Inherent Inflection Research Articles

The Oxford handbook of derivational morphology ed. by Rochelle Lieber, Pavol Štekauer

Reviewed by: The Oxford handbook of derivational morphology ed. by Rochelle Lieber, Pavol Štekauer Geert Booij The Oxford handbook of derivational morphology. Ed. by Rochelle Lieber and Pavol Štekauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. 927. ISBN 9780199641642. $55. This handbook is the second in a series of four Oxford University Press handbooks on morphology, of which one, also edited by Lieber and Štekauer (2009), deals with compounding, one with inflection (edited by Matthew Baerman, 2015), and a fourth one (to appear in 2017) with morphological theory (edited by Jenny Audring and Francesca Masini). The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with a number of concepts and issues in the analysis of derivation (understood as all types of word formation minus compounding) and contains a number of chapters on the various types of formal processes involved in derivation (twenty-four chapters in total). Part II consists of fifteen chapters on word formation in various language families, a chapter on ‘Areal tendencies in derivation’, and a concluding chapter on ‘Universals in derivation’ written by the two editors. After an introductory chapter by the editors that specifies the scope of the handbook, we find two chapters on demarcation issues. In Ch. 2, Pius ten Hacken deals with the demarcation of inflection and derivation and presents a useful survey of the debate on this distinction. He correctly points out that the choices made in the demarcation of these two domains of morphology are theory-dependent. The distinction between contextual and inherent inflection, the latter being closer to derivation than contextual inflection, is not mentioned, nor is the discussion of the intermediate cases in Andrew Spencer’s monograph on Lexical relatedness (Spencer 2013). In Ch. 3, Susan Olsen gives a fine overview of the debate on the demarcation of derivation and compounding. She presents a good summary of the gray zone between compounding and derivation, and the related issue of the gradual transition of words to affixes (that is, semi-affixes or affixoids, which are words embedded in compounds and with a specific bound meaning, as discussed in Booij & Hüning 2014). Olsen also deals with synthetic compounding and the analysis of synthetic compounds such as powerholder, which might be analyzed as either power + holder or powerhold +er; she opts for the first analysis and therefore assigns powerholder the structure of an N + N compound. She correctly points out that certain types of reduplication may also be analyzed as compounding, for instance, the contrastive reduplication of the type salad-salad. Ch. 4, ‘Theoretical approaches to derivation’ by Rochelle Lieber, focuses on the issue of how the relation between the form and meaning of complex words should be conceived. Both the conceptual level and the phonological level have a rich structure. As to the mapping between [End Page 717] these two levels, it would have been enlightening to relate this issue to the model of parallel architecture (Jackendoff 2002), in which the level of morphosyntactic structure plays a mediating role between conceptual and phonological structure at the level of the word (Booij 2010). Ch. 5, written by Mark Aronoff and Mark Lindsay, argues that in the domain of morphology, language is not a discrete phenomenon: we have to accept that there are degrees of productivity. The authors discuss methods for measuring the degree of productivity of a word-formation process. Ch. 6, ‘Methodological issues in studying derivation’, also by Rochelle Lieber, mentions the potential pitfall of using intuitions in morphological research: corpus-based studies reveal that much more is possible and occurs than one might think on the basis of one’s own intuitions. This is also my own experience. For the domain of English morphology, this insight has been convincingly demonstrated to be valid in Bauer et al. 2013. In addition, an experimental approach to word-formation phenomena is also important, and Lieber observes a convergence between these two methodologies in studying word formation. In the following chapter (Ch. 7), Harald Baayen gives an overview of experimental and psycholinguistic approaches to word formation. The central issue is whether and how morphological structure plays a role...

