Phonotactics is the study of restrictions on possible sound sequences in a language. In any language, some phonotactic constraints can be stated without reference to morphology, but many of the more nuanced phonotactic generalizations do make use of morphosyntactic and lexical information. At the most basic level, many languages mark edges of words in some phonological way. Different phonotactic constraints hold of sounds that belong to the same morpheme as opposed to sounds that are separated by a morpheme boundary. Different phonotactic constraints may apply to morphemes of different types (such as roots versus affixes). There are also correlations between phonotactic shapes and following certain morphosyntactic and phonological rules, which may correlate to syntactic category, declension class, or etymological origins.
Approaches to the interaction between phonotactics and morphology address two questions: (1) how to account for rules that are sensitive to morpheme boundaries and structure and (2) determining the status of phonotactic constraints associated with only some morphemes. Theories differ as to how much morphological information phonology is allowed to access. In some theories of phonology, any reference to the specific identities or subclasses of morphemes would exclude a rule from the domain of phonology proper. These rules are either part of the morphology or are not given the status of a rule at all. Other theories allow the phonological grammar to refer to detailed morphological and lexical information. Depending on the theory, phonotactic differences between morphemes may receive direct explanations or be seen as the residue of historical change and not something that constitutes grammatical knowledge in the speaker’s mind.
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Morphology and Phonotactics
Maria Gouskova
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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.
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Usage-Based Approaches to Germanic Languages
Martin Hilpert
The theoretical outlook of usage-based linguistics is a position that views language as a dynamic, evolving system and that recognizes the importance of usage frequency and frequency effects in language, as well as the foundational role of domain-general sociocognitive processes. Methodologically, usage-based studies draw on corpus-linguistic methods, experimentation, and computational modeling, often in ways that combine different methods and triangulate the results. Given the availability of corpus resources and the availability of experimental participants, there is a rich literature of usage-based studies focusing on Germanic languages, which at the same time has greatly benefited from usage-based research into other language families. This research has uncovered frequency effects based on measurements of token frequency, type frequency, collocational strength, and dispersion. These frequency effects result from the repeated experience of linguistic units such as words, collocations, morphological patterns, and syntactic constructions, which impact language production, language processing, and language change. Usage-based linguistics further investigates how the properties of linguistic structures can be explained in terms of cognitive and social processes that are not in themselves linguistic. Domain-general sociocognitive processes such as categorization, joint attention, pattern recognition, and intention reading manifest themselves in language processing and production, as well as in the structure of linguistic units. In addition to research that addresses the form and meaning of such linguistic units at different levels of linguistic organization, domains of inquiry that are in the current focus of usage-based studies include linguistic variation, first and second-language acquisition, bilingualism, and language change.
