A number of recent developments in phonological theory, beginning with The Sound Pattern of English, are particularly relevant to the phonology of compounds. They address both the phonological phenomena that apply to compound words and the phonological structures that are required as the domains of these phenomena: segmental and nonsegmental phenomena that operate within each member of a compound separately, as well as at the juncture between the members of compounds and throughout compounds as a whole. In all cases, what is crucial for the operation of the phonological phenomena of compounds is phonological structure, in terms of constituents of the Prosodic Hierarchy, as opposed to morphosyntactic structure. Specifically, only two phonological constituents are required, the Phonological Word, which provides the domain for phenomena that apply to the individual members of compounds and at their junctures, and a larger constituent that groups the members of compounds together. The nature of the latter is somewhat controversial, the main issue being whether or not there is a constituent in the Prosodic Hierarchy between the Phonological Word and the Phonological Phrase. When present, this constituent, the Composite Group (revised from the original Clitic Group), includes the members of compounds, as well as “stray” elements such as clitics and “Level 2” affixes. In its absence, compounds, and often the same “stray” elements, are analyzed as a type of Recursive Phonological Word, although crucially, the combinations of such element do not exhibit the same properties as the basic Phonological Word.
Article
The Phonology of Compounds
Irene Vogel
Article
The Playful Lexicon in the Romance Languages: Prosodic Templates, Onomatopoeia, Reduplication, Clipping, Blending
David Pharies
A lexical item is described as “playful” or “ludic” when it shows evidence of manipulation of the relation that inheres between its form (signifier) and its meaning (signified). The playful lexicon of any given language, therefore, is the sum total of its lexical items that show signs of such manipulation. Linguists have long recognized that the only necessary link between a word’s form and its meaning is the arbitrary social convention that binds them. However, nothing prevents speakers from creating additional, unnecessary and therefore essentially “playful” links, associating forms with meanings in a symbolic, hence non-arbitrary way. This semantic effect is most evident in the case of onomatopoeia, through which the phonetic form of words that designate sounds is designed to be conventionally imitative of the sound. A second group of playful words combines repeated sequences of sounds with meanings that are themselves suggestive of repetition or related concepts such as collectivity, continuity, or actions in sequence, as well as repeated, back-and-forth, or uncontrolled movements, or even, more abstractly, intensity and hesitation. The playfulness of truncated forms such as clips and blends is based on a still more abstract connection between forms and meanings. In the case of clipping, the truncation of the full form of a word triggers a corresponding connotative truncation or diminution of the meaning, that is, a suggestion that the referent is small—either endearingly, humorously, or contemptuously so. In blending, truncation is often accompanied by overlapping, which symbolically highlights the interrelatedness or juxtaposition of the constituents’ individual meanings. Prosodic templates do not constitute a separate category per se; instead, they may play a part in the formation or alteration of words in any of the other categories discussed here.
Article
Polysemy Versus Homonymy
Salvador Valera
Polysemy and homonymy are traditionally described in the context of paradigmatic lexical relations. Unlike monosemy, in which one meaning is associated with one form, and unlike synonymy, in which one meaning is associated with several forms, in polysemy and homonymy several meanings are associated with one form.
The classical view of polysemy and homonymy is as a binary opposition whereby the various meanings of one form are described either as within one word (polysemy) or as within as many words as meanings (homonymy). In this approach, the decision is made according to whether the meanings can be related to one or two different sources. This classical view does not prevail in the literature as it did in the past. The most extreme revisions have questioned the descriptive synchronic difference between polysemy and homonymy or have subsumed the separation as under a general use of one term (homophony) and then established distinctions within, according to meaning and distribution. A more widespread reinterpretation of the classical opposition is in terms of a gradient where polysemy and homonymy arrange themselves along a continuum. Such a gradient arranges formally identical units at different points according to their degree of semantic proximity and degree of entrenchment (the latter understood as the degree to which a form recalls a semantic content and is activated in a speaker’s mind). The granularity of this type of gradient varies according to specific proposals, but, in the essential, the representation ranges from most and clearest proximity as well as highest degree of entrenchment in polysemy to least and most obscure proximity and lowest degree of entrenchment in homonymy.
