Shapeddepending

Shapeddepending is a theoretical term used in linguistics and computational morphology to describe a class of dependency relations in which the external form of a linguistic unit is conditioned by the dependencies it bears within a structure. In its broad sense, shapeddepending covers cases where the surface form of a morpheme or token changes according to syntactic position, semantic role, or neighboring elements, rather than being fixed lexically.

In theoretical morphology, shapeddepending proposes that the morphophonemic shape of affixes or clitics is determined by the head they attach to, such as the stem’s final segment or the type of dependency (argument, modifier). In computational modeling, algorithms that implement shapeddepending adjust inflected or surface forms dynamically during generation or parsing.

The term is not widely used in standard reference works and appears mainly in theoretical discussions, exploratory papers, or online discussions. It is often presented as a conceptual umbrella for conditioning phenomena that unify morphophonemic alternations across languages, rather than as a resolved theory with established typologies.

Examples include: (1) a hypothetical language in which a plural suffix is -a after stems ending in vowels and -o after stems ending in consonants, illustrating a shape-conditioned morphophonemic alternation. (2) a verb inflection where a past-tense prefix changes its phonological shape to harmonize with a following syllable, depending on the stem’s shape and the clause’s syntactic dependency.

See also: morphophonology, agreement, dependency grammar, computational morphology.