The topic “argument structure and morphology” refers to the interaction between the number and nature of the arguments taken by a given predicate on the one hand, and the morphological makeup of that predicate on the other. This domain turns out to be crucial to the study of a number of theoretical issues, including the nature of thematic representations, the proper treatment of irregularity (both morphophonological and morphosemantic), and the very place of morphology in the architecture of the grammar. A recurring question within all existing theoretical approaches is whether word formation should be conceived of as split across two “places” in the grammar, or as taking place in only one.
Article
Argument Structure and Morphology
Jim Wood and Neil Myler
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
Case Interactions in Syntax
Jessica Coon and Clint Parker
The phenomenon of case has been studied widely at both the descriptive and theoretical levels. Typological work on morphological case systems has provided a picture of the variability of case cross-linguistically. In particular, languages may differ with respect to whether or not arguments are marked with overt morphological case, the inventory of cases with which they may be marked, and the alignment of case marking (e.g., nominative-accusative vs. ergative-absolutive). In the theoretical realm, not only has morphological case been argued to play a role in multiple syntactic phenomena, but current generative work also debates the role of abstract case (i.e., Case) in the grammar: abstract case features have been proposed to underlie morphological case, and to license nominals in the derivation.
The phenomenon of case has been argued to play a role in at least three areas of the syntax reviewed here: (a) agreement, (b) A-movement, and (c) A’-movement. Morphological case has been shown to determine a nominal argument’s eligibility to participate in verbal agreement, and recent work has argued that languages vary as to whether movement to subject position is case-sensitive. As for case-sensitive A’-movement, recent literature on ergative extraction restrictions debates whether this phenomenon should be seen as another instance of “case discrimination” or whether the pattern arises from other properties of ergative languages. Finally, other works discussed here have examined agreement and A’-extraction patterns in languages with no visible case morphology. The presence of patterns and typological gaps—both in languages with overt morphological case and in those without it—lends support to the relevance of abstract case in the syntax.
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Morphology and Argument Alternations
Malka Rappaport Hovav
Theories of argument realization typically associate verbs with an argument structure and provide algorithms for the mapping of argument structure to morphosyntactic realization. A major challenge to such theories comes from the fact that most verbs have more than one option for argument realization. Sometimes a particular range of realization options for a verb is systematic in that it is consistently available to a relatively well-defined class of verbs; it is then considered to be one of a set of recognized
argument alternations
. Often—but not always—these argument alternations are associated morphological marking. An examination of cross-linguistic patterns of morphology associated with the causative alternation and the dative alternation reveals that the alternation is not directly encoded in the morphology. For both alternations, understanding the morphological patterns requires an understanding of the interaction between the semantics of the verb and the construction the verb is integrated into. Strikingly, similar interactions between the verb and the construction are found in languages that do not mark the alternations morphologically, and the patterns of morphological marking in morphologically rich languages can shed light on the appropriate analysis of the alternations in languages that do not mark the alternations morphologically.
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Tense and Aspect in Morphology
Marianne Mithun
Distinctions of time are among the most common notions expressed in morphology cross-linguistically. But the inventories of distinctions marked in individual languages are also varied. Some languages have few if any morphological markers pertaining to time, while others have extensive sets. Certain categories do recur pervasively across languages, but even these can vary subtly or even substantially in their uses. And they may be optional or obligatory.
The grammar of time is traditionally divided into two domains: tense and aspect. Tense locates situations in time. Tense markers place them along a timeline with respect to some point of reference, a deictic center. The most common reference point is the moment of speech. Many languages have just three tense categories: past for situations before the time of speech, present for those overlapping with the moment of speech, and future for those subsequent to the moment of speech. But many languages have no morphological tense, some have just two categories, and some have many more. In some languages, morphological distinctions correspond fairly closely to identifiable times. There may, for example, be a today (hodiernal) past that contrasts with a yesterday (hesternal) past. In other languages, tense distinctions are more fluid. A recent past might be interpreted as ‘some time earlier today’ for a sentence meaning ‘I ate a banana’, but ‘within the last few months’ for a sentence meaning ‘I returned from Africa’. Languages also vary in the mobility of the deictic center. In some languages tense distinctions are systematically calibrated with respect to the moment of speaking. In others, the deictic center may shift. It may be established by the matrix clause in a complex sentence. Or it may be established by a larger topic of discussion. Tense is most often a verbal category, because verbs generally portray the most dynamic elements of a situation, but a number of languages distinguish tense on nouns as well.
