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Lexical Morphology
Lexical Morphology
Lexical Morphology
Ling 4/510 Morphology Lynn Santelmann, Ph.D. 2010
Lexicalist Morphology
Lexicalist Morphology: rescued morphology from other components of grammar Posited that derivational morphology (and possibly inflectional morphology) should be handled in the lexicon Note most of the citations are from the 1970s, and a few from the 1980s. What does that tell you about this theory?
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This rule specifies both the order of elements and the morphemes needed
A general rule cannot be determined; some verbs have two nominalizations that do not mean the same thing, e.g.,
Commit (v.) committal, commitment Affect (v.) affect (n.), affection
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Syntactic transformations are supposed to apply to all members of a word class. How can you have a syntactic transformation that only applies to some verbs?
The result?
Deriving nominals should be handled in a different area of grammar. What is that area? Morphology! If you have a morphology for nominals, it makes sense to extend it to all word formation.
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Lexical Morphology
The goal of morphology, according to Aronoff (1976) is the "enumeration of the class of possible words of a language" (p. 170), or to tell us what sort of words can be formed.
Lexical Morphology
Lexical Morphology primarily studies:
Potential word forms Rules and constraints on word formation
Parallel to thinking in Syntax, the morphology "overgenerates" words (creating potential words); non-words are ruled out by constraints.
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Non-neutral affixes:
Change stress pattern Change pronunciation of base Show obligatory phonetically conditioned allomorphy
Level Ordering
One way to account for differences between the effects of affixes is to order affixation:
Level 1 affixes added Then phonological rules (e.g., stress) applied Level 2 affixes added
Level Ordering
Predictions from Level Ordering
Level 1 affixes are always closer to the base than level 2 affixes Level 2 affixes should always appear further from the base than Level 1 affixes.
Recall: This distinction between affixes holds for other languages as well.
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Levels of Morphology
Root Non-neutral affixes (+) Phonological rules Neutral Affixes (#) Compounding Inflection Level 2 Level 3 Level 4 Level 1
Orderings of affixes are found that are not predicted by the level order hypothesis.
For example, level 2 suffixes are found inside level 1 suffixes, e.g., governmental (#ment+al), or derviational suffixes outside compounds, e.g., nonsensical.
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Feature Percolation
Another major construct of Lexicalist Morphology is: Feature Percolation The features of the head of a word determine the feature of the whole word.
Right-hand Heads
Head: the element in a compound which
determines the gender and declension/conjugation class carries inflectional elements that apply to the whole compound, denotes the superordinate of the whole compound (i.e. major meaning)
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Feature Percolation
If the features from both parts are in agreement, they will both percolate up to the mother node. If the features conflict, then the mother node will take the features from the head.
German compounds
Der Landesmusikdirektor The head = direktor:
Determines gender (der) Determines word class (noun) Type of meaning (a type of control)
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Landesmusikdirektor
English compounds
Lest you think that German has cornered the market on long compounds, let's look at: Neoorthodox existentialist theology
Whats the head? Whats the structure? What features percolate from the head?
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Constraints
Another major feature of Lexicalist Morphology was constraints on output, e.g., Generalized Lexicalist Hypothesis (Lapointe, 1981: 22):
Syntactic rules are not allowed to refer to, and hence cannot directly modify, the internal morphological structure of words.
Conclusions
Lexicalist Morphology needs to explain:
Status of the lexicon Issues with ordering
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