Article
Polysynthesis: A Diachronic and Typological Perspective
Michael Fortescue
Polysynthesis is informally understood as the packing of a large number of morphemes into single words, as in (1) from Bininj Gun-wok (Evans, in press).1)
a-ban-yawoyʔ-wargaʔ-maɳe-gaɲ-giɲe-ŋ
1SGSUBJ-3PLOBJ-again-wrong-BEN-meat-cook-PSTPF
'I cooked the wrong meat for them again.'
Its status as a distinct typological category into which some of the world’s languages fall, on a par with isolating, agglutinating, or fusional languages, has been controversial from the start. Nevertheless, researchers working with these languages are seldom in doubt as to their status as distinct from these other morphological types. This has been complicated by the fact that the speakers of such languages are largely limited to hunter-gatherers—or were so in the not too distant past—so the temptation is to link the phenomenon directly to way of life. This proves to be oversimplified, although it is certainly true that languages qualifying as polysynthetic are almost everywhere spoken in peripheral regions and are on the decline in the modern world—few children are learning them today.
Perhaps the most pervasive of the traits that give these languages the impression of a “special” status is that of holophrasis, which can be defined as the (possible) expression of what in less synthetic languages would be whole sentences in single complex (usually verbal) words. It turns out, however, that there is much greater variety among polysynthetic languages than is generally thought: there are few other traits that they all share, although distinct subtypes can in fact be distinguished, notably the affixing as opposed to the incorporating type.
These languages have considerable importance for the investigation of the diachronic complexification of languages in general and of language acquisition by children, as well as for theories of language universals. The sociolinguistic factors behind their development have only recently begun to be studied in depth. All polysynthetic languages today are to some degree endangered (they are dying off at an alarming rate), and many have been poorly studied if at all, which makes their investigation before it is too late a prime goal for linguistics.
Article
PPs and Particles in Germanic
Marion Elenbaas
Prepositional phrases (PPs) are headed by a preposition, an indeclinable word that expresses relationships between two entities, the Figure and the Ground. Prepositions are members of a larger class of adpositions, which also includes postpositions, circumpositions, and particles. The Germanic languages are predominantly prepositional, while postpositions and circumpositions are much rarer. Prepositions express either spatial (locative, directional) relationships or nonspatial (such as temporal, aspectual) relationships. PPs may function as nonargument modifiers (of verbs, nouns, adjectives) or as arguments (of verbs, nouns, adjectives). The syntax and argument structure of PPs is characterized by a range of phenomena that are found across the Germanic languages, though not necessarily to the same extent and with the same properties.
A number of prepositions are homonymous with so-called particles, which feature in what is often called a particle (or “phrasal”) verb. Particle verbs are extremely common in all Germanic languages and have an array of spatial and nonspatial meanings. While there is some variation in the morphosyntactic behavior of particle verbs across the Germanic languages, they have in common that they straddle the boundary between morphology and syntax: the verb and the particle behave as a unit, and yet they are separable. Particles are often treated as intransitive prepositions (with a Figure but without a Ground) and therefore as a type of adposition. The heterogeneous nature of the category of adposition and the characteristics of PPs and particles in Germanic languages have led to considerable debate concerning the functional or lexical nature of adpositions as well as the morphological (word) status or syntactic (phrasal) status of particle verbs.
Article
Prefixation (Nouns and Adjectives) in Romance Languages
Claudio Iacobini
Romance nominal and adjectival prefixes are derivational affixes that are added before lexemes without determining a change in the part of speech of the lexeme with which they combine. The combination between prefixes and lexemes is mostly based on a semantic principle. Prefixes express functional-relational meanings, acting as modifiers of the base lexeme. The most important semantic categories expressed through nominal and adjectival prefixation are localization (within which we include spatial and temporal meanings, as well as hierarchy), negation, evaluation (i.e., augmentation and diminution in quantity and/or quality), multiplicity, union, reciprocity, and reflexivity. The prefixed lexeme is generally a hyponym of the base lexeme; when a prefixed lexeme is a noun, it inherits its gender from the noun base. Romance prefixes do not play any role in inflection.
