The central goal of the Lexical Semantic Framework (LSF) is to characterize the meaning of simple lexemes and affixes and to show how these meanings can be integrated in the creation of complex words. LSF offers a systematic treatment of issues that figure prominently in the study of word formation, such as the polysemy question, the multiple-affix question, the zero-derivation question, and the form and meaning mismatches question.
LSF has its source in a confluence of research approaches that follow a decompositional approach to meaning and, thus, defines simple lexemes and affixes by way of a systematic representation that is achieved via a constrained formal language that enforces consistency of annotation. Lexical-semantic representations in LSF consist of two parts: the Semantic/Grammatical Skeleton and the Semantic/Pragmatic Body (henceforth ‘skeleton’ and ‘body’ respectively). The skeleton is comprised of features that are of relevance to the syntax. These features act as functions and may take arguments. Functions and arguments of a skeleton are hierarchically arranged. The body encodes all those aspects of meaning that are perceptual, cultural, and encyclopedic.
Features in LSF are used in (a) a cross-categorial, (b) an equipollent, and (c) a privative way. This means that they are used to account for the distinction between the major ontological categories, may have a binary (i.e., positive or negative) value, and may or may not form part of the skeleton of a given lexeme. In order to account for the fact that several distinct parts integrate into a single referential unit that projects its arguments to the syntax, LSF makes use of the Principle of Co-indexation. Co-indexation is a device needed in order to tie together the arguments that come with different parts of a complex word to yield only those arguments that are syntactically active.
LSF has an important impact on the study of the morphology-lexical semantics interface and provides a unitary theory of meaning in word formation.
Article
Lexical Semantic Framework for Morphology
Marios Andreou
Article
Lexical Typology in Morphology
Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm and Ljuba N. Veselinova
The goal of this chapter is to explicate the common ground and shared pursuits of lexical typology and morphology. Bringing those to the fore is beneficial to the scholarship of both disciplines and will allow their methodologies to be combined in more fruitful ways. In fact, such explication also opens up a whole new domain of study. This overview article focuses on a set of important research questions common to both lexical typology and morphology. Specifically, it considers vocabulary structure in human languages, cross-linguistic research on morphological analysis and word formation, and finally inventories of very complex lexical items. After a critical examination of the pertinent literature, some directions for future research are suggested. Some of them include working out methodologies for more systematic exploration of vocabulary structure and further scrutiny of how languages package and distribute semantic material among linguistic units. Finally, more effort is to be devoted to the study of vocabularies where basic concepts are encoded by complex lexical items.
Article
Linking Elements in Morphology
Renata Szczepaniak
Linking elements occur in compound nouns and derivatives in the Indo-European languages as well as in many other languages of the world. They can be described as sound material or graphemes with or without a phonetic correspondence appearing between two parts of a word-formation product. Linking elements are meaningless per definition. However, in many cases the clear-cut distinction between them and other, meaningful elements (like inflectional or derivational affixes) is difficult. Here, a thorough examination is necessary.
Simple rules cannot describe the occurrence of linking elements. Instead, their distribution is fully erratic or at least complex, as different factors including the prosodic, morphological, or semantic properties of the word-formation components play a role and compete. The same holds for their productivity: their ability to appear in new word-formation products differs considerably and can range from strongly (prosodically, morphologically, or lexically) restricted to the virtual absence of any constraints.
Linking elements should be distinguished from singular, isolated insertions (cf. Spanish rousseau-n-iano) or extensions of one specific stem or affix (cf. ‑l- in French congo-l-ais, togo-l-ais, English Congo-l-ese, Togo-l-ese). As they link two parts of a word formation, they also differ from word-final elements attached to compounds like ‑(s)I in Turkish as in ana‑dil‑i (mother‑tongue‑i) ‘mother tongue’. Furthermore, they are also distinct from infixes, i.e., derivational affixes that are inserted into a root, as well as from confixes, which are for bound, but meaningful (lexical) morphemes.
