape of the relevant morphemes allows for the various phenomena in the Frisian paradigms. First, Frisian hosts two verb classes both having their own inflectional paradigm. Second, Frisian first-person forms are morphophonologically simplex, while the morphosyntactically less complex second and third persons are expressed by multi-morphemic forms. Third, Frisian hosts a phenomenon of so-called Wechselflexion (Dammel 2010) which involves stem allomorphy in some cells of the paradigm. To account for these phenomena, the authors show in this chapter that, besides the size of lexical entries, the shape of lexical entries also matters.