Morphology: From Data to Theories 9780748656264

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Morphology

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Edinburgh Advanced Textbooks in Linguistics Series Editors Peter Ackema, Reader in Linguistics (University of Edinburgh) Mitsuhiko Ota, Reader in the Phonetics and Phonology of Language Acquisition (University of Edinburgh) Editorial Advisory Board Ricardo Bermudez-Otero (University of Manchester) Kersti Börjars (University of Manchester) Greville Corbett (University of Surrey) Anastasia Giannakidou (University of Chicago) Caroline Heycock (University of Edinburgh) Jack Hoeksema (University of Groningen) Miriam Meyerhoff (University of Edinburgh) Geoffrey Pullum (University of Edinburgh) Andrew Spencer (University of Essex) Donca Steriade (MIT) Susi Wurmbrand (University of Connecticut)

TITLES IN THE SERIES INCLUDE Essential Programming for Linguistics Martin Weisser Visit the Edinburgh Advanced Textbooks in Linguistics website at www.euppublishing.com/series/EATL

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Morphology From Data to Theories Antonio Fábregas and Sergio Scalise

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A Paloma Varela, maestra y amiga

© Antonio Fábregas and Sergio Scalise, 2012 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10/12 Minion by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4314 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 4313 4 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 5628 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 5626 4 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 5627 1 (Amazon ebook) The right of Antonio Fábregas and Sergio Scalise to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations Foreword

ix xi

1

Morphology: Definitions and Basic Concepts 1.1 What Is Morphology? 1.1.1 Its Object of Study 1.1.2 Morphology’s Place in Grammar 1.1.3 Differences between the Lexicon and Morphology 1.2 Classes of Morphemes 1.2.1 Classes of Affixes 1.3 Subdivisions of Morphology 1.3.1 Inflection 1.3.2 Word Formation: Derivation and Compounding 1.4 The Spell-Out of Morphemes 1.4.1 Allomorphy 1.5 Productivity Exercises Further Reading

1 1 1 4 5 8 10 12 13 13 14 15 18 20 21

2

Morphological Units 2.1 Morphemes 2.2 Words 2.3 The Debate on the Existence of Morphemes 2.3.1 Replacive and Substractive Morphology 2.3.2 Mismatches between Grammatical Features and their Exponents 2.3.3 Cranberry Morphemes 2.3.4 Priscianic Word Formation 2.3.5 Paradigmatic Motivation of Meaning 2.4 Other Units 2.4.1 Roots and Stems 2.4.2 Constructions 2.4.3 Templates

22 22 25 29 31

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contents 2.5 Correlations between Morphemes and Morphs and Morphological Typology Exercises Further Reading

40 42 43

3

Morphological Structures 3.1 The Motivation for Morphological Structures 3.1.1 Evidence in Favour of Word-Internal Structure 3.2 The Properties of Morphological Structures 3.2.1 The Concept of Head 3.2.2 The Position of the Head 3.2.3 Binary Branching 3.3 Arguments against Morphological Structures 3.3.1 A-Morphous Morphology 3.3.2 Exocentricity 3.3.3 Bracketing Paradoxes 3.3.4 Double Base 3.3.5 Parasynthesis Exercises Further Reading

44 44 46 49 49 52 53 54 54 57 60 62 62 63 64

4

Inflectional Processes 4.1 Properties of Inflection 4.2 Inflection and Grammatical Categories 4.2.1 A Comparison of Five Languages 4.2.2 Non-Inflected Categories: Prepositions, Conjunctions and Adverbs 4.3 Desinences and Theme Vowels in Grammar 4.3.1 The Status of Gender and the Notion of Desinence 4.3.2 Theme Vowels 4.4 Paradigms 4.4.1 Syncretism 4.4.2 Defectiveness 4.4.3 Suppletion 4.4.4 Patterns of Irregularity Exercises Further Reading

66 66 69 69

Derivational Processes 5.1 Properties of Derivation 5.2 Category Changes 5.2.1 Nominalizations 5.2.2 Verbalizations 5.2.3 Adjectivalizations 5.3 Semantic Changes

86 86 89 90 92 93 95

5

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contents 5.4 Category Change without Formal Marking: Conversion 5.5 Argument Structure Changes 5.5.1 Lexical Alternations 5.6 Questions Raised by the Analysis of Derivational Processes in a Single Language 5.7 The Boundaries between Inflection and Derivation 5.7.1 Appreciative Morphology 5.7.2 Hybrid Categories Exercises Further Reading 6

7

Compounding and Other Word-Formation Processes 6.1 Properties of Compounds 6.2 Basic Classes of Compounds 6.2.1 Classes According to the Relation Established between the Two Elements 6.2.2 Synthetic Compounds 6.2.3 Parasynthetic Compounds 6.2.4 Co-Compounds 6.3 Compounding between Syntax and Morphology 6.3.1 Some Differences between Compounds and Phrases 6.3.2 Intermediate Cases 6.4 Compounds and Grammatical Categories: Japanese and English 6.5 Other Word-Formation Processes 6.5.1 Clipping 6.5.2 Reduplication 6.5.3 Acronymy 6.5.4 Blending Exercises Further Reading Morphology’s Relation to Syntax 7.1 The Place of Morphology in Grammar: Lexicalism and Constructionism 7.1.1 Lexicalist Theories 7.1.2 Constructionism 7.2 The Generalized Lexicalist Hypothesis: Empirical Data 7.2.1 Syntactic Material inside Words: The No Phrase Constraint 7.2.2 Non-Morphological Processes and the Internal Structure of Words 7.2.3 Absence of Movement and the Theory of Syntactic Domains 7.2.4 Absence of Coreference to Word-Internal Constituents 7.3 The Relation between Syntax and Morphology in Diachrony: Morphologization

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vii 98 100 101 102 104 105 106 108 109 111 111 113 114 117 118 119 120 120 121 124 127 127 128 129 130 130 131 133 133 133 137 142 143 144 145 147 148

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8

contents Exercises Further Reading

150 151

Morphology’s Relation to Phonology and Semantics 8.1 Restrictions Imposed by Phonology on Morphology 8.2 The Phonological Materialization of Morphemes 8.2.1 Morphology and Phonology Feed Each Other: Lexical Strata 8.2.2 Morphology Is Independent from Phonology: The Separation Hypothesis 8.2.3 Morphology Precedes Phonology: The Late Insertion Hypothesis 8.2.4 Post-Syntactic Morphological Operations in Distributed Morphology 8.3 Accounting for Allomorphs: Localism and Globalism 8.4 The Linearization of Morphological Structure: Morpheme Order 8.4.1 Syntactic Accounts 8.4.2 Semantic Accounts 8.4.3 Purely Morphological Accounts 8.4.4 Phonological Accounts 8.4.5 Parsing-Based Accounts 8.5 The Meaning of Words and Affixes 8.5.1 The Meaning of Units Is Decomposable 8.5.2 Semantic Atomicity 8.5.3 Do Affixes Have a Meaning of their Own? 8.6 Compositionality and Semantic Unpredictability 8.6.1 The Unpredictability of Meaning 8.6.2 Dividing Structures and Concepts: Two Types of Meaning 8.6.3 How to Represent Demotivation Exercises Further Reading

152 152 155

Answers to the Exercises References Index

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155 159 161 163 165 167 168 171 171 172 173 173 174 175 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 185 190 206

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ABBREVIATIONS

1st 2nd 3rd A AdvP agr. AOG appl. Asp AspP aug. caus. CM des. DetP dim. DM En. fem. FP Fr. fut. Ge. gen. IA inch. inf. IP It. LE LF lit. masc. N

first person second person third person adjective adverbial phrase agreement Affix Ordering Generalization applicative aspect aspect phrase augmentative causative Construction Morphology desinence determiner phrase diminutive Distributed Morphology English feminine functional projection French future tense German genitive Item-and-Arrangement inchoative infinitive Item-and-Process Italian linking element Logical Form literally masculine noun ix

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x neg. neu. No. nom. nP NP P PART partc. pejo. PF pl. PP pref. RHHR sg. Sp. suff. sup. T ThV TP V ver. vP VP WP

list of abbreviations negation neuter Norwegian (Bokmål) nominalizer functional noun projection noun phrase preposition particle participle pejorative Phonological Form plural prepositional phrase prefix Right-Hand Head Rule singular Spanish suffix superlative tense theme vowel tense phrase verb verbalizer functional verb projection verb phrase Word-and-Paradigm

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FOREWORD

These are exciting times for linguistics, which means that these are particularly exciting times for morphology. In the last 20 years, new frameworks have appeared, old frameworks have been adapted to new times and old and new data have been integrated in standard descriptions. Morphology lies at the centre of discussions about the nature of language, its organization and internal functioning. This is so for two main reasons. The first one is that morphology –the study of words and their internal structure– directly interacts with all the components of grammar: syntax, phonology and semantics. This makes the study of morphology a privileged location to explore the relation between these components, their relative weight, their ordering, etc. The second reason is that one fundamental question in the study of language is how the memorized items that belong to the component we call ‘lexicon’ are combined to build specific utterances. Morphology is at the heart of this relation. It explores the aspects of the grammar of a word which derive from the information stored in the lexicon; it also tries to determine which aspects of the grammar of words can be explained by general rules (or tendencies, or principles) derived from the way these items are related to each other. This book is targeted to advanced students of linguistics. It presupposes some basic knowledge of general linguistics and, therefore, some familiarity with fundamental morphological notions that are part of the standard linguistic tradition. The first chapter aims at illustrating these basic notions, and then the rest of the textbook moves onto the problems associated with these notions and the way in which they have been interpreted in the last couple of decades. These problems are ordered by the increasing complexity of the notions that they presuppose. We start with problems related to units (words, affixes, roots, constructions; chapter 2), then we continue with problems related to structures (especially whether they exist or not; chapter 3). Then we consider processes, divided, as it is standardly, into inflection (chapter 4), derivation (chapter 5) and compounding (chapter 6). Finally, we consider the interaction of morphology with the three main components of grammar: syntax (chapter 7), phonology and semantics (chapter 8). There are of course aspects of morphology that, due to space restrictions, we have not been able to cover here. Just to name a few: the acquisition of morphology, lexicology and lexicography, computational treatment of morphological corpora, etc. . . However, we are confident that the topics covered in this textbook are all those necessary for any morphological analysis of any kind, even when it is done in the areas that we could not cover. xi

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foreword

Each chapter contains some questions and problems at the end. The goal of these exercises is to get students started on the exciting task of doing their own research in morphology in whatever language they decide to concentrate on. As the reader will see, most of the exercises are open and allow the student to choose the language where the data will be taken from, replicating with different sets of data the analyses that have been illustrated in these chapters. This is due to the advanced nature of this textbook: detailed research in morphology requires deep knowledge about the properties of a language, not only its morphology, but also fine-grained aspects of the meaning of words, the contexts where they can be used, the way in which they are actually pronounced (as opposed to how they are written), their syntax and even their historical evolution. We believe that at an advanced level, and for a textbook which does not target students of any one language, this is the right format for the exercises. Even the most complex linguistic research starts with a collection of data organized in a particular way; students are encouraged to take these problems as a way of getting their own original research started. Each chapter includes a further reading list. It has of course not been possible to cover all relevant references in any of the topics; the literature in morphology – luckily for the scientific strength of the field – is vast. The reader must not interpret the absence of a particular work from our reading list as any judgement on the quality of that work. By necessity, we had to make some choices. We have decided to concentrate on more recent publications, where readers will find many years of research summarized and at the same time will be able to perceive how known data have been analysed in new theories. Of course, we have also included some classic references which gave influential formulations of the problems discussed. As individual researchers, we both have our ideas and our opinions –usually, different opinions– about the problems that we are covering. However, we have tried –to the extent that this is humanly possible– to forget our own opinions when writing this textbook. To the best of our capacity, we have tried to give the three main theories covered in this book (Lexicalism, Constructionism and Construction Morphology) the same treatment. Whether we have succeeded or not, we leave for the reader to judge. This textbook is different from most currently available ones for several reasons. It is an advanced textbook which aims to present phenomena from the view of different recent theories which are, in general, not covered in other publications (Construction Morphology and Distributed Morphology). It presents a variety of phenomena which are discussed in relation to a variety of aspects and languages, and it covers a wide set of problems not only directly relevant to morphology, but also to theoretical views that deal with the so-called architecture of grammar. We would finally like to thank Peter Ackema and Mits Ota for comments on a previous manuscript. Tromsø / Bologna, June 2011