Derivatives based on participles in Irish and Polish and the inflection–derivation distinction

Greenberg’s Universal 28 says that ‘if both the derivation and inflection follow the root, or they both precede the root, the derivation is always between the root and the inflection’ (Greenberg 1966: 93). Booij (1994: 27) undermines this by allowing inherent inflection to feed derivation. There is abundant literature showing that inherent inflection can feed derivation in Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages (Booij 1994, 1996, Chapman 1996, Rainer 1996, Cetnarowska 1999). The aim of this paper is to describe and compare derivational categories related to participle forms in Irish and Polish. These include among others agent nouns, adjectives of tendency/inclination, resultative passive adjectives and facilitative adjectives. Stump (2005: 52) points out that the terms present and past participle are, in fact, misnomers since participles are uninflected for tense, and they should be regarded as stems conveying aspect information plus the lexical information of the root. The existence of derivatives based on inflected forms is usually taken as evidence against the inflection-derivation dichotomy, and in favour of a tripartition into contextual inflection, inherent inflection and derivation. The paper addresses the theoretical ramifications of the existence of such derivatives for inferential-realisational approaches (Stump 2001), such as for example Beard’s (1995) Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology, which separates the operations on the grammatical (morpholexical and morphosyntactic) features and operations responsible for the morphophonological modification of the root/stem.

Quirky case in creoles: Or, creolization as a quirky case

This paper investigates the fact that quirky case is rare in creole languages. It is more common in languages in general than the literature, focusing on its manifestations in a few Germanic languages, suggests. It is found even in analytic languages, as well, and therefore, analyticity cannot be the reason quirky case is rare in creoles. In creoles, when quirky case does appear, it is either 1) as an inheritance from the lexifier when lexifier influence is heavy or 2) from the substrate only with inherent rather than contextual inflection. Both observations are predictable of languages born recently from pidgins, in which the absence of case makes quirky case, of course, impossible, and inherent inflection is much more common than contextual.

Inflectional morphology restructuring in ache - discussing grammatical change and language contact in tupí-guaraní subgroup - 1

This paper deals with mechanisms of grammatical change in Ache, focusing on inflection. Ache contains restricted functional morphology when compared to most Tupí-Guaraní languages. Although erosion of inflection is attested in linear historical developments within this genetic context; the degree of inflectional erosion observed in Ache is exceptional. Ache lacks all TG prefixes, consequently, processes linked to person-number agreement, such as person hierarchy effects, are unattested. Ache enclitics for tense-aspect-mood marking (TAM) appear to be more similar to other TG languages. However, given closer examination, also for TAM considerable restructuring is revealed. Besides describing erosion and retention patterns of inflection, it is exemplified how Ache copes with the overall functional restructuring by generating innovative syntactic patterns and novel lexical items. Inspired by subclasses of inflection given in Roberts and Bresnan (2008), it becomes evident that inherent inflection (i.e. TAM) is far more stable in Ache than so-called contextual inflection (i.e. person, case); a characteristic result of contact induced grammar change. Thus, this study of inflectional restructuring contributes strong evidence for the long-standing hypothesis that Ache is a TG contact language (Dietrich, 1990; Rodrigues, 2000; Rößler, 2008).

Gender Agreement: a psycholinguistic and aphasia case study.

Gender Agreement: a psycholinguistic and aphasia case study.

Post-inflectional derivation in Zulu: Further evidence against the split morphology hypothesis

This article adds to the evidence that the Split Morphology Hypothesis (SMH) (Anderson 1982; Scalise 1984; Perlmutter 1988) is incorrect. Scalise (1984) and Anderson (1992) claim that inflectional morphology must always be ‘peripheral with respect to derivation’. Booij (1994) challenges the SMH with evidence from a range of languages, and concludes that while this may hold for contextual inflection (e.g. agreement and case marking), it does not hold true for inherent inflection (e.g. noun number or verb tense). The isiZulu language contains some clear counter-examples to the SMH, namely quantifiers based on adjectives, presentatives and demonstratives. Each of these word-types is analysed to show that they contradict the SMH. Furthermore, they contradict Booij's prediction that the SMH is more likely to be violated when new words are derived from inherently inflected forms than from contextually inflected ones. The unsustainability of the SMH suggests that lexicalist and non-derivational models of grammar are likely to be correct.