Aspect characterizes the internal temporal structure of a situation. There may be different forms of a verb ‘eat’, for example, in sentences meaning ‘I ate lamb chops’, ‘I was eating lamb chops’, and ‘I used to eat lamb chops’, though all are past tense. They may pick out one phase of the situation, with different forms for ‘I began to eat’, ‘I was eating’, and ‘I ate it up’. They may make finer distinctions, with different forms for ‘I took a bite’, ‘I nibbled’, and ‘I kept eating’. Morphological aspect distinctions are usually marked on verbs, but in some languages they can be marked on nominals as well.
In some languages, there is a clear separation between the two: tense is expressed in one part of the morphology, and aspect in another. But often a single marker conveys both: a single suffix might mark both past tense and progressive aspect in a sentence meaning ‘I was eating’, for example. A tense distinction may be made only in a particular aspect, and/or a certain aspect distinction marked only in a particular tense. Like other areas of grammar, tense and aspect systems are constantly evolving. The meanings of markers can shift over time, as speakers apply them to new contexts, and as new markers enter the system, taking over some of their functions. Markers can shift for example from aspect to tense, or from derivation to inflection. The gradualness of such developments underlies the cross-linguistic differences we find in tense and aspect categories.
There is a rich literature on tense and aspect. As more is learned about the inventories of categories that exist in individual languages and the ways speakers deploy them, theoretical models continue to grow in sophistication.
Article
Adjectivalization in Morphology
Petra Sleeman
Adjectivalization is the derivation of adjectives from a verb, a noun, an adjective, and occasionally from other parts of speech or from phrases. Cross-linguistically, adjectivalization seems to be less frequent than nominalization and verbalization. In most languages adjectivalization involves suffixation, but other adjectivalization devices, such as prefixation, reduplication or zero derivation, are also attested.
Adjectivalization by means of suffixation has been studied in depth for English. As for other languages in which suffixation is used for adjectivalization, topics that have been studied for English are the types of suffixes used for adjectivalization, their productivity, their semantic contribution, the category of the base to which they attach, and their etymology. For English an etymological distinction between native suffixes and suffixes with a Romance, more specifically Latinate, origin can be made, related to their bound or non-bound character, the type of base to which they attach, and the prosody of the derived word.
One of the major challenges to the idea of word-class changing derivation, in this case adjectivalization, comes from polyfunctional words. Participles may function both as verbs and as adjectives, which leads to the question how these complex forms are formally and semantically related. There are also derivational suffixes that are used for the formation of both adjectives and nouns. For these cases as well the formal and semantic relation has to be established. For several Western European languages a relation has been established, in the theoretical literature, between the polyfunctionality of adjectival/nominal suffixes and their influence on the prosody or the phonological properties of the root, due to their etymology. It seems that the dichotomy between two types of suffixes that is created in this way does not always occur and that there is also a mixed case.
Article
Blending in Morphology
Natalia Beliaeva
Blending is a type of word formation in which two or more words are merged into one so that the blended constituents are either clipped, or partially overlap. An example of a typical blend is brunch, in which the beginning of the word breakfast is joined with the ending of the word lunch. In many cases such as motel (motor + hotel) or blizzaster (blizzard + disaster) the constituents of a blend overlap at segments that are phonologically or graphically identical. In some blends, both constituents retain their form as a result of overlap, for example, stoption (stop + option). These examples illustrate only a handful of the variety of forms blends may take; more exotic examples include formations like Thankshallowistmas (Thanksgiving + Halloween + Christmas). The visual and audial amalgamation in blends is reflected on the semantic level. It is common to form blends meaning a combination or a product of two objects or phenomena, such as an animal breed (e.g., zorse, a breed of zebra and horse), an interlanguage variety (e.g., franglais, which is a French blend of français and anglais meaning a mixture of French and English languages), or other type of mix (e.g., a shress is a type of clothes having features of both a shirt and a dress).
Blending as a word formation process can be regarded as a subtype of compounding because, like compounds, blends are formed of two (or sometimes more) content words and semantically either are hyponyms of one of their constituents, or exhibit some kind of paradigmatic relationships between the constituents. In contrast to compounds, however, the formation of blends is restricted by a number of phonological constraints given that the resulting formation is a single word. In particular, blends tend to be of the same length as the longest of their constituent words, and to preserve the main stress of one of their constituents. Certain regularities are also observed in terms of ordering of the words in a blend (e.g., shorter first, more frequent first), and in the position of the switch point, that is, where one blended word is cut off and switched to another (typically at the syllable boundary or at the onset/rime boundary). The regularities of blend formation can be related to the recognizability of the blended words.