Nominal and adjectival prefixes do not differ much both from the formal and the semantic point of view in the early 21st-century standard Romance languages (i.e., those that have become the national official languages and developed a high degree of Ausbau). Such homogeneity is only marginally due to the conservation of features stemming from the legacy of a common Latin origin. It is mainly attributable to a re-Latinization of Romance languages through the scholarly transmission of words belonging to the domains of learned academic vocabulary coming from ancient Greek, as well as Classical, Humanistic, and Neo-Latin. The importance and the far-reaching consequences of this homogenizing re-Latinization are shown, on one hand, by the fact that Romance nominal and adjectival prefixation in standard Romance languages is, in the 21st century, more consistent and developed than it was at previous stages and, on the other hand, by the significant differences existing between standard and nonstandard Romance varieties. Standard Romance languages of the early 21st century are characterized by a quite rich inventory of Romance nominal and adjectival prefixes, whereas in nonstandard varieties native nominal and adjectival prefixes are not numerous and almost unproductive, a situation that roughly corresponds to that of the initial phase of Romance languages as a whole.
Nominal and adjectival prefixation is a productive process in standard Romance languages; in the last centuries, both the number of elements and the semantic domains have increased, after a significant decrease undergone in the passage from Latin to Romance languages. Prefixed nouns and adjectives are numerous and frequently used both in current common vocabulary and, even more, in specialized terminologies.
The spread of neoclassical compounding in common vocabulary (especially from the second half of the 20th century) has increased the number of right-headed words whose first element has a modifier function. Such a semantic relationship between the constituents of complex words shared by prefixation and some neoclassical compounds has both favored the diffusion of nominal and adjectival prefixation and determined a fuzzy zone between traditional prefixation and the new complex formations coming from technical and scientific terminology. Another blurred area between compounding and prefixation is due to the uncertain boundaries between nominal compounds with prepositions and nominal prefixation.
Article
Psycholinguistic Approaches to Morphology: Production
Benjamin V. Tucker
Speech production is an important aspect of linguistic competence. An attempt to understand linguistic morphology without speech production would be incomplete. A central research question develops from this perspective: what is the role of morphology in speech production. Speech production researchers collect many different types of data and much of that data has informed how linguists and psycholinguists characterize the role of linguistic morphology in speech production. Models of speech production play an important role in the investigation of linguistic morphology. These models provide a framework, which allows researchers to explore the role of morphology in speech production. However, models of speech production generally focus on different aspects of the production process. These models are split between phonetic models (which attempt to understand how the brain creates motor commands for uttering and articulating speech) and psycholinguistic models (which attempt to understand the cognitive processes and representation of the production process). Models that merge these two model types, phonetic and psycholinguistic models, have the potential to allow researchers the possibility to make specific predictions about the effects of morphology on speech production. Many studies have explored models of speech production, but the investigation of the role of morphology and how morphological properties may be represented in merged speech production models is limited.
Article
Psycholinguistic Approaches to Morphology: Theoretical Issues
Christina L. Gagné
Psycholinguistics is the study of how language is acquired, represented, and used by the human mind; it draws on knowledge about both language and cognitive processes. A central topic of debate in psycholinguistics concerns the balance between storage and processing. This debate is especially evident in research concerning morphology, which is the study of word structure, and several theoretical issues have arisen concerning the question of how (or whether) morphology is represented and what function morphology serves in the processing of complex words. Five theoretical approaches have emerged that differ substantially in the emphasis placed on the role of morphemic representations during the processing of morphologically complex words. The first approach minimizes processing by positing that all words, even morphologically complex ones, are stored and recognized as whole units, without the use of morphemic representations. The second approach posits that words are represented and processed in terms of morphemic units. The third approach is a mixture of the first two approaches and posits that a whole-access route and decomposition route operate in parallel. A fourth approach posits that both whole word representations and morphemic representations are used, and that these two types of information interact. A fifth approach proposes that morphology is not explicitly represented, but rather, emerges from the co-activation of orthographic/phonological representations and semantic representations. These competing approaches have been evaluated using a wide variety of empirical methods examining, for example, morphological priming, the role of constituent and word frequency, and the role of morphemic position. For the most part, the evidence points to the involvement of morphological representations during the processing of complex words. However, the specific way in which these representations are used is not yet fully known.