Linking elements are attested in many Indo-European languages (Slavic, Romance, Germanic, Baltic languages, and Greek) as well as in other languages across the world. They seem to be more common in compounds than in derivatives. Additionally, some languages display different sets of linking elements in both compounds and derivatives. The linking inventories differ strongly even between closely related languages. For example, Frisian and Dutch, each of which has five different linking elements, share only two linking forms (‑s- and ‑e-).
In some languages, linking elements are homophonous to other (meaningful) elements, e.g., inflectional or derivational suffixes. This is mostly due to their historical development and to the degree of the dissociation from their sources. This makes it sometimes difficult to distinguish between linking elements and meaningful elements. In such cases (e.g., in German or Icelandic), formal and functional differences should be taken into account. It is also possible that the homophony with the inflectional markers is incidental and not a remnant of a historical development. Generally, linking elements can have different historical sources: primary suffixes (e.g., Lithuanian), case markers (e.g., many Germanic languages), derivational suffixes (e.g., Greek), prepositions (e.g., Sardinian and English). However, the historical development of many linking elements in many languages still require further research.
Depending on their distribution, linking elements can have different functions. Accordingly, the functions strongly differ from language to language. They can serve as compound markers (Greek), as “reopeners” of closed stems for further morphological processes (German), as markers of prosodically and/or morphologically complex first parts (many Germanic languages), as plural markers (Dutch and German), and as markers of genre (German).
Article
Luxembourgish
Peter Gilles
This article provides an overview of the structure of the Luxembourgish language, the national language of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which has developed from a Moselle Franconian dialect to an Ausbau language in the course of the 20th century. In the early 21st century, Luxembourgish serves several functions, mainly as a multifunctional spoken variety but also as a written language, which has acquired a medium level of language standardization. Because of the embedding into a complex multilingual situation with German and French, Luxembourgish is characterized by a high degree of language contact. As a Germanic language, Luxembourgish has developed its distinct grammatical features. In this article, the main aspects of phonetics and phonology (vowels, consonants, prosody, word stress), morphology (inflection of nouns, adjectives, articles and pronouns, partitive structures, prepositions, verbal system), and syntactic characteristics (complementizer agreement, word order in verbal clusters) are discussed. The lexicon is influenced to a certain degree by loanwords from French. Regarding language variation and change, recent surveys show that Luxembourgish is undergoing major changes affecting phonetics and phonology (reduction of regional pronunciations), the grammatical system (plural of nouns), and, especially, the lexical level (decrease of loans from French, increase of loans from German).
Article
Mayan Languages
Nora C. England
Mayan languages are spoken by over 5 million people in Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. There are around 30 different languages today, ranging in size from fairly large (about a million speakers) to very small (fewer than 30 speakers). All Mayan languages are endangered given that at least some children in some communities are not learning the language, and two languages have disappeared since European contact. Mayas developed the most elaborated and most widely attested writing system in the Americas (starting about 300 BC).
The sounds of Mayan languages consist of a voiceless stop and affricate series with corresponding glottalized stops (either implosive and ejective) and affricates, glottal stop, voiceless fricatives (including h in some of them inherited from Proto-Maya), two to three nasals, three to four approximants, and a five vowel system with contrasting vowel length (or tense/lax distinctions) in most languages. Several languages have developed contrastive tone.
The major word classes in Mayan languages include nouns, verbs, adjectives, positionals, and affect words. The difference between transitive verbs and intransitive verbs is rigidly maintained in most languages. They usually use the same aspect markers (but not always). Intransitive verbs only indicate their subjects while transitive verbs indicate both subjects and objects. Some languages have a set of status suffixes which is different for the two classes. Positionals are a root class whose most characteristic word form is a non-verbal predicate. Affect words indicate impressions of sounds, movements, and activities. Nouns have a number of different subclasses defined on the basis of characteristics when possessed, or the structure of compounds. Adjectives are formed from a small class of roots (under 50) and many derived forms from verbs and positionals.