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1 MORPHOLOGY: DEFINITIONS AND BASIC CONCEPTS

1.1 WHAT IS MORPHOLOGY? In this first section of the book we will illustrate some basic notions in morphology. What does morphology study? What are the goals of morphological analysis? What is its place within the general theory of grammar? 1.1.1 ITS OBJECT OF STUDY Morphology is the part of linguistics that studies the grammatical properties of words and how words are related to each other in a language. Indeed, the central task of morphology is to study how words such as the pair in (1) are related to each other. (1) a. deep b. deepen (1b) is intuitively more complex than (1a). On the formal side, it contains an additional segment (-en), and on the semantic side, it has a more complex meaning that presupposes the meaning of (1a): ‘become deep’ or ‘cause something to become deep’. In this case a morphological analysis would tell us that the word in (1b) is the result of applying some operation to the word in (1a). Thus, (1a) is the base from which the word in (1b) has been built. The word in (1a) is simple; the word in (1b) is complex. In general, part of the phonology and meaning and some of the grammatical properties of a complex word are expected to be explained by the characteristics of its base. A complex word like the one in (1b) can be decomposed into two different units: deep and -en. These units are morphemes, which are traditionally defined as the smallest meaningful elements that are combined in order to build words. In clear cases, like the example in (1b), morphemes are pairs of form and meaning. Deep is a morpheme that denotes a property having to do with a physical dimension; -en is a morpheme that forms verbs and is associated with the meaning ‘(cause to) become X’, where X is the property expressed by the other morpheme. The units that have been identified in morphological analysis, and that have been claimed to be useful to relate words to each other, are analyzed in Chapter 2 of this book. When deep and -en are put together in the word (1b), we obtain the meaning ‘to (cause to) become deep’. In traditional terms, morphology analyzes the way in which 1

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morphemes (and other units that might prove relevant for relating words to each other) combine with each other to form words. This implies both explaining how the combination is performed and what combinations of morphemes are possible or impossible in a language. In our example, this would involve answering at least these questions: a) What kind of morpheme is -en, and what kind of morpheme is deep? b) What grammatical properties does -en add to the word? In what way are words containing -en different from those containing, say, -ize? c) What are the properties of the morphemes that -en can combine with, and what are the properties of the morphemes that deep can combine with? With respect to the question in (a) – and although it is a controversial issue – traditionally -en and all those morphemes that can never occur alone have been classified as bound morphemes or affixes. A morpheme like deep, which in a language like English can form a word alone, is a free morpheme or root. With respect to the question in (b), an analysis of the data would probably conclude that – at the very least – the affix -en is responsible for the fact that (1b) is a verb, and not an adjective as the word in (1a). The analysis will also involve explaining that verbs built with the morpheme -ize generally have the meaning ‘to cause something to become X’ (standardize = ‘to cause something to become standard’), not just ‘to become X’. The question in (c) focuses on facts like this: why is the word in (1b) well formed in English, but not the word in (2)? We would probably answer that this affix combines with bases that are adjectives, not nouns like dog. (2) *dog-en Although the way in which words are related to each other is the central question in morphology, there are other related aspects having to do with the grammar of words which are also part of morphological research. Morphology – at least in its traditional sense – also tries to answer the question of how the units that we have called morphemes are organized inside the word. Let’s take a word like the one in (3), where we see two morphemes which have already been isolated. One of these morphemes – the last one – is the head of the word. Why? Well, the morpheme -er is responsible for most of the grammatical properties of the whole word. It determines that the word is a noun (not a verb, as sing would be), and also that it denotes a human being that performs a particular action (an ‘agent’). Aspects having to do with word-internal structures are studied in Chapter 3. (3) sing-er Morphology also studies how a single word can change its grammatical properties when put inside a whole syntactic construction. For instance, all the forms in (4) are forms of the same verb (to live), but each one of them is used in a different kind of

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syntactic structure, depending on the tense and aspect of the sentence and the person and number of its subject. These formal changes that words experience depending on their role inside sentences and other bigger syntactic constructions are considered ‘inflectional processes’, and are studied in Chapter 4. (4) a. b. c. d.

live lives lived living

Because morphology studies the relations between words, it is also its object of study to determine what procedures a given language has to build new words from existing forms. For instance, given the form in (5), a study of English morphology can tell us that there are several ways of forming new words from it, adding affixes or combining it with other roots (6a, 6b). Some of these morphological procedures are able to create a large number of new forms whose meaning and form are predictable and do not need to be learnt by heart by speakers. Such processes are said to be productive. Other processes, such as the one in (6c), are non-productive and produce forms which, in one sense or another, have special properties in their form, meaning or both, so they need to be learnt by heart. Word formation is studied in more depth in Chapters 5 and 6 of this book. (5) alcohol (6) a. alcohol-ic b. alcohol abuse c. workaholic The object of study of morphology – the word – is a kind of unit that interacts with all the other components of the grammar. It interacts with syntax because in order to form phrases and sentences, we must combine words. It also interacts with phonology, because words are pronounced. Finally, it interacts with semantics, because words come associated with some meaning and the way in which speakers use words is generally determined by this. Therefore, the study of morphology is also the study of how words interact with these three components. With respect to syntax, one immediate question is why it is possible to substitute the noun trucks for what and question it in (7a),but not in (7b), where it is a part of the complex word truck driver. In the first case, it is possible to ask about the kind of object that someone drives; in the second case, the same kind of question is impossible. The relationship between morphology and syntax is explored in Chapter 7 of this book. (7) a. John drives [trucks] → What does John drive _____? b. Mary likes a [truck] driver → *What does Mary like a ____ driver? With respect to the relation between phonology and morphology, one of the main issues is how a morpheme gets its phonological shape inside a word and how some

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phonological conditions are required by particular morphemes; for instance, why the morpheme -ity changes the final consonant of the base in (8a) and why the morpheme -ness does not. (8) a. atomi[k] > atomi[s]-ity b. apostoli[k] > apostoli[k]-ness With respect to semantics, morphology studies the way in which the meaning of a morpheme is preserved or not inside a word: why black in blackness can only refer to that particular colour (9a), but the same morpheme in blackboard (9b) does not, as blackboards can be green. Morphology’s relation to phonology and semantics is studied in Chapter 8. (9) a. black-ness b. black-board 1.1.2 MORPHOLOGY’S PLACE IN GRAMMAR Grammar is conceived as a computational system that combines units and associates those structures with sounds (or other physical signals, like hand signs) and with meanings. This gives us the three basic components of lingustic analysis (10): (10) a. a computational system that combines simple units into bigger units (syntax), b. a system that relates those units to physical signals (phonology), and c. a system that relates those units to meanings (semantics). So where is morphology in this system? Different solutions have been proposed. The first one suggests that morphology is part of the computational system, that is, that morphology is part of syntax. The reasoning is that if the computational system is a combinatorial module where units are merged, then it should give an account of both syntax, which combines words, and morphology, which combines morphemes; there are no substantial differences between the two components, so words are actually built in syntax. This position is known as Constructionism; Distributed Morphology (DM) is the main Constructionist theory nowadays. Another answer suggests enriching the scheme in (10) and having two different  components that produce new forms. The first one would take care of the  combinations of words (syntax), and the second one would be responsible for the combinations of morphemes. This second position, where syntax and morphology are distinct components of grammar, has been characterized as Lexicalism (11): (11) a. a computational system that combines morphemes to form words (morphology), b. a computational system that combines words to form phrases (syntax),

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c. a system that relates words and phrases to physical signals (phonology), and d. a system that relates words and phrases to meanings (semantics). The computational system of the standard model of language has been split into two constituents: morphology, which is used to construct words, and syntax, which is used to combine words into phrases. As Williams (2007) notes, there are no theoretical arguments in favour of Lexicalism. A theory such as the one represented in (10), where there is only one generative component, the computational system, that takes care of the combination of any kind of unit, is generally considered simpler than a theory that proposes two, or more, generative components. Note that, however, it might be the case that a system is simpler in the number of components it assumes, but those components are, internally, more complex. The difficulty of measuring complexity has caused the debate to concentrate mainly on empirical issues. Williams notes that the reasons for proposing a division of labour between morphology and syntax have not been theoretical, but empirical. Different phenomena, which were identified mainly during the 1970s, led many linguists to the belief that the principles that operate in syntax are not identical to the principles that operate in morphology. However theoretically desirable, fields in science cannot be unified if this involves ignoring data that argue for crucial differences between these fields. A more detailed comparison of the two approaches presented here, and the empirical arguments that have motivated a division of labour between morphology and syntax, are presented in Chapter 7. 1.1.3 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE LEXICON AND MORPHOLOGY The use that part of the Lexicalist literature makes of the term ‘lexicon’ could cause some misunderstandings, to the extent that it may lead to the belief that morphology and the lexicon are the same. However, it is useful to separate the two concepts, which we will do in this section. Morphology is the set of operations that manipulate morphological units in order to form new words or adapt the form of words to specific syntactic contexts. The term refers, thus, to a component of the grammar which has the power to generate wellformed objects of a certain kind. The lexicon, in contrast, is a list of units which is stored somewhere in the mind of the speaker; these are the units combined in syntax (and/or morphology). The lexicon, in a strict sense, does not have generative power and does not create new objects. Its role is to store the units that morphology and syntax can manipulate in their operations; the list of units that the lexicon contains can be expanded – for example, when we learn a new morphologically simple word – but the lexicon itself does not have generative power. All theories of language must assume a lexicon of the kind described above. However, as we have seen, not all theories of language assume that morphology exists as an independent component of grammar; Lexicalism does, but Constructionism does not.

