Non-concatenative Morphology Research Articles

Floating mora affixation in Huozhou diminutive subtraction

This paper argues for an item-and-arrangement approach by demonstrating that the diminutive form in Huozhou Chinese results from the affixation of a floating mora. Diminutives in Huozhou Chinese are formed by deleting the final non-vocalic segment of a syllable, along with some subsegmental changes (e.g., [pʰɑŋ35] ‘plate’, [pʰaː35] ‘plate.DIM’). This paper provides a detailed description of these patterns and proposes that the underlying representation of the diminutive morpheme is a floating mora, with subtraction serving as a repair strategy for this floating mora affix. This paper makes two main contributions. First, it introduces new data on subtractive morphology. Second, it provides a formal analysis and further supports this proposal from a typological perspective, thereby supporting the item-and-arrangement approach to morphology. Overall, by combining a case study of Huozhou Chinese with a typological discussion, this analysis shows that nonconcatenative morphology can be interpreted as additive, leading to a more economical grammar and more restrictive predictions.

Semantic transparency and doublet formation: the case of Hebrew location nouns

This study examines the correlation between derivational paradigms and morphological variation and change. I will examine a case study of Hebrew location nouns formation. Semitic morphology relies highly on non-concatenative morphology, where words are formed in patterns. Some Hebrew location nouns that are formed in one pattern, receive an additional form in another pattern with no change of their meaning. In contrast, there are location nouns, which are also formed in the same pattern, but do not have morphological doublets. Previous studies accounted for this change and proposed phonological and semantic criteria that trigger it. However, such explanation only account for why the change occurs, but not for cases where there is no doublet formation. I argue that morphological change is highly motivated in cases where the forms that undergo a change are part of a derivational paradigm. Specifically, I will show that only location nouns that are derivationally related to a verbal counterpart, such that the semantic relation between them is highly transparent, can undergo such change and have doublets. In contrast, words that are not part of such a paradigm are less likely to undergo change. The study highlights the important role of semantic transparency and derivational paradigms in morphological variation and change, showing that properties of words are not the only criteria that are taken into consideration, but also their relations with other words within a derivational paradigm.

Nonconcatenative Morphology of MSA as Represented by Deverbal Verbs

The present paper considers how the derivation of deverbal verbs occurs in Arabic, a language with nonconcatenative morphology. As Arabic linguists have carefully investigated Arabic deverbal verbs, English literature lacks such investigations. Demonstrating how a word modifies meaning while explaining the intriguing nonconcatenative morphology of Arabic are reasons for considering deverbal verbs. To illustrate the hierarchical structure of Arabic deverbal verbs efficiently, autosegmental analysis was used. Arabic manuscripts and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) dictionaries, using the Alshamela search engine and the Almaany search engine, were consulted to create a list of deverbal verbs. The manuscripts were utilized to find the initial lists, while the dictionaries were used to filter the list to only include the current deverbal verbs. The author found MSA deverbal verbs are derived through nonconcatenative morphology. The meanings of deverbal verb particles were concluded to belong to an additional autosegmental tier that is distinct from the tier of the root meaning. Notice how the meaning of the deverbal verb تضرّب [taDar:aba] ‘hit oneself’ as an intransitive verb retains the root meaning of ضرب [Daraba] ‘hit’ and adds the deverbal meaning indicating the action happening to oneself. It had been expected that all the verb roots would interact with the deverbal verb templates; however, this was not the case. These morphological gaps were attributed to violations of MSA phonotactics or semantic oddities. Further investigation of the deverbal verbs, considering other languages with nonconcatenative morphology, while investigating the deverbal verb meanings from an Optimality Theory perspective, presents promising plans for future research.