Predicate types are transitive, intransitive, and non-verbal. Non-verbal predicates are based on nouns, adjectives, positionals, numbers, demonstratives, and existential and locative particles. They are distinct from verbs in that they do not take the usual verbal aspect markers. Mayan languages are head marking and verb initial; most have VOA flexible order but some have VAO rigid order. They are morphologically ergative and also have at least some rules that show syntactic ergativity. The most common of these is a constraint on the extraction of subjects of transitive verbs (ergative) for focus and/or interrogation, negation, or relativization. In addition, some languages make a distinction between agentive and non-agentive intransitive verbs. Some also can be shown to use obviation and inverse as important organizing principles. Voice categories include passive, antipassive and agent focus, and an applicative with several different functions.
Article
Mood in Morphology
Daria Mordashova and Vladimir Plungian
The category of mood is closely related to modality, though specifically involves grammatical (inflectional) means for expressing core modal meanings (most notably, those of possibility and necessity). In other words, mood is defined as modality that is grammaticalized in the verbal system as an inflectional category. The category of mood is found in nearly all full-fledged inflectional verbal systems, along with the categories of aspect and tense. The typical opposition expected within the system of moods is the division into “indicative” and “non-indicative” moods, dependent on the real vs. irreal (or, more precisely, asserted vs. non-asserted) status of the proposition.
There is no “preferable” morphological device for the expression of mood in the world’s languages—all the existing grammatical means are in demand, both synthetic and periphrastic. Among the segmental markers of mood affixal marking prevails, involving both prefixes and suffixes and various combinations thereof (yielding circumfixal marking). Non-segmental and suprasegmental marking of mood is less frequent, but also quite common. Another strategy for mood marking in the languages of the world is suppletion, when inflectional modal meanings require a different stem feeding into the verbal paradigm.
Along with dedicated morphological markers of mood, there exists a plethora of cumulative types of marking, when mood is expressed simultaneously with other verbal categories, such as tense, aspect, voice, person, number, and possibly some others.
The structure of mood as a grammatical category poses a challenge for universal typological descriptions, as the diversity of all its guises in the world’s languages is notoriously high. Imperative and subjunctive are regarded as the two core non-indicative members of mood domain attested cross-linguistically. A kind of terminological complication may arise with respect to the terms indicative vs. subjunctive and realis vs. irrealis. Still, there exist some points that reveal the differences between subjunctive and irrealis, syntactic distribution being one of the most essential (given that subjunctive is to be considered primarily as a morphological device for expressing syntactic subordination).
Of course, the systems of mood in the world’s languages often display a greater diversity within the domain of non-indicative moods, and specifically epistemic and volitive values grammaticalize to separate inflectional forms, comprising various epistemic and optative moods respectively.
Article
Morpheme Ordering
Patrik Bye
Morpheme ordering is largely explainable in terms of syntactic/semantic scope, or the Mirror Principle, although there is a significant residue of cases that resist an explanation in these terms. The article, we look at some key examples of (apparent) deviant ordering and review the main ways that linguists have attempted to account for them. Approaches to the phenomenon fall into two broad types. The first relies on mechanisms we can term “morphological,” while the second looks instead to the resources of the ‘narrow’ syntax or phonology. One morphological approach involves a template that associates each class of morphemes in the word with a particular position. A well-known example is the Bantu CARP (Causative-Applicative-Reciprocal-Passive) template, which requires particular orders between morphemes to obtain irrespective of scope. A second approach builds on the intuition that the boundary or join between a morpheme and the base to which it attaches can vary in closeness or strength, where ‘strength’ can be interpreted in gradient or discrete terms. Under the gradient interpretation, affixes differ in parsability, or separability from the base; understood discretely, as in Lexical Morphology and Phonology, morphemes (or classes of morphemes) may attach at a deeper morphological layer to stems (the stronger join), or to words (weaker join), which are closer to the surface. Deviant orderings may then arise where an affix attaches at a morphological layer deeper than its scope would lead us to expect. An example is the marking of case and possession in Finnish nouns: case takes scope over possession, but the case suffix precedes the possessive suffix. Another morphological approach is represented by Distributed Morphology, which permits certain local reorderings once all syntactic operations have taken place. Such operations may target specific morphemes, or morphosyntactic features characterizing a class of morphemes. Agreement marking is an interesting case, since agreement features are bundled as syntactically unitary heads but may in certain languages be split morphologically into separate affixes. This means that in the case of split agreement marking, the relative order must be attributed to post-syntactic principles. Besides these morphological approaches, other researchers have emphasized the resources of the narrow syntax, in particular phrasal movement, as a means for dealing with many challenging cases of morpheme ordering. Still other cases of apparently deviant ordering may be analyzed as epiphenomena of phonological processes and constraint interaction as they apply to prespecified and/or underspecified lexical representations.
