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: Production
Benjamin V. Tucker
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
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
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
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.
Article
A Survey of Morpho-Phonology in Chinese Languages
Xiaopei Wang and Bing Li
The majority of morphemes are assigned a tone in Chinese languages. Tone fulfills the equivalent function as consonant and vowel phonemes. In Chinese, tonology interacts with morphology in two ways. First, in concatenative morphology, wherein morphemes or words are combined to form new words, tones in adjacent positions may affect each other and tone sandhi occurs. Tone sandhi rules display a high degree of sensitivity to morpho-syntax in many Chinese languages. Different types of tone sandhi take place in different construction types in one single language. A common tendency observed is that tone sandhi rules generally fall into two types, depending on the structural relation held between two subcomponents of a disyllabic structure (either a word or a phrase). One type demonstrates the lexical syndrome in that it applies merely in words of cohesion, including suffixed words, disyllabic compounds of the coordinate or modifier-head structure. In contrast, the other type applies in less cohesive constructions, such as words and phrases of the verb-object or subject-predicate structure. The sensitivity of tone sandhi to morpho-syntax across Chinese is of theoretical significance for understanding the overall organization of the grammar in general and the interaction between phonology and morpho-syntax in particular.
On the other hand, the special property of tone being superimposed on syllables enables it to act as a floating entity to convey grammatical or semantic meanings. In order to be phonologically licensed, the floating morphemic tone usually anchors on the stem. A rich body of morphemic tones are reported across Chinese languages, and their theoretical significance awaits further exploration.
Article
Swedish
Erik M. Petzell
Swedish is a V2 language, like all Germanic except English, with a basic VO word order and a suffixed definite article, like all North Germanic. Swedish is the largest of the North Germanic languages, and the official language of both Sweden and Finland, in the latter case alongside the majority language Finnish. Worldwide, there are about 10.5 million first-language (L1) speakers. The extent of L2 Swedish speakers is unclear: In Sweden and Finland alone, there are at least 3 million L2 speakers. Genealogically, Swedish is closest to Danish. Together, they formed the eastern branch of North Germanic during the Viking age. Today, this unity of old is often obscured by later developments. Typologically, in the early 21st century, Swedish is closer to Norwegian than to Danish.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was great dialectal variation across the Swedish-speaking area. Very few of the traditional dialects have survived into the present, however. In the early 21st century, there are only some isolated areas, where spoken standard Swedish has not completely taken over, for example, northwestern Dalecarlia. Spoken standard Swedish is quite close to the written language. This written-like speech was promoted by primary school teachers from the late 19th century onward. In the 21st century, it comes in various regional guises, which differ from each other prosodically and display some allophonic variation, for example, in the realization of /r/.
During the late Middle Ages, Swedish was in close contact with Middle Low German. This had a massive impact on the lexicon, leading to loans in both the open and closed classes and even import of derivational morphology. Structurally, Swedish lost case and verbal agreement morphology, developed mandatory expletive subjects, and changed its word order in subordinate clauses. Swedish shares much of this development with Danish and Norwegian.
In the course of the early modern era, Swedish and Norwegian converged further, developing very similar phonological systems. The more conspicuous of the shared traits include two different rounded high front vowels, front /y/ and front-central /ʉ/, palatalization of initial /k/ and /g/ before front vowels, and a preserved phonemic tonal distinction.
As for morphosyntax, however, Swedish has sometimes gone its own way, distancing itself from both Norwegian and Danish. For instance, Swedish has a distinct non-agreeing active participle (supine), and it makes use of the morphological s-passive in a wider variety of contexts than Danish and Norwegian. Moreover, verbal particles always precede even light objects in Swedish, for example, ta upp den, literally ‘take up it’, while Danish and Norwegian patterns with, for example, English: tag den op/ta den opp, literally ‘take it up’. Furthermore, finite forms of auxiliary have may be deleted in subordinate clauses in Swedish but never in Danish/Norwegian.
Article
The Tangkic Languages of Australia: Phonology and Morphosyntax of Lardil, Kayardild, and Yukulta
Erich R. Round
The non–Pama-Nyugan, Tangkic languages were spoken until recently in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia. The most extensively documented are Lardil, Kayardild, and Yukulta. Their phonology is notable for its opaque, word-final deletion rules and extensive word-internal sandhi processes. The morphology contains complex relationships between sets of forms and sets of functions, due in part to major historical refunctionalizations, which have converted case markers into markers of tense and complementization and verbal suffixes into case markers. Syntactic constituency is often marked by inflectional concord, resulting frequently in affix stacking. Yukulta in particular possesses a rich set of inflection-marking possibilities for core arguments, including detransitivized configurations and an inverse system. These relate in interesting ways historically to argument marking in Lardil and Kayardild. Subordinate clauses are marked for tense across most constituents other than the subject, and such tense marking is also found in main clauses in Lardil and Kayardild, which have lost the agreement and tense-marking second-position clitic of Yukulta. Under specific conditions of co-reference between matrix and subordinate arguments, and under certain discourse conditions, clauses may be marked, on all or almost all words, by complementization markers, in addition to inflection for case and tense.
