Studies of the structure and function of paradigms are as old as the Western grammatical tradition. The central role accorded to paradigms in traditional approaches largely reflects the fact that paradigms exhibit systematic patterns of interdependence that facilitate processes of analogical generalization. The recent resurgence of interest in word-based models of morphological processing and morphological structure more generally has provoked a renewed interest in paradigmatic dimensions of linguistic structure. Current methods for operationalizing paradigmatic relations and determining the behavioral correlates of these relations extend paradigmatic models beyond their traditional boundaries. The integrated perspective that emerges from this work is one in which variation at the level of individual words is not meaningful in isolation, but rather guides the association of words to paradigmatic contexts that play a role in their interpretation.
Article
Paradigms in Morphology
Petar Milin and James P. Blevins
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.