Article
Morphological and Syntactical Variation and Change in Brazilian Portuguese
J. Clancy Clements
In the history of Brazil, Africans and their descendants figure prominently. In many of the country’s regions, they represented a majority of the population, especially in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. The features of Brazilian Portuguese are described and the possible links between the demographic makeup of the country and the presence of the features are explored.
Article
Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in Catalan
Gemma Rigau and Manuel Pérez Saldanya
Catalan is a Romance language closely related to Gallo-Romance languages. However, contact with Spanish since the 15th century has led it to adopt various linguistic features that are closer to those seen in Ibero-Romance languages. Catalan exhibits five broad dialects: Central, Northern, and Balearic, which pertain to the Eastern dialect block, and Northwestern and Valencian, which make up the Western.
This article deals with the most salient morphosyntactic properties of Catalan and covers diachronic and diatopic variations. It also offers information about diastratic or sociolinguistic variations, namely standard and non-standard variations. Among the most characteristic morphosyntactic features are the following:
1. Catalan is the only Romance language that exhibits a periphrastic past tense expressed by means of the verb anar ‘go’ + infinitive (Ahir vas cantar ‘Yesterday you sang’). This periphrastic past coexists with a simple past (Ahir cantares ‘Yesterday you sang’). However, Catalan does not have a periphrastic future built with the movement verb go.
2. Demonstratives show a two-term system in most Catalan dialects: aquí ‘here’ (proximal) and allà or allí ‘there’ (distal); but in Valencian and some Northwestern dialects, there is a three-term system. In contrast with other languages that have a two-term system, Catalan uses the proximal demonstrative to express proximity either to the speaker or to the addressee (Aquí on jo soc ‘Here where I am’, Aquí on tu ets ‘There where you are’).
3. Catalan has a complex system of clitic pronouns (or weak object pronouns) which may vary in form according to the point of contact with the verb, proclitically or enclitically; e.g., the singular masculine accusative clitic can have two syllabic forms (el and lo) and an asyllabic one (l’ or ‘l): El saludo ‘I am greeting him’, Puc saludar-lo ‘I can greet him’, L’havies saludat ‘You had greeted him’, Saluda’l ‘Greet him’.
4. Existential constructions may contain the predicate haver-hi ‘there be’, consisting of the locative clitic hi and the verb haver ‘have’ (Hi ha tres estudiants ‘There are three students’) and the copulative verb ser ‘be’ (Tres estudiants ja són aquí ‘Three students are already here’) or other verbs whose behavior can be close to an unaccusative verb when preceded by the clitic hi (Aquí hi treballen forners ‘There are some bakers working here’).
5. The negative polarity adverb no ‘not’ may be reinforced by the adverbs pas or cap in some dialects and can co-occur with negative polarity items (ningú ‘anybody/nobody’, res ‘anything/nothing’, mai ‘never’, etc.). Negative polarity items exhibit negative agreement (No hi ha mai ningú ‘Nobody is ever here’), but they may express positive meaning in some non-declarative syntactic contexts (Si mai vens, truca’m ‘If you ever come, call me’).
6. Other distinguishing items are the interrogative and confirmative particles, the pronominal forms of address, and the personal articles.