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The use of the term ‘lexicon’ to mean a mental storage room has a very long tradition in linguistic studies, and is associated with the idea that there is a part of the grammar of any language which is purely arbitrary and just must be learnt by speakers acquiring or learning a particular language (Jespersen 1933). The lexicon, in the strict sense, is the list which contains this arbitrary information: for instance, the underivable fact that the animal that barks is called kalb in Arabic, cane in Italian and Hund in German. Part of the Lexicalist tradition stretches this original meaning of the term ‘lexicon’ and uses it, in practice, to refer both to the list of units that morphology manipulates and to the set of operations which are used to manipulate these units. This more general use of the term is explained by the Lexicalist tenet that the idiosyncratic properties of a particular unit as it is stored in the lexicon are crucial to determining what kinds of forms it can generate. For example, part of the idiosyncratic information associated in the lexicon with the unit grow is that, when it is used to form a noun, it combines with -th and not with -ion, which means that morphology will not be able to put together a word such as *growion. Morphology and the lexicon are tightly related in cases such as these, as they are both needed to explain why some words are possible or impossible in a given language. There are linguistic theories that have a lexicon and no morphology. We have already mentioned that DM proposes that words are put together by syntax so that there is no distinct morphological component, but this theory has a lexicon where grammatical, phonological and semantic information is stored and accessed at different points in the grammar. An extremely syntactic theory where all properties of words are accounted for by syntactic rules still needs to say that there is a list of stored units which syntax combines and that can be used to construct syntactic phrases. Notice that it would also be possible to imagine a system where the lexicon is very powerful and plays the role that syntax plays in other theories. This is the approach taken in Construction Morphology (CM; Booij 2010), based on the theory of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995). In this theory it is proposed that the lexicon stores constructions, which are discussed in §2.4.2. Constructions are complex units associated with an unpredictable meaning, which can be combined with each other through different operations. The combinations of units that other theories explain as the output of a computational system are in this theory preassembled units which are stored directly in the lexicon. Despite the fact that we will mainly compare different Lexicalist theories to Constructionist ones, in this book we will bring up CM in several contexts. Evidence for the interaction between lexicon and morphology: Blocking Evidence that the lexicon and morphology are different components comes from the concept of morphological blocking (Aronoff 1976). It has been observed that, when speakers have an idiosyncratic form of a particular word in their mental lexicon, morphology is prevented from putting together morphemes to express exactly the same meaning that the idiosyncratic form expresses. Consider, for example, the irregular plural women in English. This form needs

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to be listed in the lexicon, because it is associated with unpredictable information that needs to be learnt by heart by the speaker of the language. Once the speaker has this form in her mental lexicon, there is no need to use a morphological rule to combine other units to generate *womans, a form which would be semantically and syntactically identical to the word which is already stored. There is no reason to activate a relatively costly mental operation that generates something when you already have an equivalent unit stored which you can just use. To put it simply, if the keyboard of your computer already has a key that writes the sign å, you wouldn’t bother to press three or more keys to get the same sign through the combination of smaller signs. This phenomenon is called blocking: the stored form women blocks the generation of a semantically and grammatically identical form *womans. Of course, some speakers may be able to say womans and one may even find this word in some contexts. This may be due to two reasons. The first is that maybe some speakers do not have women stored in their lexicon, that is, some speakers have not learnt the form already, for example because they are children acquiring the language or because they belong to a community where that particular aspect of standard English is not used. Then blocking does not play a role, because the idiosyncratic form is not listed. The second reason could be that the speaker makes a semantic distinction between women and womans. Blocking only acts when the two forms, the one stored in the list and the one generated by morphology, give identical results; if the results are different, of course, there is a reason to generate a new form and, therefore, no blocking effect is triggered. Notice that this is exactly what justifies the existence of two plural forms for brother, namely brethren and brothers, each one with different meanings (the first specialized for the members of a religious community). Blocking phenomena show that the lexicon and morphology must be distinct components. For blocking to act, it is required that the words that morphology generates be checked against the list of stored units to confirm that there was no semantically identical form already. This presupposes a two-way relation between morphology and the lexicon: the lexicon feeds units to morphology, but it can also read the output of a morphological process and block it if it contains an equivalent form. Existent and potential words The concept of morphology and the lexicon as two related, but different, components has given rise to one crucial distinction in the study of words. The lexicon stores many different kinds of units, among them words such as women, that have unpredictable information which needs to be learnt. The words which are stored as independent units in the lexicon must be existent words of the language, words which actually are in the mental dictionary of the speaker and have the power to block other formations. In contrast with this, morphology does not store units; morphology is composed of rules that allow the speaker to create new words with a meaning and a form which can be predicted from her knowledge of the rules themselves. Morphology gives an account of the – in principle – infinite set of potential words that can be

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generated in a particular language, just as syntax gives an account of the potentially infinite set of possible sentences of a language. 1.2 CLASSES OF MORPHEMES It is customary to make a distinction between at least two kinds of morphemes, depending on their phonological independence, semantic contribution and positional freedom. Consider a noun like the one in (12). (12) holi-ness As shown in (12), this word is segmented into two morphemes. There are at least three grammatical differences between the morphemes. The first one is their phonological independence. The morpheme holi- (spelled out as holy) can appear alone as an independent phonological unit, but the morpheme -ness cannot occur alone and needs to combine with another morpheme in order to be pronounced. The second one has to do with the position they can occupy. The morpheme holi- can appear, as in (12), on the left edge of the word, but also on the right edge, as in un-holy. However, the morpheme -ness does not have the same positional freedom, as it is always the rightmost element when combined with another morpheme. Finally, if we concentrate on their meaning, an immediate difference is that holi- has a fully fledged semantics, in this case denoting a property of people and objects, while the morpheme -ness has an abstract meaning that is not independent, but depends on the meaning of another morpheme (in this case, -ness would mean something like ‘quality associated with things which are X’, where X would be the morpheme it combines with). Morphemes that have the properties of holy are known as roots, while morphemes that have the properties of -ness are known as affixes. We can, then, define roots and affixes as in (13) and (14). (13) Roots a. do not have a fixed position inside the word, b. may be able to occur alone as words, and c. have a specific meaning (14) Affixes a. have a fixed position inside the word, b. cannot occur alone as words, and c. have a meaning that is abstract and operates on the meaning of other morphemes. In practice, one of the criteria used most to distinguish between roots and affixes is related to the fact that affixes need roots in order to create words. If we want to know, for example, whether two given morphemes are affixes, we can try to construct a word just with the two of them. If this is impossible, as in *un-ness, we know that they

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are both affixes; if this is possible, as in un-fair, we know that at least one of them is a root. We may repeat the procedure, if necessary, to determine whether one of them is an affix. Affixes used as free forms? The distinction between roots and affixes is not absolute and several difficulties arise when trying to apply it to all cases. Some affixes can become free forms. Consider, for example, the Spanish affix in (15). (15) -ismo This affix is generally used, in combination with nouns and proper names, to denote different artistic, political or social movements, as in marx-ismo ‘Marxism’, impresionismo ‘impressionism’, colonial-ismo ‘colonialism’, and so on. However, during the last century, this affix started being used as a free morpheme meaning, precisely, ‘an artistic or cultural movement’. (16) El surrealismo es un ismo de vanguardia. The surrealism is an ism of avant-garde. ‘Surrealism is an avant-garde ism.’ This may challenge the view that affixes are always bound forms. In (16), ismo is taken as a free form which is not combined with any other morpheme. However, it may also be argued that this morpheme has undergone a process of diachronic change that has turned it into a root, a free morpheme, with a specific meaning close to the meaning that the form has as an affix, and that now the lexicon of Spanish contains two homophonous forms: one an affix, the other a root. See §7.3 for cases of free forms that turn into bound forms through historical change. Neoclassical units The notion of the neoclassical unit, such as logue, philo, and drome, also challenges the distinction between roots and affixes. Neoclassical stems do not have a fixed position inside the word. For example, in Spanish, the morpheme logo can occur both in the left and in the right slot of the word (17), so it cannot be classified as an affix. Also like free forms, they can combine with an affix and produce a well-formed word (18). Unlike roots, however, logo cannot occur alone or combine with verb or noun inflection to become a full word of Spanish (19). A neoclassical unit must be combined first with an affix, as in (18), and only then can it be used as a word. Consequently, neoclassical units also show mixed behaviour between roots and affixes. (17) a. logo-peda ‘logopede’ b. filó-logo ‘philologue’ (18) log-ic-a ‘logic’ (19) a. *log-a b. *log-o

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morphology: definitions and basic concepts 1.2.1 CLASSES OF AFFIXES

One of the properties of affixes, as we have seen, is that they have a fixed position with respect to the root they combine with. In this section we will quickly review the different kinds of affixes that emerge given this criterion. Suffixes A suffix is an affix that must appear to the right of the base with which it is combined (20). (20) a. bil-en (Danish) car-determiner ‘the car’ b. luki-ja (Finnish) read-agent ‘reader’ c. distin-çâo (Portuguese) distinguish-nom. ‘distinction’ d. Tanaka-san (Japanese) Tanaka-honorific ‘Mr Tanaka’ Prefixes Prefixes are affixes which occur to the left of the base with which they combine. Several examples are provided in (21). (21) a. pre-view (English) b. til-by (Norwegian) to-bring ‘offer’ c. aba-ntu (Zulu) pl.-person ‘people’ d. za-govorit’ (Russian) inch.-speak ‘to begin to speak’ Prefixes and suffixes are the most frequent classes of affixes in the languages of the world. Apart from their position, it is difficult to find other universal properties that differentiate them. However, if we consider only one family of languages, some tendencies can sometimes be identified. In languages such as English, Italian and Russian, prefixes tend to be unable to change the grammatical category of the word they combine with; when they combine with verbs, they give words which are also verbs, and when they combine with nouns, they produce nouns. In these same languages, suffixes frequently change the category of the base. Infixes Infixes are morphemes that require to be placed inside the root with which they combine, breaking the phonological units that spell the root. For example, Latin had an affix spelled out as a nasal consonant which would break the verbal root in some present forms of the verb (22a); in Spanish, the diminutive affix -it- may require to be infixed inside particular roots, such as azúcar ‘sugar’ (22b).

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(22) a. ru-m-po/rup-i (Latin) break-present/break-past b. azuqu-ít-ar (Spanish) sugar-dim. ‘little sugar’ Interfixes Prefixes, suffixes and infixes are positionally defined solely by the position that they occupy with respect to the base. However, another kind of unit, the interfix, is defined positionally because it must occur between the base and some other additional morpheme. An example of this can be found in Spanish, where there is a class of affixes that modify the aspectual properties of the verb and must appear necessarily between the verbal root and the theme vowel (23a). The class of morphemes known as linking elements (§6.1), which occur between the two lexemes of a compound, are also interfixes (23b). (23) a. bes-uque-ar kiss-interfix-theme vowel ‘to kiss irregularly’ b. speed-o-meter Circumfixes A circumfix is an affix that surrounds the base with which it combines. Surrounding implies that part of the affix appears to the left of the base, and part to its right. A circumfix is, necessarily, a discontinuous morpheme, that is, an affix that materializes as two or more separated phonological segments interrupted by material belonging to other units. Some examples of this are given in (24). (24) a. leg-nagy-obb (Hungarian) sup.-big-sup. ‘very big’ b. ge-speel-d (Dutch) partc.-play-partc. ‘played’ Circumfixation is not to be confused with parasynthesis (cf. §3.3.5), the situation where two different affixes are simultaneously added to the same base. Circumfixation involves the addition of only one affix, and frequently neither of the two phonological segments involved in the operation can be a morpheme by itself. Transfixes Discontinuous affixes are not the general rule in Indo-European languages, but in other language families, such as Semitic, most morphemes are discontinuous, and they not only appear simultaneously to the right and to the left of a base, but intertwine with it. In a language like Arabic, both affixes and roots are transfixes. (25a) is a root and (25b) is an affix that gives us the meaning ‘passive form of the past tense’. (25) a. k-t-b ‘write’ b. u-i-a ‘passive, past tense’

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In order to form a word, these two morphemes have to interdigitate, that is, the word alternates segments belonging to one with those belonging to the other, in such a way that it is not possible to find any continuous unit in the word (26). (26) kutiba ‘it was written’ Some authors have used the term transfix to refer to this kind of discontinuous  morpheme, which forms words by alternating phonemes from one morpheme with those from the other. The existence of such morphemes is, at first sight, a counterexample to the theory that analyzes morphemes as discrete units in which a word can be segmented (see §2.3). Other authors claim that these morphemes are special only due to their phonological properties, and that once the phonological side of a morpheme is differentiated from the way in which it is represented inside the structure of a word (see §8.2.2), the word can still be segmented and, at an abstract level, it can still be said to be formed by two separate distinct morphemes. The idea is that in languages with transfixes there are phonological templates – fixed series of positions for vowels and consonants – which have to be filled by the material contained in each morpheme. For instance, the word in (26) would be the result of applying a template like the one in (27) to the morphemes in (25). Consonant positions (C) would then be filled by the root, and vowel positions (V) by the affix. None of the morphemes forms an uninterrupted sequence inside the word (a situation known as non-concatenative morphology), with the result that the way in which the morphemes combine is non-concatenative. (27)

CVCVCV

k

t

b

u

i

a

Due to this, systems with transfixes are also known as root-and-pattern morphological systems; the pattern here is the template of consonants and vowels which underlies the word. 1.3 SUBDIVISIONS OF MORPHOLOGY It is traditionally believed that there is a distinction between the processes that alter the shape and meaning of a word in order to adapt it to specific syntactic environments and the processes that create new words. Furthermore, it is customary to make a distinction in this last group between processes that combine lexemes and those that combine a lexeme with one or more affixes.