The roots of consonant bias in semitic languages: a critical review of psycholinguistic studies of languages with non-concatenative morphology

The roots of consonant bias in semitic languages: a critical review of psycholinguistic studies of languages with non-concatenative morphology

Modality of possibility and necessity in Russian Sign Language

The article discusses manual and non-manual means used to express the modal meanings of possibility and necessity in Russian Sign Language (RSL). It is shown that due to the combination of manual signs, non-manual markers, and means of non-concatenative morphology (in particular, manner of movement), RSL is able to express subtle shades of modal semantics. RSL also clearly distinguishes between semantic domains of subject-oriented modality and epistemic modality: the first one is obligatorily expressed by manual signs while the second one is obligatorily marked by non-manuals. The article also discusses the origin of manual markers of possibility and necessity in RSL: some of them are native signs, in which the modal meaning is mainly expressed by the visual metaphor “from image to meaning”, typical for sign languages, while others are lexicalized borrowings from spoken Russian or have been derived from gestures used by hearing people. It is also shown that in the division of the sematic area of modality, RSL differs both from the surrounding spoken Russian language and a number of sign languages.

The noncausal/causal alternation in Muher (Ethiosemitic)

This paper is concerned with noncausal/causal verb pairs in Muher — a little-known South Ethiosemitic language of the so-called Gunnän Gurage sub-group in Ethiopia. Muher is a morphologically complex language, characterized by nonconcatenative verb morphology and the use of prefixes in combination with template changes to derive verbs. The study is based on a dataset of the Muher equivalents for the verb pairs in Haspelmath (1993). Muher uses several strategies to mark the noncausal/causal alternation, whereby directed pairs dominate. Within these pairs, a causal verb is more often derived than a noncausal verb. Non-directed pairs, i.e., equipollent, labile and suppletive verb pairs, are also attested, but are less frequent. Moreover, for five of the original items in the list, Muher has no pairs, i.e., one verb only occurs in the noncausal form while four verbs lack a noncausal counterpart. These four verbs, as well as most of the other verbs in the list with a human subject, make use of a morphosyntactic construction, the impersonal, to express an event in which the patientive object is foregrounded.

Word-formation and reduplication in standard Arabic: A new distributed morphology approach

AbstractThe current paper aims to capture the properties of reduplication within the distributed morphology model (Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994; Embick and Noyer 2007; Siddiqi 2009; Embick 2010). Taking Standard Arabic (SA) as a representative, the article shows that SA, like many other languages, has both full and partial reduplication. Full reduplication repeats entire stems while partial reduplication doubles part of it. Rather than the available two analyses, i.e. the readjustment approach (Raimy 2000; Frampton 2009) and the affixation approach (Haugen 2008, 2010, 2011; Haugen and Harley 2010), the current paper provides a novel approach to the phenomenon of reduplication in the world languages. It argues that root consonants and vowels should be decomposed into non-phonetic distinctive features that undergo late insertion at PF. These non-phonetic distinctive features are supplied with sound items at PF in the same fashion that the terminal nodes with morphosyntactic features are fed with vocabulary items. This approach serves three purposes. It accounts for speech errors, captures the non-concatenative morphology in Semitic languages, and allows the reduplicant form to copy all the distinctive features of the roots, yielding instances of full reduplication. Instances of partial reduplication can be generated by root-sensitive impoverishment rules which target and delete some of the features of the stem or the reduplicant form.

Theoretical approaches to grammatical tone

AbstractTone is distinct from other phonological phenomena both qualitatively and quantitatively (Hyman 2011), and has been instrumental in shaping phonological theory in many ways. However, the contributions to current linguistic theory of “grammatical tone’ (GT) – a type of non-concatenative morphology where a morpheme is expressed at least in part by tone and/or tone changes – have been less apparent. In this paper, we take stock of the types of GT patterns attested in the literature and the different theoretical treatments of GT that have been proposed to date. We show that GT is still to a large extent underexplored, and highlight the immense potential of the study of GT for improving our understanding of phonology and its outer limits. This paper serves as an introduction to the high-quality research articles collected in this special issue, which directly address how GT critically informs phonological theory and its current developments.

Implicit learning versus explicit instruction in morphophonological learning

This study uses an artificial grammar learning task to probe the learning of abstract morphophonological structure. Two sets of nonce words were created, one with plural forms using concatenative morphology (similar to English) and the other using non-concatenative morphology (similar to Arabic). Both sets had multiple phonologically conditioned allomorphs. Half of the participants were provided with instruction and feedback, and half were not. These results show that even minimal instruction and feedback leads to learning abstract morphological structure through the use of nonce words. While instruction and feedback at this level may not make non-concatenative morphology more straightforward to English speakers, their subconscious understanding of the morphophonological system is improved and leads to higher quality guesses on the derivations of the nonce words than on previous work with implicit learning of non-concatenative morphology alone (e.g., Drake, 2018). Feedback provides negative input for a second-language learner to narrow possibilities when following an otherwise abstract morphophonological pattern, particularly in a morphophonological system unlike that employed by their primary language.