Article
Psycholinguistic Methods and Tasks in Morphology
Daniel Schmidtke and Victor Kuperman
Lexical representations in an individual mind are not given to direct scrutiny. Thus, in their theorizing of mental representations, researchers must rely on observable and measurable outcomes of language processing, that is, perception, production, storage, access, and retrieval of lexical information. Morphological research pursues these questions utilizing the full arsenal of analytical tools and experimental techniques that are at the disposal of psycholinguistics. This article outlines the most popular approaches, and aims to provide, for each technique, a brief overview of its procedure in experimental practice. Additionally, the article describes the link between the processing effect(s) that the tool can elicit and the representational phenomena that it may shed light on. The article discusses methods of morphological research in the two major human linguistic faculties—production and comprehension—and provides a separate treatment of spoken, written and sign language.
Article
Psycholinguistic Research on Inflectional Morphology in the Romance Languages
Claudia Marzi and Vito Pirrelli
Over the past decades, psycholinguistic aspects of word processing have made a considerable impact on views of language theory and language architecture. In the quest for the principles governing the ways human speakers perceive, store, access, and produce words, inflection issues have provided a challenging realm of scientific inquiry, and a battlefield for radically opposing views. It is somewhat ironic that some of the most influential cognitive models of inflection have long been based on evidence from an inflectionally impoverished language like English, where the notions of inflectional regularity, (de)composability, predictability, phonological complexity, and default productivity appear to be mutually implied. An analysis of more “complex” inflection systems such as those of Romance languages shows that this mutual implication is not a universal property of inflection, but a contingency of poorly contrastive, nearly isolating inflection systems. Far from presenting minor faults in a solid, theoretical edifice, Romance evidence appears to call into question the subdivision of labor between rules and exceptions, the on-line processing vs. long-term memory dichotomy, and the distinction between morphological processes and lexical representations. A dynamic, learning-based view of inflection is more compatible with this data, whereby morphological structure is an emergent property of the ways inflected forms are processed and stored, grounded in universal principles of lexical self-organization and their neuro-functional correlates.
Article
Quantitative Derivation in Morphology
Gianina Iordăchioaia
In linguistics, the study of quantity is concerned with the behavior of expressions that refer to amounts in terms of the internal structure of objects and events, their spatial or temporal extension (as duration and boundedness), their qualifying properties, as well as how these aspects interact with each other and other linguistic phenomena.
Quantity is primarily manifest in language for the lexical categories of noun, verb, and adjective/ adverb. For instance, the distinction between mass and count nouns is essentially quantitative: it indicates how nominal denotation is quantized—as substance (e.g., water, sand) or as an atomic individual (e.g., book, boy). Similarly, the aspectual classes of verbs, such as states (know), activities (run), accomplishments (drown), achievements (notice), and semelfactives (knock) represent quantitatively different types of events. Adjectives and adverbs may lexically express quantities in relation to individuals, respectively, events (e.g., little, enough, much, often), and one might argue that numerals (two, twenty) are intrinsic quantitative expressions.
Quantitative derivation refers to the use of derivational affixes to encode quantity in language. For instance, the English suffix -ful attaches to a noun N1 to derive another noun N2, such that N2 denotes the quantity that fits in the container denoted by N1. N2 also employs a special use in quantitative constructions: see hand—a handful of berries.
The challenge for the linguistic description of quantity is that it often combines with other linguistic notions such as evaluation, intensification, quality, and it does not have a specific unitary realization—it is usually auxiliary on other more established notions. Quantitative affixes either have limited productivity or their primary use is for other semantic notions. For instance, the German suffix ‑schaft typically forms abstract nouns as in Vaterschaft ‘fatherhood’, but has a (quantity-related) collective meaning in Lehrerschaft ‘lecturer staff’; compare English -hood in childhood and the collective neighborhood. This diversity makes quantity difficult to capture systematically, in spite of its pervasiveness as a semantic notion.