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1.3.1 INFLECTION If we consider the morphological process that relates the word run with runs, the third person singular form of the verb, we realize that this process involves a small number of changes. The word run is a verb, and so is the resulting word runs. Run has a particular meaning, roughly ‘to move fast by using one’s legs’, and this meaning is preserved in the word runs. Someone who knows the meaning of run does not need to look in any dictionary to know what the meaning of runs is. The only thing that the morphological process has changed is the syntactic construction where each one of the words can appear: the form runs can be used with third person singular subjects, while the form run is used for the rest of the subjects in the present tense. (28) a. John runs two miles every morning. b. *John run two miles every morning. Morphological processes that give the form of a word in a given syntactic environment, without altering its grammatical category or its core meaning, are inflectional. Inflectional processes generally do not produce new words; the inflection of a word is the different forms that it adopts in the syntactic constructions where it can occur. These processes include, for example, those that mark nouns and adjectives for case in languages such as Latin, Russian or Modern Arabic. In a relevant sense, equus, eque, equum, equi and equo are forms of the same word (‘horse’) in Latin, the difference being that each one of them can be used only in some specific syntactic contexts. The set of all inflectional forms that a word adopts, paired with information about the contexts where each one of them can be used, is its paradigm. As the grammatical category of a word is crucial to determine the syntactic constructions where it can occur, it is generally the case that each grammatical category has a different paradigm and that for each category, the forms of the same word contrast in different properties. For instance, in English, the verbal paradigm contrasts in tense, aspect and, to some extent, person and number (run, ran, running, runs . . . ), while the noun paradigm has contrasts based on number (dog, dogs). Properties of inflection are studied in Chapter 4. 1.3.2 WORD FORMATION: DERIVATION AND COMPOUNDING In contrast to the process that relates run to runs, the process that relates write to writer involves deeper changes that could justify some dictionaries in listing the two words as separate entries. In this case, the grammatical category of the two words is different: write is a verb and writer is a noun. Also, the meaning has changed: writer denotes a person with a particular occupation, while write denotes an action. Morphological processes that change the category, the meaning or both aspects of a word are known as word-formation processes. These processes include operations such as those that form nouns referring to agents from verbs (as in our example above), abstract nouns from adjectives (good > goodness) or change-of-state verbs from adjectives or nouns (red > redden).

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These processes typically produce words which tend to be included in dictionaries, although some authors would agree that, when a word-formation process has a very regular effect on the base, many of the formations do not need to be listed, because the speaker who knows the meaning of the base form and how the morphological process behaves can deduce the meaning and behaviour of the new words. For example, with some exceptions, the English nouns with -er built on top of verbs do not need to be listed, because their meaning is easily predictable from the meaning of the verb to which they are related, plus some basic knowledge of what -er does to it. The same could be said about adjectives derived from nouns or other adjectives with the suffix -ish or nouns derived with -ation from verbal bases. Most authors differentiate between two different kinds of word-formation operations. The one illustrated in (29a) is known as derivation, while (29b) would be a case of compounding. (29) a. blu(e)-ish b. navy-blue Simplifying the concepts a bit, the difference between (29a) and (29b) is that in the former a lexeme combines with an affix, while in the latter two lexemes combine to form a new word. Properties of derivation are studied in Chapter 5; compounding, in Chapter 6. 1.4 THE SPELL- OUT OF MORPHEMES When considering morphemes, a distinction is generally made between the contribution that each one of them gives to the grammar and meaning of the word and the way in which they are spelled out phonologically. In order to avoid confusion between these two aspects of morphological units, sometimes the term morpheme is used to refer to their grammatical and semantic properties and morph is used to refer to the sequence of sounds that materializes the morpheme. Consider the examples in (30). Here the root is materialized with two different morphs, but they spell out the same morpheme, which in both cases is a verb with one meaning. (30) a. destroy-er b. destruct-ion The distinction between the grammatical and semantic side of morphological units  and their phonological representation is traditional in morphology, but in some specific theories it has been used as the basis for the Separation Hypothesis (§8.2.2), which has implications for the interaction between phonology and morphology. In this introduction, however, we will not address these topics and instead we will use the distinction to introduce the basic notion of allomorphy.

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1.4.1 ALLOMORPHY Allomorphy refers to the situation where the same morpheme is spelled out as different morphs, each one occurring in a different environment. The two forms of the root in (30) illustrate allomorphy. Each one of the variants of the root (destroy and destruct) is an allomorph. The morpheme that underlies the two variants always has the same grammatical and semantic contribution; we could represent it as Mdestroy. This morpheme, when materialized, adopts two different forms: the allomorph destroy and the allomorph destruct. Each one of them is used in different contexts. The morph destruct- is used in more specific contexts, such as in combination with the suffixes -tion and -ible (destruct-ible, vs. destroy-able, also attested) while the other morph seems more general in its use, as it is the form that surfaces when the root does not combine with any other morpheme (to destroy), and also in combination with the suffixes -er (destroy-er), -ing (destroy-ing) and -ed (destroy-ed). As we can see from these examples, generally, when two or more allomorphs compete, one of them is less marked and appears in a bigger number of contexts. This is the default allomorph: in our example, destroy, which appears in more contexts and, crucially, when the morpheme is not combined with other morphemes. The distribution of allomorphs One further question is what determines the distribution of two or more allomorphs across contexts. One option is that the allomorphs are sensitive to specifically morphological properties, for instance the presence of some other morpheme in their environment. Consider the suffix -able in English, which turns into -abil- in contact with the affix -ity (enjoy-able > enjoy-abil-ity). The semantics and the grammatical behaviour of -able and -abil- are identical, which makes us conclude that they are two allomorphs of the same morpheme, Mable. In this case, the distribution of the variants is determined by a property of the morphological environment, namely the contact with another suffix. The suffix -ity requires the use of -abil-, but a similar morpheme (also used to derive nouns from adjectives) like -ness does not (agree-able > agree-able-ness). This contrast shows that different morphemes require different allomorphs in their environment, without any apparent phonological or semantic motivation (see §8.2.1 for the way in which the different behaviour of morphemes such as -ity and -ness is explained). This situation, where the variants are distributed with regard to a morphological property, is called morphological allomorphy. In other cases, the distribution of the allomorphs seems to be sensitive to some phonological property of the environment. This phonological allomorphy can be illustrated with an example from Varela (1990). This author notices that one morpheme that produces abstract nouns from adjectives in Spanish has two different allomorphs: -ez and -eza. The distribution of the variants is generally determined by the number of syllables of the base. If the base has two syllables or fewer, the form preferred is the longer -eza; if the base has three syllables or more, -ez is preferred. (31) a. pesado vs. pesad-ez heavy vs. heavi-ness

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morphology: definitions and basic concepts b. estúpido vs. estupid-ez stupid vs. stupidity c. raro vs. rar-eza strange vs. strange-ness d. bello vs. bell-eza beautiful vs. beauty

When can we say that two variants are allomorphs? It is also possible for roots to have different variants, as in go ~ went or similar cases. In these situations, however, the term used is suppletion (§4.4.3), which shares with allomorphy the property that the same morpheme is spelled out in different ways. However, suppletion and allomorphy are different. It is generally assumed that the different allomorphs of a morpheme should have some phonological relation, since, in the traditional notion of allomorph, they are variants of one and the same lexical item. For this reason, it is expected that one variant can be related to the other through some change in its shape, even if this change does not generally take place in that language. That is, for example, the case of the suffix that forms agent nouns from verbs in Spanish. It has two allomorphs, -dor and -or. The first one appears when the last segment of the base is a vowel (32a, b), while the first shows up in contact with any kind of consonant (32c, d). The two variants could be related by a phonological rule that avoids a series of two consonants (/td/ in 32c; /sd/ in 32d) by erasing the initial /d/ of the suffix. Given the possibility of relating the two variants by a simple phonological rule, this is a case of allomorphy. (32) a. mata-dor kill-agent ‘killer’ b. bebe-dor drink-agent ‘drinker’ c. pint-or (not *pint-dor) paint-agent ‘painter’ d. confes-or (not *confes-dor) confess-agent ‘confessor’ Note also that this phonological rule does not always apply in Spanish, as sequences of /s/ followed by /d/ are otherwise attested in the language (as in esdrújulo ‘stressed in the third-to-last syllable’). The phonological rule that relates allomorphs has to be plausible, that is, it must be related to phonological processes that we otherwise see attested in languages of the world – and series of adjacent consonants are frequently simplified across languages – but it can be restricted to only some cases in the language we are studying. Instead, the relationship between go and went is generally considered to be one of suppletion precisely because it does not seem plausible that any phonological rule can derive one from the other, or both from the same common representation. In cases of suppletion it is generally believed that we are talking about two (or more) different lexical items that happen to share the same paradigm; as they are different

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lexical items, we do not expect that their shape will be related by a phonological rule of any kind. This phonological criterion does not always give clear results precisely because what we define as a ‘plausible rule’ is subject to discussion. For example, in Spanish several verb stems are irregular for a number of reasons: either because their vowel becomes a diphthong when it bears stress (33a), or because the vowel closes in the same context (33b), or because a consonant is added to it (33c) or undergoes a change (33d). (33) a. cont-ar vs. cuent-o tell-inf. vs. tell-1sg. present indicative b. ped-ir vs. pid-o ask-inf. vs. ask-1sg.present indicative c. ten-er vs. teng-o have-inf. vs. have-1sg. present indicative d. ha[θ]-er vs. ha[g]-o do-inf. vs. do-1sg. present indicative None of these pairs can be related to each other by an obvious productive phonological process – as they involve operations such as adding /g/ after a consonant or turning [θ] into [g], which are not generally attested as productive phonological processes across languages – and yet most authors find it counterintuitive to propose that this is a case of suppletion, because the two forms are very close and these three patterns appear with some frequency in the Spanish verbal paradigms. These semiregular patterns have attracted some attention in recent analysis (§4.4.4). Another criterion has been the historical origin of the word – namely, if both variants share the same etymology – but this criterion, useful as it is in lexicography and other linguistic disciplines, does not give clear results in the study of contemporary morphology. For example, in a Romance language, the relationship between a word borrowed from Latin and the result of the historical evolution of that same Latin word may be judged differently by speakers depending on their historical knowledge of this relationship: most Spanish speakers would agree that the relationship between the two words in (34a) is suppletion, but the situation in (34b) would be less clear for those with some knowledge of historical linguistics. In this second case, the two forms of the root are historically related to each other: the first is a historically regular phonological evolution of the second. This is not true of (34a): each word comes from a different form: hermano comes from Latin germanus, while fraterno comes from the Latin adjective fraternus. (34) a. hermano vs. fraterno brother vs. brotherly b. leche vs. lácteo milk vs. dairy As we see, in practice the boundaries between allomorphy and suppletion are fuzzy. It is generally the case that the term ‘suppletion’ is used when discussing

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different roots which do not share clear phonological similarities, while ‘allomorphy’ is reserved for cases where either there are systematic phonological similarities between the forms of a root or the morphemes that show variants are affixes. 1.5 PRODUCTIVITY When analyzing the different morphological processes, one of the factors that morphologists take into account is how easy it is for speakers of a given language to apply those processes to existing words. Some processes can be applied quite freely, and can, for instance, be applied to all words – or almost all words – belonging to a particular grammatical category. An example of this is the process that forms the plural of a noun in English by adding an -s. Most nouns can take part in this operation (35a). The result is, most frequently, predictable in two ways: what the meaning of the resulting word is and how it will be pronounced. Moreover, when confronted with a new noun that he or she had never heard before, any speaker who knows the rules of English will be able to use this process to make a plural form. Such processes are productive processes. In contrast, the process that adds -en to a noun to make the plural (35b) is nonproductive. First of all, there is a very restricted set of nouns in current standard English that take -en to make the plural (ox, child and brother; the last also accepts the productive -s plural). Secondly, the result of this process is not predictable in its meaning or form. The base brother has to change its vowel quality when combined with -en, and its meaning is not just any group of brothers, but is specialized to refer to those belonging to a religious community. Naturally, this special meaning is possible because the word competes with the regular brothers. Finally, it would be surprising if a speaker decided to make the plural form of a noun he or she never heard before with -en. (35) a. dog-s b. brethr-en The two examples in (35) illustrate two extremes in a productivity scale. Plural formation with -s is maximally productive; speakers do not store the forms with -s in the lexicon, but build them by applying a process to bases. Plural formation with -en is maximally unproductive; speakers store the very small set of plural forms with -en in the lexicon and do not extend this process to other bases. However, productivity is a relative concept, and as such there are degrees of productivity that have to do with different aspects, depending on how productivity is measured. There are three main ways of measuring productivity. a) In order to build a form with particular properties, how often do we use that process and how often do we use competing processes that give the same kind of form? b) How many restrictions does the process impose on its base? c) How easy is it to build a new form using that process?

