Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
This paper is meant as a contribution to historical morphology, although it takes the form of a critique. What will be criticized is a particular proposal, made by Carstairs (especially, 1984b), to look upon PARADIGM MIXTURE as a cause of morphological change. An issue not unrelated to this proposal is the use of PARADIGM ECONOMY (Carstairs, 1983) as a teleological principle in accounting for morphological change. We will show that paradigm economy is likely to be irrelevant to historical linguistics.