Article
Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in European French
John Charles Smith
With the introduction of free compulsory elementary education by laws passed in 1881 and 1882, French children were exposed to the standard language as a matter of course. By the end of the First World War, therefore, a majority of the population was, for the first time, competent in French, as well as, or instead of, a regional or local dialect. However, this national language has always exhibited variation, including in its morphology and syntax, and this variation has often been a driving force behind change. Loci of variation include competing morphological exponents (‘overabundance’), morphomic (autonomously morphological) structure, the expression of number and gender, use of tenses and moods, agreement, negation, interrogation, and dislocation of elements to the beginning or end of the sentence. Geography and social class may still have some effect on variation in French, although it is often argued that their influence has largely been leveled, with style and register becoming more significant factors.
Article
Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in Latin American Spanish
John M. Lipski
The Spanish language, as it spread throughout Latin America from the earliest colonial times until the present, has evolved a number of syntactic and morphological configurations that depart from the Iberian Peninsula inheritance. One of the tasks of Spanish variational studies is to search for the routes of evolution as well as for known or possible causal factors. In some instances, archaic elements no longer in use in Spain have been retained entirely or with modification in Latin America. One example is the use of the subject pronoun vos in many Latin American Spanish varieties. In Spain vos was once used to express the second-person plural (‘you-pl’) and was later replaced by the compound form vosotros, while in Latin America vos is always used in the singular (with several different verbal paradigms), in effect replacing or coexisting with tú. Other Latin American Spanish constructions reflect regional origins of Spanish settlers, for example, Caribbean questions of the type ¿Qué tú quieres? ‘What do you (sg)want?’ or subject + infinitive constructions such as antes de yo llegar ‘before I arrived’, which show traces of Galician and Canary Island heritage. In a similar fashion, diminutive suffixes based on -ico, found in much of the Caribbean, reflect dialects of Aragon and Murcia in Spain, but in Latin America this suffix is attached only to nouns whose final consonant is -t-. Contact with indigenous, creole, or immigrant languages provides another source of variation, for example, in the Andean region of South America, where bilingual Quechua–Spanish speakers often gravitate toward Object–Verb word order, or double negation in the Dominican Republic, which bears the imprint of Haitian creole. Other probably contact-influenced features found in Latin American Spanish include doubled and non-agreeing direct object clitics, null direct objects, use of gerunds instead of conjugated verbs, double possessives, partial or truncated noun-phrase pluralization, and diminutives in -ingo. Finally, some Latin American Spanish morphological and syntactic patterns appear to result from spontaneous innovation, for example, use of present subjunctive verbs in subordinate clauses combined with present-tense verbs in main clauses, use of ser as intensifier, and variation between lo and le for direct-object clitics. At the microdialectal level, even more variation can be found, as demographic shifts, recent immigration, and isolation come into play.
Article
Morphological and Syntactic Variation and Change in Romanian
Ion Giurgea
The geographical varieties of Romanian spoken in Romania, the Republic of Moldova, and adjacent regions are largely mutually intelligible. More important are the differences between these varieties (known as “Dacoromanian”) and the South-Danubian varieties of Aromanian, Meglenoromanian, and Istroromanian, which have been separated from (Daco-)Romanian for a very long time, but qualify as dialects of Romanian from a historical and comparative Romance perspective.
Standard Romanian is based on the southern dialect of Dacoromanian, in particular the variety of Muntenia, but also includes features taken from other dialects (e.g., the 3pl imperfect -au, the absence of “iotacism” in verb forms—văd instead of the etymological vă(d)z ‘see.1sg’ < Lat. *uidi̯o
<
uideō, with the regular sound change -di̯->-dz->-z-). A unified standard language was established around the middle of the 19th century.
Some of the differences between the high and the colloquial register of standard Romanian are due to innovations characterizing southern varieties: the demonstrative system (high register acest(a), acel(a) versus colloquial ăsta, ăla), the future (high register voi [inflected] + infinitive versus colloquial o [uninflected] + subjunctive), the use of the infinitive (more restricted in the colloquial register than in the high register), and the presumptive mood (mostly colloquial, representing a modal epistemic specialization of a future form oi + infinitive, which is itself an innovation with respect to voi + infinitive).