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productivity

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If we start with the first notion of productivity, this is what we have illustrated with the plural formation. When an English speaker needs to build a plural form, the cases in which the -s form will be used are much more frequent than those in which the -en form is used. Both processes compete not only with each other, but also with the possibility of not marking the plural form at all (sheep > sheep) and with marking the plural with a vowel change on the root (man > men). Using statistical methods it would be possible to determine the relative productivity of each one of these ways of making the plural in modern English. This allows for a continuous number of degrees of productivity, depending on the relative frequency of each process given a set of forms. This measurement is done taking into account the set of existing words meeting some properties, that is, the group of words actually attested in dictionaries, texts and other utterances by speakers of a language. Consider now the second notion. This parameter measures productivity by considering how big the set of possible bases is. When the process requires the base to meet a lot of requisites, there will be fewer words built with that process; when the process allows the base to be quite unrestricted, the number of words resulting from it will be higher. Consider, for instance, what conditions the suffix -ly, when used to form adverbs from adjectives, imposes on its base. It cannot be applied to just any adjective of English. Not even all adjectives that denote qualities can be the base of this process (cf. *redly, *blackly), but still, some semantic subclasses of adjectives, such as those denoting human behaviours, can undergo the process quite freely. From this perspective the process is more restricted because it imposes more conditions on the base, going beyond its grammatical category: adjectives expressing colours cannot combine with -ly because these adjectives do not express manners, but those expressing properties that can be understood as manners of behaving can. So in this case it can be said that the process imposes two kinds of restrictions on its base: categorial restrictions (the base has to be an adjective) and semantic restrictions (the base has to denote a specific subset of properties). This way of measuring the notion allows for different relative degrees of productivity, and it is done considering not only the existing words of a language, but also the potential words that speakers could build with that process, even if they are not actually found in texts and dictionaries. The third way of measuring productivity is to determine whether a speaker would use a particular process when forming new words. Consider Spanish. Spanish has the morphological property that all verbs have to be marked with a vowel, which determines the way in which the verb is conjugated (§4.3.2). There are three markers for verbs in Spanish: -a, -e and -i. (36) a. cant-a sing b. beb-e drink c. viv-i live

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morphology: definitions and basic concepts

The question is whether these three markers are equally productive or not. To determine that, we can take a look at which marker or markers speakers use with newly coined verbs that enter contemporary Spanish as borrowings from English. Here we see that Spanish speakers only use the marker -a to mark these new verbs, never -e or -i. (37) a. b. c. d.

format (a disk) click chat blogg

→ format-a → clic-a → chate-a → blogue-a

The conclusion in this case is that -a is productive as a marker, but -e and -i are not productive anymore, as no new verbs are marked with them. As we can see, this measurement of productivity allows for only two values: productive and nonproductive. The measurement is done considering the new words that appear in a language at a particular period. As we hope has become clear from this very short presentation, productivity is an extremely complex part of the study of morphology, as it can be measured in different ways and can be defined in ways that allow for different degrees. It will be impossible to do justice to its complexities within the present book (see the further reading sections below for expansion on this topic). EXERCISES 1. Give a segmentation of the following complex words in English and determine whether they are produced by (a) inflection, (b) derivation or (c) compounding. Notice that in some cases the word might exhibit more than one of these processes. expects, running, reader, book reading, childish, smallish, imperfect, unexplainable 2. In a language of your choice, try to find examples of (a) inflection, (b) derivation and (c) compounding. 3. Select a language, and determine whether in this language you can find examples of affixes which are (a) suffixes, (b) prefixes, (c) infixes, (d) interfixes, (e) circumfixes and (f) transfixes. Which of these classes of affixes are used in inflection? Which are used in derivation? 4. Given the traditional definition of allomorph, discuss whether the following alternations in English can be said to be cases of allomorphy: a. -ation and -ment, as in modific-ation ~ impeach-ment b. am and was, as in I am sick ~ I was sick c. a- and an-, as in a-morphous ~ an-alphabet When you have given your answer, try to find comparable cases in English or another language of your choice.

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further reading

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FURTHER READING Given the introductory nature of this chapter, most of the further readings that we can suggest will be provided in the next chapters, when we expand on the topics mentioned above. Here we will concentrate only on areas that we will not specifically discuss in the following chapters. The distinction between the lexicon as a set of stored items and morphology is explicitly explored in DiSciullo and Williams (1987), Aronoff and Anshen (1998) and Williams (2007); they all argue that these two components of the grammar need to be kept distinct. The analysis of transfixes that we have sketched is taken from McCarthy’s (1979, 1981) theory of autosegmental morphology; an alternative to McCarthy’s theory is presented in Hudson (1986). Some recent studies of this phenomenon include McCarthy and Prince (1990), Bat-El (1994), Benmamoun (2003), Ussishkin (2003), Arad (2005) and Watson (2007). With respect to productivity, the list of possible readings is enormous. There are two recent monographs that cover all topics related to productivity: Plag (1999) and Bauer (2001); see also Plag (2006a) for an overview of the concept. Some of the fundamental works that have discussed this concept include Rose (1973), Aronoff and Schvanefeldt (1978), Anshen and Aronoff (1981), Riddle (1985), Kastovsky (1986), Baayen (1993), Bolozky (1999), Plag, Dalton-Puffer and Baayen (1999), De Jong, Schreuder and Baayen (2000), Hay (2001), Hay and Baayen (2002), Cowie (2003) and Dressler (2003).

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2 MORPHOLOGICAL UNITS

2.1 MORPHEMES The definition of a morpheme presented in the previous chapter – a pairing between meaning and form – is the one traditionally used in linguistics. Despite its initial simplicity, this notion of morpheme is highly problematic, as has been emphasized in morphology since the early 1970s. But before we can present its problems we need to understand the implications of the definition. Properties of morphemes In the context of structuralism, units are identified because they can be replaced by other units, giving rise to grammatical contrasts, and because they tend to appear recurrently in similar contexts. Given this methodology, the properties that a unit needs to have to be considered a morpheme can be summarized as follows: a) Isolability. A morpheme must be isolable, that is, it must be possible to identify the unit and separate it from the rest of the word. b) Contrastiveness. In the context identified, the morpheme must be able to be replaced by other morphemes, giving rise to grammatical and semantic differences. c) Recurrency. A morpheme cannot be restricted to one specific word. d) Meaning. A morpheme must be associated with a specific meaning. Consider how these four criteria allow us to say that -ation in English is a morpheme. Take the word in (1): (1) presentation The segment -ation is isolable, as inside the word we can differentiate it from the unit present, which corresponds to an English verb. It can also be shown to be contrastive, because it can be replaced by -able, producing the word presentable, which is different in meaning (and in grammatical category) from the word presentation. The unit -ation can also be shown to be recurrent, because it can appear in many other nouns derived from verbs (variation, authorization, manifestation, etc.). Finally, this unit has a specific meaning, which can be identified once we ask ourselves which seman22

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tic notion all the words ending in -ation share. It turns out that all of them are the name that we give to the action or the effect associated with a verb: presentation is the action of presenting, or the effect obtained by that action; authorization is the action of authorizing, or its associated effect; etc. Thus, -ation is a morpheme, and the word in (1) can be segmented in two units. (2) present-ation What is not a morpheme Consider how the structuralist method determines whether something is a morpheme. In Spanish, there are nouns which refer to a particular ideology, and they typically end in -ismo (3a). There are at the same time nouns that refer to the person following a particular ideology; they typically end in -ista (3b). (3) a. marxismo, ecologismo, surrealismo Marxism, environmentalism, surrealism b. marxista, ecologista, surrealista Marxist, environmentalist, surrealist The connection between the meanings of the two series of words is apparent. Is it possible to say that we have a morpheme -is-, which means ‘ideology’, and then two morphemes, -mo and -ta, which mean, respectively, the abstract ideology and the human that follows that ideology? It might be possible to argue that -mo and -ta are isolable and even that, in the light of the examples in (3), they can be paired to a specific meaning. It can even be argued that they are also contrastive units, as both of them would compete for the same position inside the word. However, these elements lack the crucial property of recurrency. In order to determine that they are morphemes, we would need to see them in contexts not preceded by -is-. But we do not have any pair of words ending in -mo and -ta, the latter meaning a person that follows an ideology, unless these segments are preceded by -is-. We conclude, thus, that -ismo and -ista are the real morphemes here, as they are the only units that meet all four criteria, while -mo and -ta are just sequences of sounds inside the morphemes. The apparently simple and uncontroversial traditional definition of morpheme runs into a number of difficulties when confronted with a variety of data. This has led to proposals that deny the existence of morphemes. We will develop these problems in some detail in §2.3, but now we will focus on two aspects of the structuralist definition of the morpheme which must be clarified. What does ‘having meaning’ mean? The first problem here is to identify what is intended by ‘meaning’ in the definition of the morpheme. Intuitively, we may want to consider meaning as ‘denoting entities or states of affairs of reality external to linguistics’. So -ist is a morpheme because it denotes – that is, it symbolizes – followers of an ideology or movement. However, not all morphemes are used to describe properties of the external world. Consider (4), from Italian.

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morphological units (4) ragazz-e youngster-fem.pl.

biond-e blonde-fem.pl.

