Form-meaning mismatch

A form-meaning mismatch is a natural mismatch between the grammatical form and its expected meaning. Such form-meaning mismatches happen everywhere in language. Nevertheless, there is often an expectation of a one-to-one relationship between meaning and form, and indeed, many traditional definitions are based on such an assumption. For example, Verbs come in three tenses: past, present, and future. The past is used to describe things that have already happened (e.g., "earlier in the day, yesterday, last week, three years ago"). The present tense is used to describe things that are happening right now, or things that are continuous. The future tense describes things that have yet to happen (e.g., "later, tomorrow, next week, next year, three years from now"). While this accurately captures the typical behaviour of these three tenses, it's not unusual for a futurate meaning to have a present tense form ("I'll see you before I go") or a past tense form ("If you could help, that would be great").
Types of mismatch.
There are three types of mismatch.
Examples.
Syncretism.
Syncretism is "the relation between words which have different morphosyntactic features but are identical in form." For example, the English first person genitive pronouns are distincte for dependent "my" and indepenent "mine", but for "she", there is syncretism: the dependent and independent pronouns share the form "her". As a result, there is no consistent match between the form and function of the word.
Subject-agent mismatches.
The subject of a sentence is often defined as a noun phrase that denotes "the doer of the action".[p. 69]a noun, noun phrase, or pronoun that usually comes before a main verb and represents the person or thing that performs the action of the verb, or about which something is stated.But in many cases, the subject does not express the expected meaning of doer.[p. 69]
Dummy pronouns.
Dummy "there" in "there's a book on the table", is the grammatical subject, but "there" isn't the doer of the action or the thing about which something is stated. In fact is has no semantic role at all. The same is true of "it" in "it's cold today".[p. 252]
Raising objects.
In the case of object raising, the object of one verb can be the "doer of the action" of another verb. For example, in "we expect JJ to arrive at 2:00", "JJ" is the object of "expected", but "JJ" is also the person who will be doing the arriving.[p. 221]
Definiteness.
From a semantic point of view, a definite NP is one that is identifiable and activated in the minds of the first person and the addressee. From a grammatical point of view in English, definiteness is typically marked by definite determiners, such as "this". “The theoretical distinction between grammatical definiteness and cognitive identifiability has the advantage of enabling us to distinguish between a discrete (grammatical) and a non-discrete (cognitive) category”[p. 84]
So, in a case such as "I met this guy from Heidleberg on the train", the underlined NP is grammatically definite but semantically indefinite;[p. 82] there is a form-meaning mismatch.
Number agreement.
Grammatical number is typically marked on nouns in English, and present-tense verbs show agreement with the subject. But there are cases of mismatch, such as with a singular collective noun as the subject and plural agreement on the verb (e.g., "The team are working hard").[p. 89]
The pronoun "you" triggers plural agreement regardless of whether it refers to one person or more (e.g., "You are the only one who can do this").
Some words, such as "everyone", have singular argeement even though they refer to more than one person (e.g., "Everyone has arrived. They're all here".)[p. 90]
In some cases, the mismatch may be apparent rather than real due to a poorly chosen term. For example, plural in English suggest more than one, but non-singular may be a better term. We use plural marking for things less than one (e.g., "0.5 calories") or even for nothing at all (e.g., "zero degrees").
Gender.
In some cases, the gender of a word appears to be a mismatch with its meaning. For example, in German, das Fräulein means the unmarried woman. A woman is naturally feminine in terms of social gender, but the word here is neuter gender.
Cross linguistic example.
German and English compounds are quite different syntactically, but not semantically.
Effects.
Language change.
Form-meaning mismatches can lead to language change. An example of this is the split of the nominal gerund construction in English and a new “non-nominal” reference type becoming the most dominant function of the verbal gerund construction.
Language learning.
The syntax-semantics interface is one of the most vulnerable aspects in L2 acquisition. Therefore, L2 speakers are found to either often have incomplete grammar, or have highly variable syntactic-semantic awareness and performance.
Causes.
In morphology, a morpheme can get trapped and eliminated. Consider this example: the Old Norwegian for "horse's" was "hert-s", and the way to mark that as definite and genitive ("the" + GEN) was "-in-s". When those went together, the genitive of "hert-s" was lost, and the result is "hest-en-s" ("the horse" + GEN) in modern Norwegian.[p. 90] The result is a form-meaning mismatch.