Blend formation in Turkish Sign Language: Are we missing the big picture?

From the point of word formation, the phenomenon of lexical blending is a common productive process, entailing the notion of combination of lexemes in so many languages. In the vast majority of literature on blends, they preserve a linear formation of segments with a shortening of both lexemes. However, in sign languages where morphological categories are mainly encoded by non-concatenative morphology, signed blends can be created by the general mechanism of templatic structures, the combination of lexical bases into a non-linear sequence. Specifically, the main purposes in this study are (i) to provide a comprehensive definition of blending formation in signed modality, (ii) to determine whether there are any structural regularities in the formation of lexical blends in Turkish Sign Language (TÄ°D), and (iii) to classify TÄ°D blends according to well-defined criteria. The corpus data to be studied currently include 109 blending formations. Overall, the results demonstrate that TÄ°D data has familiar properties of blends (named complete blends here) in established spoken languages, as well as modality-specific types of root, simultaneous and initialized blends. We propose a modality-specific categorization, in which blend formation is not limited to linear organization and actual source words.

Morphological generalization of Hebrew verb classes

Abstract The present work investigated how morphological generalization, namely the way speakers extend their knowledge to novel complex words, is influenced by sources of variability in language and speaker properties. For this purpose, the study focused on a Semitic language (Hebrew), characterized by unique non-concatenative morphology, and native (L1) as well as non-native (L2) speakers. Two elicited production tasks tested what information sources speakers employ in verbal inflectional class generalization, i.e., in forming complex novel verbs. Phonological similarity was tested in Experiment 1 and argument structure in Experiment 2. The analysis focused on the two most common Hebrew inflectional classes, Paal and Piel, which also constituted the vast majority of responses in the two tasks. Unlike the commonly found outcomes in Romance inflectional class generalization, the results yielded, solely for Piel, a graded phonological similarity effect and a robust argument structure effect, i.e., more Piel responses in a direct object context than without. The L2 pattern partially differed from the L1: (i) argument structure effect for L2 speakers was weaker, and (ii) L2 speakers produced more Paal than Piel responses. The results are discussed within the framework of rule-based and input-based accounts.

The dependence of root extraction in a non-concatenated morphology on the word-specific orthographic context

• Root extractions depends on the orthographic context in which the root appears. • No root priming effect is observed under a fast priming + letter delay procedure. • Fast priming better reflects root extraction during reading than masked priming. In Hebrew, as in other Semitic languages, most words are formed in a non-concatenated way, with a root morpheme embedded in a word-pattern morpheme consisting of only vowels or vowels plus consonants. Previous research on visual word recognition in Hebrew has revealed a robust morphological root-priming effect, with word recognition facilitated by the prior sub-perceptual presentation of the root morpheme, along with a less stable and more fragile word-pattern priming effect, particularly in the nominal system. These findings support the theory that morphological principles govern lexical access, with the root morpheme as a main organizational unit of the mental lexicon. However, less research has been done to delineate the algorithm underlying decomposition. The current study explores the importance of the natural lexical orthographic context of a complex root + pattern word structure for root extraction, using on-line measures based on tracking eye-movements in sentence reading. A series of 4 experiments using a fast-priming paradigm demonstrated that detaching the root morpheme from its lexical orthographic structure hinders the root-priming effect. Presenting the root in a non-word or a pseudo-word, that is, a non-existent combination of a real root + a real pattern did not make any difference. These results suggest that mapping the orthographic root onto its morphological mental representation depends on the orthographic context in which its letters appear. This finding constrains the role of the root in visual word-recognition, highlighting the crucial conditions for extracting it in the natural setting of reading.

