Morphology最新文献

This paper investigates stem-marker allomorphy in Czech adjectives. It shows that an analysis based on the frequently used context-sensitive rules comes at the expense of having to postulate widespread accidental homophony or disjunctive rules. The paper further demonstrates that the allomorphy can be accounted for within an approach based on portmanteau realisation of features, specifically the version of Nanosyntax proposed in Starke (2018), although alternative implementations are conceivable. Along the way, we explore a fine-grained decomposition of adjectival meaning and we also discuss the implications of these observations for the general issues surrounding context-sensitive rules compared to other systems of dealing with allomorphy.

The exact nature of French liaison as a phonological or morphological alternation is still debated. Under the phonological analysis, liaison is allophony: liaison consonants are special phonemes that alternate between a consonant allophone and zero (e.g., [t] ∼ ∅), the zero allophone being derived from the consonant phoneme through deletion (/t/ → ∅). Under the morphological analysis, liaison is allomorphy: liaison words have two underlyingly listed allomorphs, a consonant-final allomorph and a shorter allomorph that lacks this consonant (e.g., grand ‘great’ /gʁɑ̃t, gʁɑ̃/). This paper uses evidence from lexical statistics to arbitrate between these two analyses. The form without liaison consonant (and with deletion, under the phonological analysis) has been found in previous research to become less likely with increasing lexical frequency. The paper shows that this is problematic for the phonological analysis of French liaison, as deletion typically applies more frequently in high-frequency words across languages. The paper further shows, using evidence from a large lexical database, that words involved in liaison alternations generally have lower type frequency but higher token frequency than non-liaison words when phonotactic and morphological effects on lexical frequency are controlled for. This result is in line with the predictions of the morphological analysis, as allomorphy typically involves a relatively small number of words that occur frequently. Due to its empirical nature, this argument constitutes to date one of the strongest arguments in favor of the morphological analysis.

Using distributional semantics, we show that English nominal pluralization exhibits semantic clusters. For instance, the change in semantic space from singulars to plurals differs depending on whether a word denotes, e.g., a fruit, or an animal. Languages with extensive noun classes such as Swahili and Kiowa distinguish between these kind of words in their morphology. In English, even though not marked morphologically, plural semantics actually also varies by semantic class. A semantically informed method, CosClassAvg, is introduced that is compared to two other methods, one implementing a fixed shift from singular to plural, and one creating plural vectors from singular vectors using a linear mapping (FRACSS). Compared to FRACSS, CosClassAvg predicted plural vectors that were more similar to the corpus-extracted plural vectors in terms of vector length, but somewhat less similar in terms of orientation. Both FRACSS and CosClassAvg outperform the method using a fixed shift vector to create plural vectors, which does not do justice to the intricacies of English plural semantics. A computational modeling study revealed that the observed difference between the plural semantics generated by these three methods carries over to how well a computational model of the listener can understand previously unencountered plural forms. Among all methods, CosClassAvg provides a good balance for the trade-off between productivity (being able to understand novel plural forms) and faithfulness to corpus-extracted plural vectors (i.e., understanding the particulars of the meaning of a given plural form).

This paper presents a typology of tonal exponence. Couched within an Abstractive Word-and-Paradigm approach to morphology, the present study builds on previous studies on exponence typology and morphological organization by extending it to the study of tone. About half the languages of the world have tone systems, and tone is an important dimension in the morphologies of numerous languages. Tone is therefore a necessary part of a comprehensive typology of exponence. This paper shows that like segmental exponents, tonal exponents may be involved in a diversity of form-function mappings, but they also pose unique challenges due to their autosegmental nature. This study aims to advance our understanding of the role of tone in the organization of morphological systems by addressing deviations from form-function isomorphism, polyfunctionality, morphomic distributions, paradigmatic layers, and inflectional class organization. It is argued that the attested diversity of form-function mappings constitutes an empirical argument for a paradigm-based view of morphology, where the attested diversity is taken at face value and the range of encoding strategies are treated as equivalent, as opposed to choosing form-function isomorphism as the theoretical ‘ideal’.

This paper reports on the compilation and quantitative analysis of VeLePa, an inflected lexicon containing paradigms of 216 Central Pame verbs and a total of 12528 elicited words, in phonological form, supplied with cell and lexeme frequency information. The language (Otomanguean) is of interest due to both its extraordinary morphological complexity, as well as due to the organization of the inflection into a four-fold concurrent classification system where prefixes, stems, tone-stress, and suffixes all display inflection classes and irregularities which are only partially predictable from each other. A quantitative analysis of morphological predictability as per the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem is conducted for every layer, and for the whole word, as well as of the uncertainties language users face to learn or predict the morphosyntactic values or lexical meaning of a verb form from its morphology.