Article
Typological Diversity Within the Romance Languages
Davide Ricca
The Romance languages, despite their overall similarity, display interesting internal diversity which can be captured only very partially by looking at the six major standard languages, as typological databases often do. This diversity spans over all the levels of linguistic analysis, from phonology to morphology and syntax. Rather than making a long list of features, with no space to go much beyond their mere mention, the article focusses on just four main areas in a little more detail, trying to develop, if minimally, a discussion on their theoretical and methodological import.
The comparison with the full-world typological background given by the WALS Online shows that the differences within Romance may reach the level of general typological relevance. While this is probably not the case in their rather mainstream segmental phonology, it surely holds regarding nominal pluralization and the syntax of negation, which are both areas where the Romance languages have often distanced themselves quite significantly from their common ancestor, Latin. The morphological marking of nominal plural displays four values out of the seven recorded in WALS, adding a further one unattested there, namely subtraction; the negation strategies, although uniformly particle-like, cover all the five values found in WALS concerning linear order. Finally, Romance languages suggest several intriguing issues related with head-marking and dependent-marking constructions, again innovating against the substantially dependent-marking uniformity characteristic of Latin.
Article
Writing Systems in Modern West Germanic
Martin Evertz-Rittich
The writing systems of the modern West Germanic languages have many features in common: They are all written using the Modern Roman Alphabet and exhibit a certain depth, that is, in addition to the pure grapheme–phoneme correspondences, prosodic, morphological, and syntactic information that is systematically encoded in their writing systems. A notable exception is the writing system of Yiddish, which is not only written with an alphabet evolved from the Hebrew script but is also almost completely transparent.
Except for Yiddish, all writing systems of modern West Germanic languages use graphematic syllable and foot structures to encode suprasegmental properties such as vowel quantity. Paradigmatic relations are represented by morphological spellings (especially stem and affix constancy). Syntagmatic relations are expressed, for example, in compound spelling, which adheres to the same principles in all writing systems under discussion.
The writing systems of modern West Germanic languages have been studied by grapholinguists in varying depth. While German is probably the best researched writing system in the world, some writing systems, such as Luxembourgish, await thorough grapholinguistic investigation.
Article
Yiddish
Lea Schäfer
The Yiddish language is directly linked to the culture and destiny of the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe. It originated as the everyday language of the Jewish population in the German-speaking lands around the Middle Ages and underwent a series of developments until the Shoah, which took a particularly large toll on the Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish population. Today, Yiddish is spoken as a mother tongue almost exclusively in ultra-Orthodox communities, where it is now exposed to entirely new influences and is, thus, far from being a dead language.
After an introductory sketch, information on the geographical distribution and number of speakers as well as key historical developments are briefly summarized. Particularly important are the descriptions of the various sociolinguistic situations and the source situation. This is followed by a description of various (failed) attempts at standardization, as well as the geographical distribution and surveys of the dialects. The following section describes the status of Yiddish in the early 21st century, which overlaps with the sociolinguistic situation of Orthodox Yiddish. Finally, the linguistic features of modern Eastern Yiddish (dialects, standard, and Orthodox) are presented. In this context, linguistic levels and structures in which Yiddish differs from other (standard) Germanic languages are also discussed. Since Yiddish, as a language derived from Middle High German, is particularly close to German varieties, the differences and similarities between the two languages are particularly emphasized.
Article
Zero Morphemes
Eystein Dahl and Antonio Fábregas
Zero or null morphology refers to morphological units that are devoid of phonological content. Whether such entities should be postulated is one of the most controversial issues in morphological theory, with disagreements in how the concept should be delimited, what would count as an instance of zero morphology inside a particular theory, and whether such objects should be allowed even as mere analytical instruments.
With respect to the first problem, given that zero morphology is a hypothesis that comes from certain analyses, delimiting what counts as a zero morpheme is not a trivial matter. The concept must be carefully differentiated from others that intuitively also involve situations where there is no overt morphological marking: cumulative morphology, phonological deletion, etc.
About the second issue, what counts as null can also depend on the specific theories where the proposal is made. In the strict sense, zero morphology involves a complete morphosyntactic representation that is associated to zero phonological content, but there are other notions of zero morphology that differ from the one discussed here, such as absolute absence of morphological expression, in addition to specific theory-internal interpretations of what counts as null. Thus, it is also important to consider the different ways in which something can be morphologically silent.
Finally, with respect to the third side of the debate, arguments are made for and against zero morphology, notably from the perspectives of falsifiability, acquisition, and psycholinguistics. Of particular impact is the question of which properties a theory should have in order to block the possibility that zero morphology exists, and conversely the properties that theories that accept zero morphology associate to null morphemes.
An important ingredient in this debate has to do with two empirical domains: zero derivation and paradigmatic uniformity. Ultimately, the plausibility that zero morphemes exist or not depends on the success at accounting for these two empirical patterns in a better way than theories that ban zero morphology.