Tying up loose ends

Since the introduction of the Creole Prototype hypothesis in 1998, much of the controversy it has occasioned has centered on a question as to whether it is scientifically appropriate to reconstruct creoles as born as pidgins, rather than as results of only moderately transformational second-language acquisition or as simply mixtures of ‘features’ from assorted languages coming together. This paper first outlines traits in creoles that reveal their origin in pidgins. Then, the paper refines the characterization of the Creole Prototype’s three features, regarding inflectional morphology, tone, and compositionality of derivation-root combinations. The inflectional component is refined to incorporate Booij’s (1993) distinction between contextual and inherent inflection and Kihm’s (2003) proposal that inflectional morphology can be either bound or free. The tonal stipulation is refined in view of traits of Mon-Khmer phonology that distinguish these languages from creoles despite their analyticity, and the grammatical uses of tone in some creoles such as Papiamentu and Principense. Finally, for the derivational component, an account is proposed for the noncompositionality of reduplicated forms that have been observed in many creoles. The conclusion is that there remains a synchronic characterization possible only in languages recently born from pidgins, and impossible of older (i.e. most) languages.

Creoles as interlanguages

The idea that processes of second language acquisition (SLA) are highly relevant for an account of creole genesis is far from new or original (see Plag (2008a) for some discussion and further references). However, it is still controversial which kinds of interlanguage processes are relevant, and how much of a given creole’s structures can be attributed to such processes. In my previous two Columns (Plag 2008a,b) I discussed a specific hypothesis about the relation of creolization and SLA that I labeled ’interlanguage hypothesis’. According to this hypothesis, creoles originate as conventionalized interlanguages of an early developmental stage. The interlanguage hypothesis is highly compatible with scenarios that claim that creolization is at least a two-generation process, which involves at least two successive stages of development. For example, Veenstra (2003) argues that during the first stage, adults acquire the superstrate language to variable degrees, with interlanguages of the Basic Variety type (Perdue 1993) chiefly among them. Traditionally, this stage has also been called the pidginization stage, characterized by rudimentary acquisition of the dominant language. This stage is followed by a second stage, following the so-called target-shift, in which the next generation of speakers acquires the new medium of interethnic communication (cf., e.g., Baker 1994), and no longer the superstrate language. At this stage, processes of SLA, first language acquisition and dialect levelling may all be going on at the same time. In my previous column, I took a closer look at inflectional morphology and a number of syntactic constructions to investigate whether the linguistic phenomena encountered in these areas lend themselves to an explanation in terms of SLA processes. Starting out with the assumptions of a psycholingistic theory of morphosyntactic development in SLA (Processability Theory, e.g. Pienemann 1998, 2005) I argued that both the loss of inflectional morphology and the preservation (if any) of primarily inherent inflection can be

Yearbook of Morphology 1999 (review)