Mixed categories: The morphosyntax of noun modification by Irina Nikolaeva and Andrew Spencer

Reviewed by: Mixed categories: The morphosyntax of noun modification by Irina Nikolaeva and Andrew Spencer Antonio Fábregas Mixed categories: The morphosyntax of noun modification. By Irina Nikolaeva and Andrew Spencer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xi, 396. ISBN 9781108415514. $125 (Hb). A scientific theory is judged by its ability to provide a principled explanation of less straightforward facts that lie at the margins of the data normally discussed and captured by other theories. To the extent that those data naturally follow from the new proposal, a theory is successful in defining a new paradigm. Mixed categories, by Irina Nikolaeva and Andrew Spencer, is an excellent example of how to deliver a maximally explicit morphological theory in a way that complies with these scientific desiderata. As always, one can agree or disagree with some of the assumptions [End Page 951] made, but there is no doubt that this book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of grammatical categories and the relation between lexical and syntactic representations. In this respect, the title of the book might be a bit misleading in that it suggests that the book is devoted to a particular empirical phenomenon. That is not the case, even if the empirical phenomenon that names the book is discussed in depth and analyzed in a broad range of manifestations. This monograph goes far beyond the specific empirical domain that names it, as it defines in a maximally explicit way a full-fledged theory about the lexicon that addresses some of the foundational questions in morphology, from the divide between inflection and derivation to the integration of lexical information with syntactic structures. N&S present in this monograph an expansion of Spencer's generalized paradigm function morphology, an inferential word-and-paradigm theory that integrates Stump's (2016) paradigm function morphology with recursive function application in order to capture in a principled way both concatenative and nonconcatenative morphology. The theory itself challenges syntacticocentric approaches to word formation, such as Halle & Marantz 1993. But before I discuss N&S's contribution to these foundational issues, let us do justice to the phenomenon that the authors chose as title of the book by presenting their specific analysis. N&S follow Spencer 2013 in defining 'mixed categories' as 'lexical types that have not only some properties of the morphology, syntax, or semantics of one category, but also some properties of the morphology, syntax, or semantics of another category' (22). This categorial mixing is widely illustrated in the book, with examples that frequently have been obtained by the authors themselves, from a broad variety of languages. The Upper Sorbian possessive adjective bratowe in 1 (Corbett 1987) is a good example of a mixed category in the nominal domain (97). (1) The categorial mixing is visible in that the possessive adjective acts both as an adjective and as a noun. Externally, bratowe is an adjective in that it agrees in case and number with the head noun that it modifies (nominative plural). Internally, bratowe behaves as a noun that licenses the presence of a possessive determiner mojeho, which agrees with the nominal base bratr- in gender and number (masculine singular) and inflects for genitive case. For some syntactically inclined morphologists (such as myself), it has always been tempting to use these data to support a syntactic analysis of inflection and derivation. Roughly, the analysis would be to propose that the possessive adjective suffix -ow combines not with a morpheme 'brother', but with a syntactic phrase corresponding to 'my brother'. This dual projection analysis (discussed in detail by N&S in Ch. 4) would correspond roughly to 2. (2) N&S, however, show that this analysis cannot be right, specifically that the base of the possessive adjective cannot be a phrase (137). A coordinated base is, for instance, ungrammatical. (3) A dual projection analysis could try to argue that coordination is different from other phrases, but in any instance 3 shows that a phrasal analysis cannot be adopted without other (perhaps idiosyncratic) provisos. N&S then argue in detail that the solution for mixed categories is to be found in the lexicon, but in a very specific model of the lexicon...

The Form of Morphemes: MEG Evidence From Masked Priming of Two Hebrew Templates

Studies of lexical access have benefited from comparisons between languages like English, which shows concatenative morphology, and Semitic languages showing non-concatenative morphology of roots and patterns. Morphological decomposition in Semitic has previously been probed using masked priming, originally developed to investigate concatenative morphology. However, studies conducted on Semitic languages have often targeted Semitic-specific questions, such as whether the root and the verbal template prime lexical access. The overall consequence of these studies for our understanding of lexical access remains unclear. In two experiments on Hebrew using MEG, we demonstrate that a verbal form which is orthographically and phonologically indistinguishable from non-verbal forms is primed by other verbs in the same template but not by similar nouns and adjectives. These results suggest that masked priming taps into more than just visual forms but reflects morphological content, even if this content is abstract, showing no distinct orthographic or phonological marking.