Article
Quantitative Methods in Morphology: Corpora and Other “Big Data” Approaches
Marco Marelli
Corpora are an all-important resource in linguistics, as they constitute the primary source for large-scale examples of language usage. This has been even more evident in recent years, with the increasing availability of texts in digital format leading more and more corpus linguistics toward a “big data” approach. As a consequence, the quantitative methods adopted in the field are becoming more sophisticated and various.
When it comes to morphology, corpora represent a primary source of evidence to describe morpheme usage, and in particular how often a particular morphological pattern is attested in a given language. There is hence a tight relation between corpus linguistics and the study of morphology and the lexicon. This relation, however, can be considered bi-directional. On the one hand, corpora are used as a source of evidence to develop metrics and train computational models of morphology: by means of corpus data it is possible to quantitatively characterize morphological notions such as productivity, and corpus data are fed to computational models to capture morphological phenomena at different levels of description. On the other hand, morphology has also been applied as an organization principle to corpora. Annotations of linguistic data often adopt morphological notions as guidelines. The resulting information, either obtained from human annotators or relying on automatic systems, makes corpora easier to analyze and more convenient to use in a number of applications.
Article
Raeto-Romance: Romansh, Ladin, Friulian
Luca Melchior
Raeto-Romance languages are spoken in northeastern Italy and (south)eastern Switzerland. They are subdivided into three major groups: Romansh, with about 40,000 speakers in Switzerland; Dolomite Ladin, with about 30,000 speakers in the Italian South Tyrol, Trentino, and Veneto; and Friulian—whose speaker number is estimated between 420,000 and 600,000—in the Italian Friuli and in eastern Veneto. The (supposed) linguistic unity of these subgroups bases on phonological and morphological features like the retention of Lat. clusters C+l, sigmatic noun plural, sigmatic second-person singular ending, palatalization of Lat. c
a
, g
a
, and syncope of proparoxytones, which separate them from Italian dialects. Other features, such as verb–subject (clitic) inversion in interrogative sentences, are more or less spread, and others like periphrastic future or differential object marking are characteristic only for one or few subvarieties. The unity (and uniqueness) of the Raeto-Romance group is hardly debated.
The three groups do not have a common history and do not correspond to a unique political entity. Therefore, they show different language contact phenomena, whereby Romansh and Dolomite Ladin are characterized by a strong influence from German, while Friulian has been historically influenced by Germanic and Slavic languages, but much more from Venetan and Italian. Standardization efforts do not have the same success in the three areas: rumantsch grischun and Standard Friulian dominate in the official written uses in Grisons and Friuli, whereas the use of ladin dolomitan is more marginal. Romansh and Dolomite Ladin are compulsory subjects in school education while Friulian is only an optional subject.
Article
Secondary Predication in the Romance Languages
Steffen Heidinger
A secondary predicate is a nonverbal predicate which is typically optional and which shares its argument with the sentence’s main verb (e.g., cansada ‘tired’ in Portuguese Ela chega cansada ‘She arrives tired’). A basic distinction within the class of adjunct secondary predicates is that between depictives and resultatives. Depictives, such as cansada in the Portuguese example, describe the state of an argument during the event denoted by the verb. Typically, Romance depictives morphologically agree with their argument in gender and number (as in the case of cansada). Resultatives, such as flat in John hammered the metal flat, describe the state of an argument which results from the event denoted by the verb. Resultatives come in different types, and the strong resultatives, such as flat in the English example, are missing in Romance languages. Although strong resultatives are missing, Romance languages possess other constructions which express a sense of resultativity: spurious resultatives, where the verb and the resultative predicate are linked because the manner of carrying out the action denoted by the verb leads to a particular resultant state (e.g., Italian Mia figlia ha cucito la gonna troppo stretta ‘My daughter sewed the skirt too tight’), and to a much lesser extent weak resultatives, where the meaning of the verb and the meaning of the resultative predicate are related (the resultative predicate specifies a state that is already contained in the verb’s meaning, e.g., French Marie s’est teint les cheveux noirs ‘Marie dyed her hair black’). In Romance languages the distinction between participant-oriented secondary predicates and event-oriented adjectival adverbs is not always clear. On the formal side, the distinction is blurred when (a) adjectival adverbs exhibit morphological agreement (despite their event orientation) or (b) secondary predicates do not agree with the argument they predicate over. On the semantic side, one and the same string may be open to interpretation as a secondary predicate or as an adjectival adverb (e.g., Spanish Pedro gritó colérico ‘Pedro screamed furious/furiously’).