The noun ragazze can be decomposed in two morphemes: ragazz-, which describes a particular class of people, and -e, which simultaneously denotes two properties of that class of people: the property of being female (because it is a feminine gender marker, opposed to masculine plural -i) and the property of forming a group (because it is a plural marker, opposed to feminine singular -a). In this word, both morphemes have a meaning which refers to entities or properties of the world. Consider now the adjective bionde. It can be decomposed in two units, biond-, which is a morpheme describing a property, that of having hair of a yellowish colour, and -e. However, here, -e does not describe a property of the real world, for the property of having yellowish hair cannot be, in itself, male, female, plural or singular. The appearance of -e in bionde is due to the fact that this word is an adjective, and adjectives in Italian must share some grammatical features with the nouns that they modify, in a formal process known as agreement. The result of agreement is that the adjective has to carry one or several morphemes which are required to satisfy a formal property of the grammar of this particular language. Do these units have a meaning and can they thus be considered morphemes? If we answer this question negatively, we are forced to say that -e is a morpheme in the word ragazze, but not in bionde, despite the clear relation between the two elements. If we answer the question affirmatively, then we need to reconsider what meaning is. The option generally adopted is the second one: the definition of ‘meaning’ should not be restricted to the representation of concepts of the world. The expression of specific relationships and properties internal to the grammar, as happens with agreement, is also considered meaningful. The morpheme -e is meaningful in bionde to the extent that it marks a formal relation that is established between an adjective and the element it modifies, the noun. The notions of isolability and recurrency In practice, isolability is diagnosed by considering whether or not the unit can be segmented inside the word and whether, after isolating that unit, the rest of the structure is identified with other morphemes. In our example in (1), presentation, identifying the morpheme -ation is unproblematic, because as a result, we obtain another unit that can be identified as a morpheme: present. Not all examples are equally unproblematic. Consider what happens if, when we isolate a morphological unit, the remaining part of the word does not have the aforementioned properties (cf. (5), from Spanish). (5) fusión ‘fusion’ There are reasons to segment the morpheme -sión here. The morpheme -sión is productive in the formation of nouns denoting actions and effects in Spanish. The noun

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fusión is a noun that denotes an event (‘the process or effect of blending’) and is related to the verb fundir ‘to blend’. The problem is that by this segmentation the sequence fuis also isolated. The unit fu-, however, cannot be linked to any morpheme of modern Spanish, because it is not recurrent in other words; that is, hypothetical words such as *fu-ar ‘to fu’ or *fu-dor ‘fu-er’ are not possible in Spanish. For some authors (Pena 1999), these problems are enough to propose that fusión cannot be segmented into -sión and fu-. They argue that the word fusión is stored in the lexicon as an unanalyzable unit, and, under this account, the presence of the segment -sión and its meaning are not due to the word being formed by the rules of Spanish morphology, but due to the etymology of the word, which comes from Latin fussio(n), and is treated in Spanish as a loanword. Other authors, in contrast, argue that the average speaker does not have access to the etymology of an item and that, independent of its origin, speakers confronted with a segment -sión in a word with a meaning of action or effect will automatically associate it with the productive morpheme -sión. This requires considering fu- as another morpheme, even if its isolability and recurrency are not immediately obvious. One option is to consider fu- an allomorph (§1.4.1) of the morpheme fund-. This allomorph occurs only in one context in the whole language, but still it can be segmented. 2.2 WORDS The notion of word has some intuitive reality in the mind of speakers, who tend to consider words the basic units of language. However, the definition of word is elusive. The reason is that words are understood as the minimal autonomous units, and the ways in which a unit can be autonomous differ depending on the criterion that is used to define autonomy. By autonomous we mean that at some particular level of analysis a sequence behaves as a complete and undecomposable unit where all the information relevant for that level has been satisfied. Problems are caused when the criteria do not coincide, that is, when something behaves as autonomous for, say, phonology, but not for semantics. All the English sequences in (6) are minimal autonomous units in a sense. (6) a. b. c. d.

militarism to kick the bucket dʒiʔjɛʔ (‘did you eat yet?’) truck driver

The orthographic word In one sense, the word is an orthographically autonomous unit, that is, an uninterrupted series of letters without spaces in between and separated from other series of letters by blank spaces. This makes (6a) a word of English, but not the rest. This is also the notion of word which is relevant in psycholinguistic studies about the acquisition or the performance of reading skills (Stanovich 1986). Obviously, this definition of word is problematic, to the extent that it implies that languages without a writing system – or speakers unaware of this writing system – do not have words.

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morphological units

The word as a listed unit in the lexicon Another definition of the word defines autonomy from a storage perspective, as each one of the units that are stored separately in the lexicon (Jackendoff 1975). A word, as opposed to a sentence or a phrase, would be a unit listed in the lexicon. Some authors have observed that speakers have an acquired knowledge of the words that are stored in their lexicon, as opposed to those that can be newly coined as the occasion demands it, but are not listed. In this sense, (6b) is a word of English, as it is an expression with an unpredictable meaning that needs to be listed as a whole in the lexicon. Presumably, (6d) would not be listed in the lexicon, as it is regular in meaning and form. This object, thus, would not be listed in the lexicon, and thus would not be a word. This definition of word, however, also has some problems. As DiSciullo and Williams (1987) note, if we adopt this definition of word, the objects that we classify together do not show a coherent formal behaviour and, moreover, they belong to different domains of grammar. Speakers store in the lexicon (among other things) any pairing between form and meaning that cannot be predicted. This includes phrases such as (6b), which are called idioms; in this case to kick the bucket behaves as a phrase if only because its first component, the verb to kick, allows verbal inflection (is kicking the bucket, has kicked the bucket, etc.): this shows that at the syntactic and morphological levels the sequence is not treated as an undecomposable unit, because one part of it can change without affecting the other parts. The lexicon would also include intonational patterns, such as the knowledge that a speaker of English has that a raising intonation at the end of the utterance is interpreted as a question; intonations are phonological units, not morphological ones. DiSciullo and Williams propose the term listeme to refer to all the objects stored in the lexicon; not all listemes are words and not all words are listemes (see also §1.1.3). The phonological word The phonological word is the smallest sequence that meets some phonological conditions, such as the presence of primary stress or the fact that it can be uttered in isolation. In some languages, the word can be defined through various phonological processes. For example, in Turkish the vowel of an affix has to assimilate to the final vowel of the base to which it attaches. Its plural morpheme has two variants, -lar and -ler; the first is used when the final vowel of the word is back (adam-lar ‘man-pl., men’) and the second, when it is front (köylü-ler ‘villager-pl., villagers’). A sequence can be identified as a word at this level when this kind of ‘frontness agreement’ is visible. Following this definition, (6c) would have to be considered a word, because that sequence is pronounced without visible stops that allow us to recognize smaller units clearly. However, intuitively, an English speaker knows that it is a way of pronouncing a syntactically complex structure equivalent to a whole sentence containing at least an auxiliary, an adverb and a verb: ‘did you eat yet?’. We can agree that this sequence does not represent a morphological unit of analysis. Conversely, some units that morphol-

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ogists consider words, such as compounds, show a great deal of internal phonological independence (§8.1); in Turkish, for example, the rule of vowel assimilation that we have mentioned does not apply inside a compound. The morphological word It has been claimed that morphological structures (words) have properties distinct from those of syntactic structures (phrases), and that one of them is the position of the head. Williams (1981) and DiSciullo and Williams (1987) proposed that the head of the word is always the rightmost element. A compound such as (6d) and a derived word such as (6a) share the property that the morpheme that determines its grammatical category is the rightmost morpheme (-ism or -er). It is also the constituent that determines the meaning of the whole word: whether it is an agent such as truck driver (and other words formed with -er, like reader, teacher or speaker), or an ideological viewpoint such as in militarism (or communism, fascism, romanticism, etc.). Let us assume that this proposal is correct, for the time being (see §3.2.2 for some counterexamples), and let us consider the intuition underlying it. This proposal consists of defining the word on the basis of some special property which differentiates it from syntactic phrases or sentences. If words are created by special rules, distinct from syntax, we expect them to have different properties: this is the morphological word. Since DiSciullo and Williams made their proposal, a number of morphologists have accepted this way of defining the word, but proposing other properties which do not involve reference to the position of the head, as this particular definition runs into problems when we consider bigger samples of words or languages. One alternative is that words, as opposed to phrases, need to contain special category markers (§4.3): a word is a structure that minimally contains an inflectional marker that marks its grammatical category. The constituents in (7), from Spanish, are morphological words because they are the smaller units that contain these kinds of markers, -a marking (7a) as a verb and -o marking (7b) as a noun. This kind of marker for verbs is called ‘theme vowel’, and for nouns, ‘desinence’; see §4.3. (7) a. cant-a sing-ThV b. perr-o dog-des. This proposal has the problem that some languages entirely lack this class of markers. Thus, in these languages this criterion is not enough to identify a word. Williams (2007) has proposed a different alternative to differentiate morphological words from phrases. His proposal is that structures put together by means of syntactic rules allow for Delayed Resolution, while units constructed in morphology do not allow this. Consider (8). (8) a. John is not afraid because Mary is with him. b. John is unafraid because Mary is with him.

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Williams characterizes the prefix un- as semantically equivalent to the word not; the difference between these two units is solely the level of grammar to which they belong. The form not is a word used to build phrases, while un- is a morpheme that forms morphological words. With these assumptions, consider the meaning of (8a). This sentence is actually ambiguous; the negation can affect the adjective afraid (‘John is not afraid, and the reason is that he feels protected when Mary is around’), or it can affect the subordinate clause introduced by because (‘John is afraid, but the reason is not because Mary, a violent person, is with him, but because of some other thing’). In contrast, the sentence in (8b) only has the first interpretation: the prefix un- must semantically modify the adjective with which it combines, afraid, and cannot wait until the subordinate clause is introduced in order to modify it. Williams’ explanation of the contrast involves the principle of Delayed Resolution. Negative elements are required to satisfy a semantic condition, namely to modify the information contained in a constituent. The word not, a syntactic unit, does not need to satisfy this property as soon as possible; it can wait until the subordinate clause with because is introduced in the sentence and then choose it as the constituent that is negated, or it can satisfy the semantic condition as soon as it is combined with the adjective. The possibility of delaying the resolution of this property produces the ambiguity. In contrast, the negative element un-, an affix, cannot use Delayed Resolution, so it must negate the adjective. Words as syntactic atoms Words are also the smallest units that syntax can manipulate. The main idea is that if morphology and syntax contain distinct sets of rules and create distinct objects, the rules of syntax cannot manipulate the units built by morphology simply because they belong to two different domains of grammar. This implies that syntax will not be able to access morphemes inside words. Only units which are of a higher level than morphemes can be accessed by syntax; if words are composed of morphemes, syntax will be able to manipulate whole words, but not individual morphemes. Accepting these premises leads to the conclusion that the word is the smallest unit that syntax can manipulate. Hence the use of the label ‘syntactic atom’ to refer to words: their internal structure is not accessible, and they are the smallest units accessible to syntax. From this perspective, the utterances in (6a) and (6d) are syntactic atoms, because their internal constituents cannot be manipulated by syntax, for example by using them in questions (9), but the units in (6b) and (6c) are not, because syntax can manipulate them, for example, by making the verb agree with a subject or modifying the way in which the question is performed (10). In §7.2 we will discuss in more detail all the syntactic processes that cannot manipulate the internal constituents of words, which form a family of properties that has given rise to the Generalized Lexicalist Hypothesis. (9) a. *How militar- did John propose some ____-ism? b. *Which truck is John a ____ driv-er? (10) a. Napoleon has kick-ed the bucket. b. You didn’t eat yet!

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The interesting systematicity in these examples is that the two that can be classified as syntactic atoms can also be classified as morphological words (6a, d). This correlation can be captured nicely in a Lexicalist system (§7.1.1) in the following way: if something can be defined as a morphological word, it is because it is the result of applying morphological rules; as the units of morphology are not units of syntax, being a morphological word implies being a syntactic atom. In conclusion, ‘word’ is a cover term that has been used in linguistic studies to refer to a variety of constructions which sometimes do not identify the same units as words. The most useful notion of the word from the perspective of morphology is the notion of morphological word, which also implies the notion of syntactic atom. 2.3 THE DEBATE ON THE EXISTENCE OF MORPHEMES Not all theories accept the existence of morphemes. Since the early 1940s there has been an ongoing debate about whether this kind of unit exists or whether the only objects that morphology deals with are words. Theories that accept the existence of morphemes are called Item-andArrangement (IA; Selkirk 1982, Jensen 1990, Lieber 1992, among many others). Morphemes are viewed in this theory as in §2.1; in these theories, the lexicon contains a list of individual morphemes. For example, the English word accepted would be analyzed as in (11). (11) a. The minimal units that can be identified here are accept-, a root, and -ed, a suffix. b. The suffix -ed is paired with the meaning [past]. c. The root accept- is paired with the meaning ‘receive willingly’. d. They combine together in order to construct a word, specifically a verb form in the past tense, as in (i): (i)

accept‘receive’

+

-ed ‘past’

Item-and-process Next to this family of theories, there are other theories that do not acknowledge the existence of morphemes. They can be divided in two classes, the first of which is called Item-and-Process (IP; Aronoff 1976, Beard 1995). The basic unit in this framework is the root, also referred to as the lexeme – to the extent that the root has been generally considered the morpheme that differentiates one word from the other. Affixes are not considered pairs of meaning and form, but markers of some processes that the lexeme undergoes. The analysis of accepted in IP theories would be as in (12). (12) a. The minimal unit that can be identified here is accept, a lexeme. b. This lexeme has undergone a process: past tense formation.

