Stem alternants as morphological signata: Evidence from blur avoidance in Polish nouns

At first sight, the suffixal inflection of Polish masculine nouns violates massively the No Blur Principle proposed by Carstairs-McCarthy (1994) as a constraint on inflection class proliferation but, when stem alternation is taken into account, Polish turns out to comply with the No Blur Principle p erfectly - provided that characteristics of stem alternants are permitted t o be constitute part of the `meaning' of affixes, i.e., to be morphological signata. This supports the hypothesis that affixal inflection and nonaffix al inflection are subject to different constraints, and sheds new light on how the two kinds of inflection can interact.