Article
Southern Gallo-Romance: Occitan and Gascon
Andres M. Kristol
Occitan, a language of high medieval literary culture, historically occupies the southern third of France. Today it is dialectalized and highly endangered, like all the regional languages of France. Its main linguistic regions are Languedocien, Provençal, Limousin, Auvergnat, Vivaro-dauphinois (Alpine Provençal) and, linguistically on the fringes of the domain, Gascon. Despite its dialectalization, its typological unity and the profound difference that separates it from Northern Galloroman (Oïl dialects, Francoprovençal) and Gallo-Italian remain clearly perceptible. Its history is characterised by several ruptures (the Crusade against the Albigensians, the French Revolution) and several attempts at "rebirth" (the Baroque period, the Felibrige movement in the second half of the 19th century, the Occitanist movement of the 20th century). Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the Occitan koinè, a literary and administrative language integrating the main dialectal characteristics of all regions, was lost and replaced by makeshift regional spellings based on the French spelling. The modern Occitanist orthography tries to overcome these divisions by coming as close as possible to the medieval, "classical" written tradition, while respecting the main regional characteristics. Being a bridge language between northern Galloroman (Oïl varieties and Francoprovençal), Italy and Iberoromania, Occitan is a relatively conservative language in terms of its phonetic evolution from the popular spoken Latin of western Romania, its morphology and syntax (absence of subject clitics in the verbal system, conservation of a fully functional simple past tense). Only Gascon, which was already considered a specific language in the Middle Ages, presents particular structures that make it unique among Romance languages (development of a system of enunciative particles).
Article
The Status of the Morpheme
Tom Leu
The morpheme was the central notion in morphological theorizing in the 20th century. It has a very intuitive appeal as the indivisible and invariant unit of form and meaning, a minimal linguistic sign. Ideally, that would be all there is to build words and sentences from. But this ideal does not appear to be entirely adequate. At least at a perhaps superficial understanding of form as a series of phonemes, and of meaning as concepts and morphosyntactic feature sets, the form and the meaning side of words are often not structured isomorphically. Different analytical reactions are possible to deal with the empirical challenges resulting from the various kinds of non-isomorphism between form and meaning. One prominent option is to reject the morpheme and to recognize conceptually larger units such as the word or the lexeme and its paradigm as the operands of morphological theory. This contrasts with various theoretical options maintaining the morpheme, terminologically or at least conceptually at some level. One such option is to maintain the morpheme as a minimal unit of form, relaxing the tension imposed by the meaning requirement. Another option is to maintain it as a minimal morphosyntactic unit, relaxing the requirements on the form side. The latter (and to a lesser extent also the former) has been understood in various profoundly different ways: association of one morpheme with several form variants, association of a morpheme with non-self-sufficient phonological units, or association of a morpheme with a formal process distinct from affixation. Variants of all of these possibilities have been entertained and have established distinct schools of thought. The overall architecture of the grammar, in particular the way that the morphology integrates with the syntax and the phonology, has become a driving force in the debate. If there are morpheme-sized units, are they pre-syntactic or post-syntactic units? Is the association between meaning and phonological information pre-syntactic or post-syntactic? Do morpheme-sized pieces have a specific status in the syntax? Invoking some of the main issues involved, this article draws a profile of the debate, following the term morpheme on a by-and-large chronological path from the late 19th century to the 21st century.