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morphological units c. The operation is marked by a change in the phonological shape of the lexeme; in this particular case, the operation is marked by adding the sequence /ed/ at the end of the lexeme. d. The operation can be viewed as a function that takes the lexeme and gives as a result a new form of it, as represented in (i): (i)

Past (accept) = accepted

The different treatment of ‘affixes’ as independent units (in IA) or as markers of a process (in IP) is very clear if we consider the analysis of an irregular past tense in English. In IA, the surprising fact of a past form like sang is that the [past] grammatical property is not expressed here by a segmentable affix. Therefore it is necessary to propose that in this particular verb, a morpheme without phonological shape is used to express past (13). (13) a. sang is composed of two different morphemes: sang-Ø. b. The grammatical property [past] is represented here by a morpheme without phonological content (Ø). c. The root sing, when combined with this -Ø, must appear as the allomorph sang. As Nida (1948) observed, the problem is that this analysis proposes that two different forms of the word are contrasted by means of a zero morpheme, while at the same time a contrast (sing/sang) does not mark any tense information. An IP analysis of this verb does not encounter difficulties in dealing with this case, because in this approach affixes are not independent units. The idea is that the vowel change is the way in which the morphological process is marked with this verb: (14) a. There is only one morpheme, the lexeme sing. b. There is an operation (past) which applies to the lexeme sing. c. The operation marks the lexeme, changing its vowel (i): (i)

past (sing) = sang

In IP theories, the units which are stored inside the lexicon are words, not individual morphemes. Realizational morphology Word-and-Paradigm theories (WP; Robins 1959, Matthews 1965, Anderson 1992, Stump 2001) also deny the existence of individual morphemes and consider that only whole words are stored in the lexicon. In this theory the basic unit is the word. Variations in the shape of words are not caused by their undergoing processes, but by the fact that they are integrated into paradigms, within which each form of a word manifests a different set of grammatical properties. From this perspective, accepted

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and sang are the word forms associated with past tense in the paradigms of the verbs accept and sing, respectively. WP morphology has been labelled Realizational Morphology because it establishes correspondences between different sets of grammatical properties and the different forms of a word that realize each one of these sets of properties. Consider the word homines (‘men, accusative’) in Latin. In a WP theory, this word is viewed as the form which expresses a set of properties (accusative, plural) in the paradigm of a particular noun; in the same paradigm, hominis materializes a different set of features (genitive, singular). Homo materializes nominative singular; hominum, genitive plural; etc. No internal constituents are recognized, and there is no need to posit any process that takes a basic form and marks it with some phonological change, as all forms are organized inside the paradigm, none being derived from another. (15) a. [accusative, plural] b. [genitive, singular] c. [genitive, plural] d. [nominative, singular] etc.

→ → → →

homines hominis hominum homo

For more information about paradigms and their status in different morphological theories, see §4.4. In the remainder of this section we discuss the different pieces of empirical evidence that have been used to argue in favour of IP and WP theories. 2.3.1 REPLACIVE AND SUBTRACTIVE MORPHOLOGY IA theories need to find segments that correspond to grammatical properties or pieces of meaning in order to decompose the word exhaustively. This proposal runs into problems when confronted with non-additive morphological processes, that is, those that do not add any segment to the base. The term replacive morphology describes cases where the change undergone by a base implies replacing some phonological property with another one. We have already seen a case of this: the contrast between the forms sing and sang. Here it is not obvious that any segment has been added; instead, the vowel of the base has changed its quality, from /ɪ/ to /æ/. In other cases, the contrast comes from the position of stress. The difference between the verb rebel and the noun rebel in English involves a shift in the stressed syllable: /rɪˈbɛl/ vs. /ˈrɛbəl/. Similar contrasts between the noun and the verb through a stress shift are visible in impact, import, abstract, insult, insert, discourse and protest. Replacive morphology is also common outside Germanic languages. The plural form of a feminine noun in Italian usually involves the replacement of the final segment -a by the segment -e, as in casa ‘house’ vs. case ‘houses’. Nida (1948) reports that in the Nilotic language Shilluk the plural form of nouns is marked by changing the tone of the lexeme: wât ‘house’ makes its plural as wàt, and yít ‘ear’ as yît. Subtractive morphology describes the morphological processes that are

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marked by removing some phonological material from the lexeme. One often-quoted case comes from French, where the masculine form of nouns and adjectives typically involves the loss of the last consonant with respect to the feminine form. The feminine /plat/, written platte, ‘flat’, contrasts with the masculine /pla/, written plat; the same contrast takes place in /lõg/, longue, and /lõ/, long ‘long’, or /sul/, soûle, and /su/, soûl ‘drunk’. It is not possible to analyze these contrasts as cases of additive morphology that add a consonant to the masculine form of the adjective in order to obtain the feminine, because the last consonant of the feminine form is different in each case, so no rule could be stated that associates feminine marking with a specific segment in French. Rather it has to be stated that the masculine is obtained by removing the last consonant of the feminine adjective. Subtractive morphology gives rise to backformations, derived forms that are phonologically shorter than the words they come from. Some backformations can be explained by the historical evolution of the language. The verb resurrect in English, for example, was historically formed by removing the segment -ion from the noun resurrection, taken (almost) directly from Latin. The word resurrection was used in English before the verb resurrect existed, so from a historical perspective it makes sense to state that the latter was derived from the former by subtracting a string of elements that could correspond to a morpheme in an IA theory. It is more dubious, however, that a speaker of contemporary English unfamiliar with these historical data would not assume that resurrection is derived from the verb resurrect. This class of backformations is different from the French case just discussed in that here it is possible to analyze the contrast as a case of additive morphology. 2.3.2 MISMATCHES BETWEEN GRAMMATICAL FEATURES AND THEIR EXPONENTS IA theories assume that morphemes are pairs of form and (grammatical) meaning. Another potential problem, therefore, is caused by the cases where there is no oneto-one correspondence between the meaning and the form of the segments that can be isolated inside a word. We have already seen this kind of mismatch in the form of the zero morpheme that can be postulated to explain the past tense of sang. Zero morphemes or null morphemes are morphemes without any phonological content that add information to the lexeme. IA theories need to postulate them in order to keep the correspondence between pieces of grammatical information and morphemes. Their existence is dubious, as they cannot be seen directly in a word. As they are not directly perceived, they pose problems for acquisition. It is not obvious how a child realizes that her language has zero morphemes if she never gets to hear them; perhaps the shift in meaning carried by that zero morpheme could be a hint, but why does the child not interpret it as showing that the base can have two meanings? It is not obvious, either, what kind of signs zero morphemes are, because their form would be null; evidence from zero morphemes, thus, always needs to be indirect. Another potential problem for IA theories appears when one segment is the expo-

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nent of two or more grammatical properties that are otherwise expressed by distinct segments. These cases are known as cumulative exponence. Consider the Spanish forms in (16). In (16a), an IA theory would segment the segment -s and associate it with the second person singular inflection, while the segment -ba- would be the exponent of the imperfective past tense. In (16b), however, the same undecomposable segment, -ste, would carry both the second person singular agreement and the information that the verb is a perfective past tense. The segment -ste would have to be considered a cumulative exponent for person and number agreement, and for tense. (16) a. canta-ba-s b. canta-ste

‘sing’, 2sg., imperfective past ‘sing’, 2sg., perfective past

In some languages (§2.5), some distinct properties are systematically expressed at the same time by the same segment. In Latin declensions, for example, the ending of nouns and adjectives expresses case and number at the same time. The endings -ibus or -is express dative or ablative plural; the ending -em, accusative singular; the ending -rum, genitive plural; etc. Sometimes, two or more segments need to co-occur in order to express a single piece of information. This situation, known as extended exponence, can be illustrated with the formation of the German participles. In German, regular participles are constructed by adding the segment -t to the right of the verb and ge- to its left (17). (17) lach-en → laugh-inf.

ge-lach-t partc.-laugh-partc. ‘laughed’ 2.3.3 CRANBERRY MORPHEMES

Zero morphemes are cases of grammatical properties not expressed by a phonological segment. The opposite situation also exists: a segment without an associated meaning. Consider the series of words in (18). (18) cranberry, strawberry, gooseberry, bearberry . . . The recurrence of the segment -berry suggests for an IA theory that it should be segmented as a morpheme. However, segmenting -berry in the word cranberry leaves us with another morpheme which is neither recurrent nor meaningful in (current) English: cran-. In the rest of the words the situation is no better; it is possible to associate the segments straw-, goose- and bear- with meaningful morphemes in English, but it is clear that the meaning of strawberry, gooseberry and bearberry cannot be reconstructed by combining these meanings with the one that we may wish to associate with -berry. These non-recurrent and meaningless segments, which an IA theory would identify as morphemes, are known, since Aronoff (1976), as cranberry morphemes.

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They challenge IA theories because they show that trying to identify morphemes in a word sometimes causes the collateral damage of treating some remaining material which is not meaningful or recurrent as morphemes. Cranberry morphemes, even though they cannot be paired with a meaning of their own, are used to distinguish words. This is very clear in another famous example discussed in Aronoff (1976). (19)

a. refer confer infer transfer . . .

b. restitute c. receive constitute conceive institute perceive prostitute . . . deceive . . .

d. remit commit permit transmit . . .

Some recurrent phonological segments can be segmented inside these words, among them -fer , -stitute, -ceive and -mit, which IA theories would classify as roots, and re-, con-, in-, per-, trans-, pro- and de-, which would be considered prefixes by these theories. The problem is, again, that these recurrent units cannot be paired with a specific meaning. What would be, for example, the common meaning of -stitute in prostitute, restitute and constitute? 2.3.4 PRISCIANIC WORD FORMATION The cases discussed up to now are evidence for any theory that rejects the existence of morphemes. Priscianic word formation (Matthews 1972) is, in contrast, evidence that supports WP theories, as it shows that the shape that a word adopts to realize a particular combination of grammatical features is determined by other forms inside the paradigm. Priscianic word formation (also parasitic word formation) refers to cases in which a form in the paradigm of a word is derived from another paradigmatic form of that word, and not directly from what can be identified as the lexeme. A case of this is the Latin future participle, discussed in Aronoff (1994). (20) a. captur-, from capere, ‘take’ ‘will/must take’ b. latur-, from ferre, ‘bear’ ‘will/must bear’ c. laudatur-, from laudare, ‘praise’ ‘will/must praise’ The crucial morphological property of future participles is that they always contain the segment that corresponds to the supine form of the verb (21). (21) a. captum, from capere, ‘take’ ‘(is) taken’ b. latum, from ferre, ‘bear’ ‘(is) borne’

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c. laudatum, from laudare, ‘praise’ ‘(is) praised’ The forms in (20) could be understood as the result of removing the ending -um from the supine and adding the segment -ur- to the remaining form. Crucially, however, the supine does not bring any semantics to the future participle. This form has a passive interpretation, but future participles, as seen in the glosses in (20), are always active. This makes it difficult to analyze future participles by decomposing them into the supine form and some additional morpheme. The conclusion is that the form of future participles is associated with the supine, but not in the sense that they share a morpheme, because if that was the case they should also share a meaning. The association is due to the fact that one form in the paradigm is linked to another one, without the intermediation of any morpheme. If this diagnosis is right, then it forcefully follows that the forms of words cannot be understood unless structured inside a paradigm. 2.3.5 PARADIGMATIC MOTIVATION OF MEANING A second piece of evidence in favour of the WP approach comes from some words whose meaning cannot be explained by the combination of their morphemes, but is defined by their relation to a whole paradigm. Consider the Spanish words in (22). (22) a. teléfono ‘telephone’ b. televisor ‘TV-receiver’ c. telecontrol ‘control from a distance’ All these words share some properties both in their form and in their meaning; they start with the segment tele- and involve in their meaning the idea that there is an action that takes place at a distance. The action is part of the meaning of the second segment of the word, so the forms in (22) could be analyzed by segmenting two morphemes. However, consider the words in (23). (23) a. telesilla ‘chair used to transport people to the top of a mountain’ b. telecabina ‘wagon used to transport people to a high place’ c. telebocata ‘sandwich-delivery company’ The nouns in (23) are interpreted as denoting things involved in actions that involve movement through a certain physical distance. However, the nouns from which they seem to be derived do not denote any action: silla means ‘chair’, cabina means ‘wagon’,