Formal and semantic effects of morphological families on word recognition in Hebrew

ABSTRACTIn Hebrew, content words are usually composed of two interleaving morphemes; roots which carry semantic information, and word-patterns which mainly carry grammatical information. The family size effect in languages with non-concatenative morphology has been previously examined only with respect to the root. The present study reports a lexical-decision experiment with 260 Hebrew nouns representing a variety of nominal word-patterns and roots. We observed independent facilitatory effects of morphological family sizes of the roots and the nominal word-patterns. The family size effect of the nominal word-pattern was stronger for words with low frequency. The novelty of these findings is in showing in a within-stimuli design that both morphemes have a role in defining the complex family effect in a language with non-concatenated morphology, despite the massive differences in their linguistic characteristics. The data provide evidence in favour of the proposed multi-dimensional structure of the Hebrew lexicon.

Templatic morphology as an emergent property

Modern Hebrew exhibits a non-concatenative morphology of consonantal “roots” and melodic “templates” that is typical of Semitic languages. Even though this kind of non-concatenative morphology is well known, it is only partly understood. In particular, theories differ in what counts as a morpheme: the root, the template, both, or neither. Accordingly, theories differ as to what representations learners must posit and what processes generate the eventual surface forms. In this paper I present a theory of morphology and allomorphy that combines lexical roots with syntactic functional heads, improving on previous analyses of root-and-pattern morphology. Verbal templates are here argued to emerge from the combination of syntactic elements, constrained by the general phonology of the language, rather than from some inherent difference between Semitic morphology and that of other languages. This way of generating morphological structure fleshes out a theory of morphophonological alternations that are non-adjacent on the surface but are local underlyingly; with these tools it is possible to identify where lexical exceptionality shows its effects and how it is reined in by the grammar. The Semitic root is thus analogous to lexical roots in other languages, storing idiosyncratic phonological and semantic information but respecting the syntactic structure in which it is embedded.

Morphological length and prosodically defective morphemes by Eva Zimmermann

Reviewed by: Morphological length and prosodically defective morphemes by Eva Zimmermann Anthi Revithiadou Morphological length and prosodically defective morphemes. By Eva Zimmermann. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 350. ISBN 9780198747321. $99 (Hb). Eva Zimmermann offers an elegant and meticulous monograph on morphological length-manipulation (MLM) phenomena, that is, length alternations bound to morphological contexts. The work is based on the general claim that all nonconcatenative processes—additive and subtractive alike—arise from an ‘enriched notion of affix’ (1) that involves prosodic nodes as primitives. The main argumentation in the book aims at establishing that all morphology is additive, a claim that is empirically supported by an impressively broad typological survey that includes representative data sets for attested morphological length-manipulating patterns culled from sixty-two languages. Furthermore, the author argues that MLM operations are best analyzed in a theoretical framework named prosodically defective morphemes (PDM), which, in addition to morphemic prosodic nodes, includes a rather rich representational apparatus, a constraint-based computational component that regulates the integration of such prosodic nodes into larger structures, and a handful of conditions that impose restrictions on gen. PDM not only succeeds in predicting all attested patterns and systematically excluding imaginable yet unattested ones, but also circumvents several problems encountered by alternative accounts. More importantly, it makes some insightful predictions about, for instance, the possible interaction and coexistence of additive and subtractive operations within the same language. Z sets an ambitious goal: to show that ‘all kinds of subtractive MLM can be derived if one takes into account the full range of prosodic nodes and their possible (defective) integration into a base’ (34). This way she challenges the shared assumption that subtractive phenomena have a processual character and delivers a model that is consistent with an item-and-arrangement (Hockett 1954) morphology framework and the basic tenets of its more sophisticated version, namely distributed morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993). The core idea, defended throughout the book, is that nonconcatenative morphology (i.e. addition and subtraction) is epiphenomenal [End Page 475] and results from the affixation of morphemic prosodic nodes. In order to achieve this goal, Z develops an extended version of generalized nonlinear affixation (Bermúdez-Otero 2012), in which prosodic nodes (μ, σ, Φ) are treated as independent phonological objects related to each other via association lines and not by projection, as standardly assumed in the prosodic hierarchy (Nespor & Vogel 1986). A representative example of additive suffixation is presented in 1a. In Wolof, the reversive suffix /-i/ is lexically specified to trigger gemination (pp. 5–6). Under the PDM framework, gemination is caused by a floating morphemic mora that escorts /-i/ and, more specifically, by its integration into the structure through association to the final root consonant. Subtraction, attested with the causative suffix /-al/ (1b) in the same language (p. 8), is taken to be the surface result of the integration of an underlyingly mora-less vowel. That is, the vowel of the suffix /-al/, which lacks its own mora, takes over the mora of the preceding moraic consonant, yielding the surface effect of degemination. (1) Based on Prince and Smolensky’s (1993) notion of containment (‘every element of the input must be contained in the output’) and following previous work on the topic (e.g. van Oostendorp 2006, Revithiadou 2007), Z develops a comprehensive theory that consists of three key components: colored phonological objects, association relations, and the constraints that regulate their mapping. First, she argues that all phonological objects that are part of the underlying representation of a morpheme share the same information about morphological affiliation: that is, they have the same color (indicated as a subscribed symbol, e.g. V○, C●, μ□, etc.). A phonological object’s morphological color cannot be deleted or changed, although it can be enriched (as explained below in the discussion of color reflection and fusion). Second, remaining faithful to an extended version of containment that requires the whole input (e.g. segments, features, prosodic nodes, and their association relations) to be reconstructable from the output at any time, Z identifies four different types of association relations between phonological objects. Morphological association lines (2a) are underlyingly present and can never be erased; they may...

