Morpho-syntactic boundaries can either be signaled by alignment to boundaries in regular prosodic patterns or by being ‘irregularly’ misaligned, in which case they are often signaled instead through highly dispreferred, or marked, structures such as consonant clusters. In some languages these structures additionally appear in simple forms, which compromises their compositionality-signaling function. This paper models the dynamics of such structures in complex and simple forms by means of a Lotka-Volterra model, which is analyzed evolutionarily. Finally, the evolutionary dynamics of the model are tested against diachronic language data.

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