Article
Coordination in Compounds
Angela Ralli
Compounds are generally divided in those that involve a dependency (subordinate and attributive) relation of one constituent upon the other and those where there is coordination, for which there is much controversy on delimiting the exact borders. This article offers an overview of compounds belonging to the second type, for which the term ‘coordinative’ is adopted, as more general and neutral, drawn from a wide range of terms that have been proposed in the literature. It attempts to provide a definition on the basis of structural and semantic criteria, describes the major features of coordinative compounds and discusses crucial issues that play a significant role to their formation and meaning, such as those of headedness, the order of constituents, and compositionality. Showing that languages vary with respect to the frequency and types of coordinative compounds, being unclear in which way these constructions are distributed and used cross-linguistically, it tries to give a classification with extensive exemplification from genetically and typologically diverse languages.
Article
Exocentricity in Morphology
María Irene Moyna
The definition of exocentricity hinges on the notion of head in morphology. Exocentricity and its opposite, endocentricity, describe the two possible relationships between compound constituents and the compound lexeme they make up. In endocentric compounds, one of the constituent lexemes is the head, that is, the lexical item with the semantico-syntactic features that are passed on to the whole compound. In exocentric compounds, the features of the whole are not attributable to the constituents and must be sought elsewhere.
Exocentric compounds can be divided into two broad classes, namely, syntactic (or formal) and semantic exocentric compounds. Syntactic exocentric compounds exhibit a mismatch between the grammatical category of their constituents and that of the whole. Semantic exocentric compounds are exocentric by virtue of their meaning alone, their structure providing no clues of their nonliteral interpretation. Historically, most descriptive and theoretical analyses of exocentricity have focused on syntactic exocentric compounds. On the basis of large but non-exhaustive databases of the world languages, it has been shown that exocentric compounds are marked. With a few exceptions, exocentric compound patterns are both less frequent cross-linguistically and less likely to be used in those languages that can have them. However, some patterns recur with remarkable regularity in the world’s languages. These include possessive compounds (known by their Sanskrit name, bahuvrīhi), which combine a description of a part to denote the whole (e.g., Eng. sabretooth). Deverbal nominal compounds are also robust in many language families, such as Romance; these compounds combine a verb and its direct object to denote an agent or instrument (e.g., Fr. portefeuilles ‘briefcase,’ lit. ‘carry+papers’). A third highly frequent exocentric compounding pattern combines two constituents of the same grammatical category to create a lexeme of a different word class (e.g., Japanese daisho ‘size,’ lit. ‘small+large’). It should be noted that the basic distinction between syntactic and semantic exocentric compounds can become blurred because any lexicalized compound, regardless of its internal structure, is potentially susceptible to metaphoric meaning shifts and to formal recategorization through conversion. Although exocentricity is a syntactico-semantic feature typically attributed to compounds, other morphological structures may occasionally exhibit similar behavior, namely, phrasal chunks or “syntactic freezes.”
Exocentric compounds create interesting challenges to rule-based accounts of morphology, including both lexicalist hypotheses and also those that subsume word formation operations to those of syntax. In both types of proposals, the features of all constructions are attributable to their head, so that accounting for the mismatch exhibited by exocentric compounds requires structural adjustments. Cognitive linguistics has also focused on exocentric compounds, and has sought to account for their meanings through a combination of metaphoric and metonymic shifts.
Article
Functional Categories: Complementizers and Adpositions
Lena Baunaz
The standard observation is that complementizers corresponding to English that involve the illocutionary force of the clause, but the situation is not that simple, as factivity and modality may come into play, too. Complementizers are cross-linguistically systematically morpho-phonologically identical to other categories like nouns, verbs, and adpositions (that is, prepositions and post-positions). Recently there have been attempts to account for the formal identity of complementizers with other categories by decomposing the complementizer morpheme into smaller pieces. New ways of thinking about function words like complementizers and (some) prepositions involve digging into their internal structure(s) through determining the presence or absence of structural homogeneity within and across languages or by taking a nanosyntactic approach to cross-category syncretism.