Some of the features by which substandard varieties differ from the standard language represent innovations: the replacement of the inflectional dative and genitive by prepositional constructions, the change of the relative pronoun care into a complementizer, and the loss of the number contrast in the 3rd person of verbs (the latter representing a recent development, mostly found in the southern varieties, but also in parts of Crişana and Transylvania). The loss of agreement with the possessee on the genitival article al is an innovation that first appeared in the northern dialect and subsequently gained ground across substandard varieties.
Northern varieties, especially in peripheral areas (Crişana, Maramureş, northern Moldova), preserve a number of archaic features that disappeared from the standard language, for example, the productivity of verb-clitic word orders (with both auxiliary and pronominal clitics), the use of al-Genitive-N word orders, the conditional periphrases vream + infinitive and reaş + infinitive (the latter in Banat), and, as a widespread phenomenon, the 3sg=3pl homonymy in the perfect auxiliary (in the form o < au). Compared to the colloquial standard language, northern varieties preserve the infinitive better. An innovative feature characteristic of northern varieties is the use of periphrastic forms for the imperfect and pluperfect.
As conservative features found in some nonstandard southern varieties, we may cite the use of the synthetic perfect (which in the standard language is restricted to the written register) and the stress on the oblique determiner/pronominal endings (ăstúia vs. ắstuia).
Article
Morphological Change
Carola Trips
Morphological change refers to change(s) in the structure of words. Since morphology is interrelated with phonology, syntax, and semantics, changes affecting the structure and properties of words should be seen as changes at the respective interfaces of grammar.
On a more abstract level, this point relates to linguistic theory. Looking at the history of morphological theory, mainly from a generative perspective, it becomes evident that despite a number of papers that have contributed to a better understanding of the role of morphology in grammar, both from a synchronic and diachronic point of view, it is still seen as a “Cinderella subject” today. So there is still a need for further research in this area.
Generally, the field of diachronic morphology has been dealing with the identification of the main types of change, their mechanisms as well as the causes of morphological change, the latter of which are traditionally categorized as internal and external change. Some authors take a more general view and state the locus of change can be seen in the transmission of grammar from one generation to the next (abductive change). Concerning the main types of change, we can say that many of them occur at the interfaces with morphology: changes on the phonology–morphology interface like i-mutation, changes on the syntax–morphology interface like the rise of inflectional morphology, and changes on the semantics–morphology like the rise of derivational suffixes. Examples from the history of English (which in this article are sometimes complemented with examples from German and the Romance languages) illustrate that sometimes changes indeed cross component boundaries, at least once (the history of the linking-s in German has even become a prosodic phenomenon). Apart from these interface phenomena, it is common lore to assume morphology-internal changes, analogy being the most prominent example.
A phenomenon regularly discussed in the context of morphological change is grammaticalization. Some authors have posed the question of whether such special types of change really exist or whether they are, after all, general processes of change that should be modeled in a general theory of linguistic change. Apart from this pressing question, further aspects that need to be addressed in the future are the modularity of grammar and the place of morphology.
Article
Morphological Entities: Overview and General Issues
Laurie Bauer
Some of the basic terminology for the major entities in morphological study is introduced, focusing on the word and elements within the word. This is done in a way which is deliberately introductory in nature and omits a great deal of detail about the elements that are introduced.
Article
Morphologically ‘Autonomous’ Structures in the Romance Languages
Paul O'Neill
This contribution analyses morphologically autonomous structures within the context of the Romance languages, the family of languages which, along with Latin, have most served as an evidence base for these structures. Autonomous morphological structures are defined as an abstract representation of paradigmatic cells which form a cohesive group and reliably share exponents with each other, and the forms which realize them, are thus to a large extent interpredictable. In this contribution, I restrict my discussion to the most canonical type of these structures and those which have sparked the most controversy in the linguistic literature. I analyze this controversy and suggest that it is due to (a) their overlapping meaning with the term morphome, a concept which embodies an empirical claim about all morphology and (b) the controversy surrounding what morphology actually is and the basic units of morphological analysis and storage. I make a distinction between abstractive and constructive models of morphology and suggest that historical tendencies within the latter encourage scholars to view morphologically autonomous structures either as not synchronically relevant or as phonologically or semantically derivable due to their theoretical assumptions about the nature of language and the mental storage of words. These assumptions constitute the horizons of intelligibility of such models regarding the functioning of language and its governing principles, including outdated ideas of the capacity of mental storage. Unfortunately, however, the different theories furnish scholars with an expansive array of devices through which they can seemingly explain away the synchronic generalizations of the data while relegating the most recalcitrant data to the domain of memorized forms which are not relevant to the grammar. I present evidence in favor of the psychological reality of morphologically autonomous structures in diachrony and I argue that synchronically, these structures are necessary to explain the distribution of the data and capture the fact that speakers do not memorize every inflectional form of a paradigm but rely on patterns of predictability and implicational relationships between forms. It is my suggestion that morphologically autonomous structures encourage a revaluation of the basic units of memorization and the structure of the lexicon in accordance with abstractive theories of morphology.