Morpho-Lexicon for standard Moroccan Amazigh

Standardized resources are key components for the development of applications related to human language technology. Therefore, it is important to adopt it for designing lexical resources, especially for less commonly resourced languages such Amazigh. This language is spoken by many North African communities, including Morocco. Due to historical, geographical and sociolinguistic factors, the Amazigh language is characterized by the proliferation of many intervarieties, which has led to a complex morphology. This latter poses significant challenge to NLP tasks, especially that Amazigh language belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language (Hamito-Semitic) family, known by its non-concatenative morphology based on root and pattern. Face to the scarcity of Amazigh language resources dealing with morphemes encoding, orthographic changes, and morphotactic variations, the elaboration of a standardized lexical resource will certainly ensure a large exchange and exploitation. In this context, this paper describes ongoing work for elaborating a morphological lexicon, based on inflected forms, for the standard Moroccan Amazigh language.

Computational locality in morphological maps

This paper presents a computational investigation of a range of morphological operations. These operations are first represented as morphological maps, or functions that take a stem as input and return an output with the operation applied (e.g., the ing-suffixation map takes the input ‘dɹɪŋk’ and returns ‘dɹɪŋk+ɪŋ’). Given such representations, each operation can be classified in terms of the computational complexity needed to map a given input to its correct output. The set of operations analyzed includes various types of affixation, reduplication, and non-concatenative morphology. The results indicate that many of these operations require less than the power of regular relations (i.e., they are subregular functions), the exception being total reduplication. A comparison of the maps that fall into different complexity classes raises important questions for our overall understanding of the computational nature of phonology, morphology, and the morpho-phonological interface.

Arabic word processing and morphology induction through adaptive memory self-organisation strategies

Aim of the present study is to model the human mental lexicon, by focussing on storage and processing dynamics, as lexical organisation relies on the process of input recoding and adaptive strategies for long-term memory organisation. A fundamental issue in word processing is represented by the emergence of the morphological organisation level in the lexicon, based on paradigmatic relations between fully-stored word forms. Morphology induction can be defined as the task of perceiving and identifying morphological formatives within morphologically complex word forms, as a function of the dynamic interaction between lexical representations and distribution and degrees of regularity in lexical data.In the computational framework we propose here (TSOMs), based on Self-Organising Maps with Hebbian connections defined over a temporal layer, the identification/perception of surface morphological relations involves the alignment of recoded representations of morphologically-related input words. Facing a non-concatenative morphology such as the Arabic inflectional system prompts a reappraisal of morphology induction through adaptive organisation strategies, which affect both lexical representations and long-term storage.We will show how a strongly adaptive self-organisation during training is conducive to emergent relations between word forms, which are concurrently, redundantly and competitively stored in human mental lexicon, and to generalising knowledge of stored words to unknown forms.