Morphology (Dordrecht, Netherlands)最新文献

It is well known that children produce non-adult-like forms during language acquisition. Among these are errors where in the fashion of multiple exponence the child overtly marks an underlying feature or category more than once. In addition, children also produce errors where features that are marked fusionally with one form in the target language are marked separately with more than one form by the child. This paper is concerned with such errors in the domain of English past tense. We present a comprehensive corpus study investigating the frequencies and distribution of different error types, combining both overregularization and overtensing errors, which have previously been studied separately. We then propose an analysis based on Generalized Head Movement (Arregi & Pietraszko, 2021) and Distributed Morphology arguing that errors can be derived from two occasionally occurring underlying mistakes: negligence of secondary features and omission of obliteration. We show how these two mistakes and their interaction can account for the overall differences in error rates and distributions between different error types as well as across different verbs.

Certain patterns of directional syncretism, in particular bidirectional syncretism, have been argued to necessitate the power of directional rules that create a form dependency between two cells in a paradigm. The existence of such patterns, divergent bidirectional syncretism in particular, has been claimed to be fatal for the approach to syncretism adopted in Distributed Morphology that holds that (directional) syncretism always involves a retreat to less specific and therefore less marked exponents. In this paper, we will demonstrate that this is not the case. Apparently challenging cases of directional syncretism can be adequately handled on the view that impoverishment may have two outcomes: deletion of features or insertion of contextually unmarked values. Once this view is adopted, bidirectionality is no longer a problem. Furthermore, we argue that this view allows us to still maintain the claim that syncretism is universally markedness decreasing if markedness is defined over insertion contexts rather than exponents.

Autonomous morphology, such as inflection class systems and paradigmatic distribution patterns, is widespread and diachronically resilient in natural language. Why this should be so has remained unclear given that autonomous morphology imposes learning costs, offers no clear benefit relative to its absence and could easily be removed by the analogical forces which are constantly reshaping it. Here we propose an explanation for the resilience of autonomous morphology, in terms of a diachronic dynamic of attraction and repulsion between morphomic categories, which emerges spontaneously from a simple paradigm cell filling process. Employing computational evolutionary models, our key innovation is to bring to light the role of 'dissociative evidence', i.e., evidence for inflectional distinctiveness which a rational reasoner will have access to during analogical inference. Dissociative evidence creates a repulsion dynamic which prevents morphomic classes from collapsing together entirely, i.e., undergoing complete levelling. As we probe alternative models, we reveal the limits of conditional entropy as a measure for predictability in systems that are undergoing change. Finally, we demonstrate that autonomous morphology, far from being 'unnatural', is rather the natural (emergent) consequence of a natural (rational) process of inference applied to inflectional systems.

We argue that secondary imperfectivisation in Serbo-Croatian (and possibly in Slavic more generally) is a procedure whereby a new verb is derived from a perfective verb, i.e., the perfective verb gets reverbalised. This operation takes a perfective verb, that is, a verbal structure including an aspectual projection that restricts its interpretation aspectually (but also adds some lexical semantic content) and turns it into a bare vP. The new verb preserves the conceptually enriched semantics, but not the structurally derived aspectual restriction, which gets overwritten by the newly projected category. The inner aspect of the verb is thus reset to the unvalued, i.e., aspectually unrestricted default. The verb gets interpreted as imperfective by scalar implicature: had the speaker intended the perfective interpretation, they would have used the more specific and computationally cheaper expression involving the perfective verb. On the morphophonological side, assuming with a host of literature that the verbal category is realised by theme vowels (Spyropoulos et al., 2015 and Panagiotidis et al., 2017 for Greek, Svenonius, 2004a for Russian, Jabłońska, 2004, 2007 for Polish, Biskup, 2019 for Czech, Milosavljević & Arsenijević, 2022 for Serbo-Croatian), imperfectivisation amounts to stacking theme vowels. Support for the view comes from Simonović et al. (2023), who arrive at the same conclusion on morphophonological grounds.