Article
Morphological Units: Stems
Paul Kiparsky
Article
Morphological Units: A Theoretical and Psycholinguistic Perspective
Dominiek Sandra
Speakers can transfer meanings to each other because they represent them in a perceptible form. Phonology and syntactic structure are two levels of linguistic form. Morphemes are situated in-between them. Like phonemes they have a phonological component, and like syntactic structures they carry relational information. A distinction can be made between inflectional and lexical morphology. Both are devices in the service of communicative efficiency, by highlighting grammatical and semantic relations, respectively. Morphological structure has also been studied in psycholinguistics, especially by researchers who are interested in the process of visual word recognition. They found that a word is recognized more easily when it belongs to a large morphological family, which suggests that the mental lexicon is structured along morphological lines. The semantic transparency of a word’s morphological structure plays an important role. Several findings also suggest that morphology plays an important role at a pre-lexical processing level as well. It seems that morphologically complex words are subjected to a process of blind morphological decomposition before lexical access is attempted.
Article
Morphological Units: Words
Paolo Ramat
This chapter deals with the discussion that has concerned and concerns the very concept of ‘word’. It considers different definitions which have been advanced according different theoretical positions. Thereafter, it examines various phenomena which are strictly bound to ‘word’: word compounds and multi-word expressions, word formation rules, word classes (or Parts-of-Speech), splinters, univerbation and, finally, word blendings
Article
Morphologization and the Boundary Between Morphology and Phonology in the Romance Languages
Paul O'Neill
This article analyses, from a Romance perspective, the concept of morphologization and seeks to answer the following question: At what point does a historically proven phonological cause-and-effect relationship, whereby phonological feature X causes and determines phonological feature Y, cease to hold and the dephonologized Y element stand as a marker of some morphological distinction? The question is relevant to cases in which the original phonological conditioning element is still present and where it has disappeared. I explain that the answer to this question depends entirely on one’s conception of morphology and phonology. I argue against theories that adhere to the principle of lexical minimization and have a static conception of morphology, which is restricted to the concatenation of idiosyncratic morphemes. These theories are forced by their theoretical underpinnings, which are often ideological and not supported by robust empirical evidence, to explain morphologized phenomena as being synchronically derived by phonology. This approach comes at a huge cost: the model of phonology is endowed with powerful tools to make the analysis fit the theory and which ultimately diminishes the empirical content and plausibility of the phonological hypotheses; such approaches also constitute serious problems for language acquisition and learning. I argue for more dynamic and abstractive models of morphology, which do not impose strict restrictions on lexical storage. I ultimately view morphologization as an instance of morphologically conditioned phonology and uphold that there is no strict boundary between the phonology and morphology but both systems overlap and interact.
I analyze data and phonological explanations of metaphony in nouns and verbs in Italo-Romance, plural formation in Spanish and Portuguese, the distribution of velar allomorphy in the Italian and Spanish verbs, and the distribution of verbal stress in Surmiran Romansh and Spanish. With reference to the latter, the contribution dedicates significant space exploring the extent to which the diphthong/monophthong alternation in Spanish, and different types of allomorphy in Surmiran Romansh, is a matter of phonologically conditioned allomorphy or morphologically conditioned phonology.
Article
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.
