Rival morphological processes 4:

Where have all the rivals gone? Summary

The foregoing discussion has clearly shown that it is the semantic properties of bases and individual affixes as well as affix-specific phonological constraints that govern the distribution of verb-deriving morphological processes in English. In the remaining area, where no constraints are violated and semantic interpretations overlap, the choice of a particular process or affix is essentially arbitrary, i.e. it cannot be predicted on structural grounds. This area is however, much smaller than standardly assumed. The notion of type-blocking was shown to be inadequate and should be dismissed. The only paradigmatic forces at work are token-blocking and different kinds of local analogies, both of which are mechanisms independently needed in any adequate morphological theory.