Article
The Status of Heads in Morphology
Beata Moskal and Peter W. Smith
Headedness is a pervasive phenomenon throughout different components of the grammar, which fundamentally encodes an asymmetry between two or more items, such that one is in some sense more important than the other(s). In phonology for instance, the nucleus is the head of the syllable, and not the onset or the coda, whereas in syntax, the verb is the head of a verb phrase, rather than any complements or specifiers that it combines with. It makes sense, then, to question whether the notion of headedness applies to the morphology as well; specifically, do words—complex or simplex—have heads that determine the properties of the word as a whole? Intuitively it makes sense that words have heads: a noun that is derived from an adjective like redness can function only as a noun, and the presence of red in the structure does not confer on the whole form the ability to function as an adjective as well.
However, this question is a complex one for a variety of reasons. While it seems clear for some phenomena such as category determination that words have heads, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the properties of complex words are not all derived from one morpheme, but rather that the features are gathered from potentially numerous morphemes within the same word. Furthermore, properties that characterize heads compared to dependents, particularly based on syntactic behavior, do not unambigously pick out a single element, but the tests applied to morphology at times pick out affixes, and at times pick out bases as the head of the whole word.
Article
Stem Change (Apophony and Consonant Mutation) in Morphology
Thomas W. Stewart
Segment-level alternations that realize morphological properties or that have other morphological significance stand either at an interface or along a continuum between phonology and morphology. The typical source for morphologically correlated sound alternations is the automatic phonology, interacting with discrete morphological operations such as affixation. Traditional morphophonology depends on the association of an alternation with a distinct concatenative marker, but the rise of stem changes that are in themselves morphological markers, be they inflectional or derivational, resides in the fading of phonetic motivation in the conditioning environment, and thus an increase in independence from historical phonological sources. The clearest cases are sole-exponent alternations, such as English man~men or slide~slid, but it is not necessary that the remainder of an earlier conditioning affix be entirely absent, only that synchronic conditioning is fully opaque. Once a sound-structural pattern escapes the unexceptional workings of a language's general phonological patterning, yet reliably serves a signifying function for one or more morphological properties, the morphological component of the grammar bears a primary if not sole responsibility for accounting for the pattern’s distribution.
It is not uncommon for the transition of analysis into morphology from (morpho)phonology to be a fitful one. There is an established tendency for phonological theory to hold sway in matters of sound generally, even at the expense of challenging learnability through the introduction of remote representations, ad hoc triggering devices, or putative rules of phonology of very limited generality. On the morphological side, a bias in favor of separable morpheme-like units and syntax-like concatenative dynamics has relegated relations like stem alternations to the margins, no matter how regular, productive, or distinct from general phonological patterns in the language in question overall. This parallel focus of each component on a "specialization" as it were has left exactly morphologically significant stem alternations such as Germanic Ablaut and Celtic initial-consonant mutation poorly served. In both families, these robust sound patterns generally lack reliable synchronic phonological conditioning. Instead, one must crucially refer to grammatical structure and morphological properties in order to account for their distributions. It is no coincidence that such stem alternations look phonological, just as fossils resemble the forms of the organisms that left them. The work of morphology likewise does not depend on alternant segments sharing aspects of sound, but the salience of the system may benefit from perceptible coherence of form. One may observe what sound relations exist between stem alternants, but it is neither necessary nor realistic to oblige a speaker/learner to generate established stem alternations anew from remote underlying representations, as if the alternations were always still arising; to do so constitutes a grafting of the technique of internal reconstruction as a recapitulating simulation within the synchronic grammar.
Article
Subordinate and Synthetic Compounds in Morphology
Chiara Melloni
Subordinate and synthetic represent well-attested modes of compounding across languages. Although the two classes exhibit some structural and interpretative analogies cross-linguistically, they denote distinct phenomena and entail different parameters of classification. Specifically, subordinate makes reference to the grammatical relation between the compound members, which hold a syntactic dependency (i.e., head-argument) relation; synthetic makes reference to the synthesis or concomitance of two processes (i.e., compounding and derivation). Therefore, while the former term implies the presence of a syntactic relation realized at the word level, the latter has strictly morphological implications and does not directly hinge on the nature of the relation between the compound members.