Reviewed by: Yearbook of morphology 1999 ed. by Geert Booij, Jaap van Marle Edward J. Vajda Yearbook of morphology 1999. Ed. by Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001. Pp. 319. ISBN 079236631X. $157.50 (Hb). This Yearbook volume contains eleven articles, five on diachronic aspects of morphology, the rest dealing with miscellaneous topics. The data derives mainly from Romance, Germanic, and Slavic languages. Martin Haspelmath is guest editor for the section on diachronic morphology. The articles here focus mainly on the motivation behind morphological change, or on the notion of which formal elements in a word (stem vs. affix, phonological stem trait vs. inflection) actually convey semantic content. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy’s ‘Umlaut as signans and signatum: Synchronic and diachronic aspects’ (1–23) explores an instance where a phonological trait has come to express informational content. In ‘What sort of thing is a derivational affix? Diachronic evidence from Romanian and Spanish’ (25–52), Martin Maiden makes a similar argument for the function of derivational affixes, which, contrary to some claims (cf. Robert Beard, Lexeme morpheme base morphology, New York: SUNY Press, 1995), are shown not to be semantically vacuous. In ‘The development of “junk”: Irregularization strategies of have and say in the Germanic languages’ (53–74), Damaris NÜbling analyzes how these originally weak verbs became irregular across the various Germanic languages. Elisabetta Magni’s ‘Paradigm organization and lexical connections in the development of the Italian passato remoto’ (75–96) explores cognitive motivations for the development of irregular preterite forms. Elke Ronneberger-Sibold’s ‘On useful darkness: Loss and destruction of transparency by linguistic change, borrowing, and word creation’ (97–120) likewise deals with speaker awareness of phonological processes—a factor that manifests itself in speaker preference for specific types of word formation. The volume’s remaining six articles cover a range of topics, most dealing with cognitive processing. Marco Baroni’s ‘The representation of prefixed forms in the Italian lexicon’ (121–52) uses the distribution of intervocalic [s] and [z] allophones in Northern Italian dialects as evidence for whether speakers have come to regard certain historically prefixed stems as monomorphemic. In ‘On inherent inflection feeding derivation in Polish’ (153–83), Bożena Cetnarowska argues that in certain Polish word forms derivation must be able to follow as well as precede inflection. This raises interesting questions about the notion of lexical stem. In ‘The processing of interfixed German compounds’ (184–220), Wolfgang U. Dressler, Gary Libben, Jacqueline Stark, Christiane Pons, and Gonia Jarema explore the cognitive processing of compound words such as leben-s-lang ‘life-long’. Andrew Hippisley’s ‘Word formation rules in a default inheritance framework: A network morphology account of Russian personal nouns’ (221–61) provides an excellent encapsulation of network morphology, as well as a convincing account of how affix rivalry and exceptionality can be simultaneously accommodated in a theory of word form creation. Steven G. LaPointe’s ‘Stem selection and OT’ (263–97) gives an optimality theory account of stem and affix allomorphy, based on data from a variety of languages, including Korean and Cherokee. The book’s final article, Irit Meir’s ‘Verb classifiers as noun incorporation in Israeli sign language’ (299–319), argues that certain hand gestures bear striking similarities to the properties of certain types of noun incorporation. This excellent study is a welcome inclusion here for the new dimension it adds to understanding the essence of morphological structure shorn of the epiphenomenon of sound. All of these articles reflect the ‘cutting edge’ of morphological research, making this volume, like its predecessors in the same series, an important acquisition for any linguist or librarian serious about keeping pace with morphological theory. Edward J. Vajda Western Washington University Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America

Constraining Inherent Inflection: Number and Nominal Aspect

Since Booij (1994, 1996) it has become increasingly clear that inflectional morphology can take part in lexeme formation and compounding. Booij (1994) recognized the need for substantive constraints on the ways inflection can feed derivation, and restricted its derivational use to deictic categories, including Number. Pursuing this search for constraints, I propose that Number is a single morphological category covering two abstract functions (cf. Beard 1995), and that it can be inherent only when it expresses the more lexical of those functions, and thus means more than the grammatical feature would. This lexical Number expresses properties of the lexeme but stands halfway between the lexical core and the properly inflectional categories. It encodes mereological (part-whole) properties of the noun's interpretation, thus paralleling the role of Aspect in the verbal domain, and like Aspect it can be integrated to different degrees in the grammatical system of a language. In some languages, this type of information has a specific morphological expression (so-called collective affixes). In others, it appears only as non-canonical semantics (and sometimes form) for Number inflection. Inherent Number, both as a component of lexeme-formation and as fixed Number value on certain nouns, consists in the expression of Nominal Aspect through the morphology of Number. Morphology is not split, but its uses are. Inherent inflection, specifically Number, arises in certain languages as a by-product of the separation of (morphological) form and meaning. The article develops these views by presenting first a relatively detailed exemplification from several sources (section 1), followed by some critical reflections on the peculiarities of these constructions, to the effect that inherent Number must be qualitatively different from inflectional Number (section 2). Section 3 sets out in detail the hypothesis that inherent Number is the inflectional expression of Nominal Aspect, an

The morphological complexity of simplex nouns

This paper reports experimental results concerning the processing of morphologically simplex nouns. It appears that the way in which these nouns are processed is influenced not only by their own frequency of use, but also by two other frequency measures. First, the token frequency of the corresponding plural inflection plays a role. Second, the type count of the number of compounds and derived words in which a given simplex noun appears as a constituent also affects our experimental measures. We offer an explanation of these results in terms of the semantic differences between noun pluralization as inherent inflection on the one hand, and derivation and compounding on the other