Typical examples of subordinate compounds are [V+N]N formations like pickpocket, a class which is scarcely productive in English but largely attested in most Romance and many other languages (e.g., Italian lavapiatti ‘wash-dishes, dishwater’). Other instances of subordinate compounds are of the type [V+N]V, differing from the pickpocket type since the output is a verb, as in Chinese dài-găng ‘wait for-post, wait for a job’. The presence of a verb, however, is not compulsory since possible instances of subordinate compounds can be found among [N+N]N, [A+N]A, and [P+N]N/A compounds, among others: The consistent feature across subordinate compounds is the complementation relation holding between the constituents, whereby one of the two fills in an argumental slot of the other constituent. For instance, the N tetto ‘roof’ complements P in the Italian compound senza-tetto ‘without-roof, homeless person’, and the N stazione ‘station’ is the internal argument of the relational noun capo in capo-stazione ‘chief-station, station-master’.
Synthetic compounds can envisage a subordination relation, as in truck driv-er/-ing, where truck is the internal argument of driver (or driving), so that they are often viewed as the prototypical subordinates. However, subordination does not feature in all synthetic compounds whose members can hold a modification/attribution relation, as in short-legged and three-dimensional: In these cases, the adjective (or numeral) is not an argument but a modifier of the other constituent. The hallmark of a synthetic compound is the presence of a derivational affix having scope over a compound/complex form, though being linearly attached and forming an established (or possible) word with one constituent only. This mismatch between semantics and formal structure has engendered a lively theoretical debate about the nature of these formations. Adopting a binary-branching analysis of morphological complexes, the debate has considered whether the correct analysis for synthetic compounds is the one shown in (1) or (2), which implies answering the question whether derivation applies before or after compounding.
(1) a.[[truck] [driv-er]] b. [[short] [leg(g)-ed]]
(2) a. [[[truck] [drive]] -er] b. [[[short] [leg(g)]]-ed]
Interestingly, the structural and interpretative overlap between subordinate and synthetic compounds with a deverbal head is well represented across language groups: Synthetic compounds of the type in (1–2) are very productive in Germanic languages but virtually absent in Romance languages, where this gap is compensated for by the productive class of subordinate [V+N]N compounds, like Italian porta-lettere ‘carry-letters, mailman’, which are the interpretative analogous of Germanic synthetic formations. The difference between the two complexes lies in constituent order, V+N in Romance versus N+V in Germanic, and lack of an (overt) derivational affix in Romance languages.
Article
Subtraction in Morphology
Stela Manova
Subtraction consists in shortening the shape of the word. It operates on morphological bases such as roots, stems, and words in word-formation and inflection. Cognitively, subtraction is the opposite of affixation, since the latter adds meaning and form (an overt affix) to roots, stems, or words, while the former adds meaning through subtraction of form. As subtraction and affixation work at the same level of grammar (morphology), they sometimes compete for the expression of the same semantics in the same language, for example, the pattern ‘science—scientist’ in German has derivations such as Physik ‘physics’—Physik-er ‘physicist’ and Astronom-ie ‘astronomy’—Astronom ‘astronomer’. Subtraction can delete phonemes and morphemes. In case of phoneme deletion, it is usually the final phoneme of a morphological base that is deleted and sometimes that phoneme can coincide with a morpheme.
Some analyses of subtraction(-like shortenings) rely not on morphological units (roots, stems, morphological words, affixes) but on the phonological word, which sometimes results in alternative definitions of subtraction. Additionally, syntax-based theories of morphology that do not recognize a morphological component of grammar and operate only with additive syntactic rules claim that subtraction actually consists in addition of defective phonological material that causes adjustments in phonology and leads to deletion of form on the surface. Other scholars postulate subtraction only if the deleted material does not coincide with an existing morpheme elsewhere in the language and if it does, they call the change backformation. There is also some controversy regarding what is a proper word-formation process and whether what is derived by subtraction is true word-formation or just marginal or extragrammatical morphology; that is, the question is whether shortenings such as hypocoristics and clippings should be treated on par with derivations such as, for example, the pattern of science-scientist.
Finally, research in subtraction also faces terminology issues in the sense that in the literature different labels have been used to refer to subtraction(-like) formations: minus feature, minus formation, disfixation, subtractive morph, (subtractive) truncation, backformation, or just shortening.