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and bocata means ‘sandwich’. It does not seem obvious how to derive the meaning of these words from the meaning of their morphemes, unless this meaning is made very abstract. Despite the fact that no segment inside them denotes an action, these words are interpreted as objects used for actions that take place at a distance; it has been proposed that this kind of meaning is obtained by associating these words, in the minds of speakers, with a wider set of forms (those in (22) and similar cases). This network of words with a similar meaning is considered by some morphologists (Van Marle 1984) to be a derivational paradigm, thus extending the notion of paradigm to non-inflectional processes (see also §4.4). 2.4 OTHER UNITS At this point we have discussed the basic units of morphological analysis, and highlighted their controversial status. Here we will review some other units, sometimes specific to a particular theory, that have been proposed in morphology. In this chapter, we will not discuss any further the notion of paradigm as a unit of morphological analysis; see §4.4. for this. 2.4.1 ROOTS AND STEMS Consider the words in (24), from Spanish. (24) a. canta ‘sing’ b. perro ‘dog’ If we compare them to the related words in (25), an IA theory would want to segment them into two parts: cant- and -a; perr- and -o. (25) a. cant-or sing-er b. perr-uno dog-ish The segments -a and -o are formal markers that morphologically mark a word as belonging to a certain grammatical category. The first marker signals that a word is a verb, while the second marks a word as a noun or an adjective (§4.3). The segment that remains once we have eliminated all inflectional and derivational affixes, plus the category markers of a word, is the root: cant- in the first case and perr- in the second case. In Spanish, and in all the languages where words need formal markers of grammatical category, roots are never independent words: *cant and *perr are not possible words in this language. They need to combine with other morphemes, such as those presented here, in order to stand alone in an utterance, as in (24). In these languages,

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the minimal words are combinations of roots and formal markers of category; these combinations are known as stems. Stems are the basic units for inflectional processes. In Spanish, the form canta- is the basic form on which the present forms of the verb are constructed. The same word may also have two or more stems which are used by inflectional paradigms, each one for a different set of forms. In Latin, for example, three different stems have traditionally been recognized: the present stem (am-a ‘love’), the perfect stem (am-av roughly ‘have loved’) and the supine (am-at- roughly ‘loved’). All the paradigm forms of a verb in Latin are related to one of these three basic stems. For example, the imperfective forms of the verb, including the future and the imperative, are inflected with the present stem (am-a-ba-s ‘you loved, imperfective’), and the participles are inflected with the supine stem (am-at-us ‘loved, beloved’). Roots in distributed morphology We have seen that roots are the units that we obtain once we have removed all affixes from the word that are associated with a grammatical category. This situation has led some authors, working in DM, to propose a definition of root which focuses on its defective nature and the fact that the root requires other morphemes before it can be inflected within a particular inflection class or paradigm. In DM, roots are identified as special morphemes which, unlike affixes, lack a grammatical category and need to combine with other elements in order to acquire one. This is different from the traditional proposal; there, the Spanish root cant- ‘sing’ is a verb which then is marked accordingly. In DM, cant- is stored in the lexicon as not a verb, but becomes a verb when it is combined with the marker -a (cant-a) or becomes a noun when combined with the marker -o (cant-o ‘song’). Accordingly, the root perr- ‘dog’ is not a noun, but the combination of perr- and the marker -o is (perr-o). The same reasoning extends to English, despite the fact that in this language roots and stems are – generally – formally identical. Marantz (1997) proposes that a root like grow (represented as √grow) is interpreted as a verb only when it appears inside a structure which contains verbal information. When it combines with a verbal head, as in (26a), the whole is categorized as a verb. Here, the head v0 is a null morpheme, so the materialization of this root in a verbal context is grow; with other roots, however, the verbal head is represented phonologically as an overt affix, for example -ify (26b). The same root √grow can appear in a nominal context when it combines with a nominal head; in the case of this particular root, n is materialized as -th (26c). With other roots, like √dog, the same head is materialized as a null morpheme (26d). (26) a. b. c. d.

[[√grow] ØV] [[√electr] ifyV] [[√grow] thN] [[√dog] ØN]

This sense of root has been used, for example, in the analysis of conversion (see §5.4). This treatment of roots as units without a category has two empirical challenges. The

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first one is that the phonological manifestation of the same head (v or n in (26)) is variable, so it has to depend idiosyncratically on the root it combines with. The second problem is related to overgeneration. If grow in English is listed in the lexicon as a verbal root, then we do not expect it to surface as an adjective or as a noun unless some specific operation that turns verbs into these categories is applied to it. However, if all roots are listed as morphemes without a grammatical category, it becomes a mysterious fact that not all of them can surface, in normal situations, as nouns, adjectives and verbs, because in principle they should be able to appear in any kind of combination without giving rise to any category incompatibility. See §7.1.2 for the a proposed solution to this problem. For this reason, this view of roots is rejected by many theories of morphology (see Panagiotidis 2005, Spencer 2005a, 2005b, Williams 2007). 2.4.2 CONSTRUCTIONS Theories of morphology differ with respect to what units are considered to be stored in the lexicon. IA theories mainly store individual morphemes, while IP and WP theories list whole words. In CM (Booij 2010), the basic units stored in the lexicon are constructions. Constructions are individual schemas consisting of pairs of form and meaning which are used to organize the existing forms in the lexicon and create new forms. For instance, the pattern which in English forms agent nouns from verbs can be viewed as an abstract schema paired with a meaning (27): (27) [[ ]V -er]N ←→ ‘one who Vs’ The construction in (27) specifies some form (the ending -er), some grammatical properties (the whole word behaves as a noun, and it contains a verb) and is associated with a specific meaning. The meaning in CM is not associated with individual morphemes, but with the whole schema. Due to this, the segment -er is not directly responsible for the agent meaning, and we expect it to appear in other words without adding this meaning (as in six-packer; cf. §8.5.3); the explanation is that this nonagent word is created using a different construction that happens to contain the same segment, but is linked to a different meaning. As opposed to IP and WP theories, however, in CM the word can be decomposed into smaller units. A construction is a schema that contains available slots inside which other elements need to be inserted. In (27), the slot with an open position is the one that corresponds to the verb, for example write. Some other constructions contain two available slots, like the construction used to create compounds of two nouns in English (adapted from Tuggy 2005). (28) [[ ]N1 [ ]N2] ←→ ‘N2 establishes a relation to N1’ As can be seen in (28), a construction can have a very abstract and general meaning. When this is the case, the construction normally has associated subschemas which further specify the meaning relation, and at the same time further restrict the set of elements that can appear inside each slot. In this case, following Tuggy (2005),

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among these subschemas we would find ‘N1 is the main ingredient of N2’, which is only possible when the element inserted in N1 is an edible thing (chocolate cake, but not birthday cake). In general, the more open positions a construction has, the less specified its meaning is. Constructions that lack any open position have a fully specified meaning; a word like chocolate is viewed as a fully specified construction where a complete form is associated with a complete meaning. Evidence in favour of constructions comes from cases where there is a recurrent meaning in a series of words that cannot be predicted from the meaning of the individual morphemes. Consider the adjectives that contain -free in English, such as caffeinefree, sugarfree, germfree, carefree, gunfree, etc. (Booij 2005b). The meaning that free has in these words is not the one commonly associated with this word when it appears as a simple adjective, but is rather equivalent to ‘without’ (as it is also in complex phrases like ‘free of problems’). However, listing the special meaning of these words individually, treating them as stored units learnt individually, misses the point that speakers of modern English feel that there is a pattern common to all these words and can create new forms following that pattern. Even if English speakers have not heard the words before, they will not have problems interpreting syntaxfree morphology or religionfree reasoning. This shows that the speaker does not need to learn each word individually with its specific meaning. In general, compositional idioms (Pitt and Katz 2000) – sequences with a special meaning that are, however, related to a productive patterns – have been taken as evidence for the existence of constructions. 2.4.3 TEMPLATES In some languages, morphemes seem to be ordered in an arbitrary way which follows a fixed sequence. Specific morphological templates have been proposed in order to explain these arbitrary orderings. In languages with templates, affixes belong to position classes, which refer to the slot that the affix occupies inside the template. For example, in Swahili, the following template has been described (simplified with respect to Schadeberg 1984; see also Stump 1998). (29) The Swahili template (simplified) 1

2

3

4

Negative Tense, Negation Subject haagreement affix simood and prefixes negative infinitive

5

6

7

Object Root agreement

Theme vowel

Plural addressee morpheme

In this example we see that different families of affixes are assigned to different positional classes or slots; for example, all the affixes used for tense and mood distinctions would compete with each other for the slot labelled 4. Templates are organized in such a way that a slot can only be occupied by a single affix. It has been argued that templates are units of morphological analysis because some operations need to make reference to their internal organization. One common sign

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that a language has templatic morphology is that an affix shows allomorphy depending on affixes that occupy non-adjacent positions inside the sequence. In Swahili, the past tense morpheme (slot 4) can surface as li- or ku-, depending on whether the negative morpheme in slot 1, ha-, appears or not (30). (30) a. tu-li-taka 1pl.-past-want ‘we wanted’ b. ha-tu-ku-taka neg-1pl.-past-want ‘we did not want’ As the two affixes are not adjacent and the allomorphy does not affect the intermediate affixes (tu-), a way of stating this process is by making reference to the template itself: ‘the presence of form X in slot A triggers a change in form Y in slot B’. As the two forms are not adjacent, it is difficult to explain this variation as a direct influence of one morpheme on the other; instead, proponents of templates argue that it is an effect of the whole template determining which forms appear in one slot when a specific form appears in another. Templatic morphology organizes morphemes in an arbitrary way, and has been proposed in cases where there are effects such as the one illustrated in (30) or where the order of morphemes does not result from phonological, syntactic or semantic principles. 2.5 CORRELATIONS BETWEEN MORPHEMES AND MORPHS AND MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY The way in which grammatical features are manifested in specific exponents and how regular this relation is have traditionally been used to classify languages according to their morphological type. We will shortly present this classification, but it is crucial to keep in mind that it is an idealization and no natural language falls perfectly into any of these types. Analytic languages Analytic languages – also called isolating languages – are commonly described as languages without any morphology, where all words are morphologically simple in the sense that they are typically monomorphemic and there is a general coincidence between word and morpheme. Consider (31), from Mandarin Chinese. (31) gŏu dog

bù not

ài like

chī eat

qīngcàī vegetable

The word gŏu could refer to a female or male dog, several dogs or the whole class of dogs; in other words, this noun does not have any marking for number or gender. If the noun needs to be counted, a distinct word, called a classifier, needs to be added. Without this classifier the noun cannot be combined with a numeral. The verb ài could be past or present tense, as it does not get any tense morphology. If any disam-

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biguation is needed in Chinese, independent time adverbials are introduced in the sentence. Many South-East Asian languages have been classified as analytic, among them Vietnamese, Tibeto-Burman, Thai and Khmer. Classical Chinese is also given as a prototypical example of this kind of languages, but it has been argued (Basciano 2010) that Modern Chinese has developed some bound grammatical morphemes and it is not entirely accurate to consider it an analytic language anymore. In languages that fall into this class, morphosyntactic features are very frequently not represented by specific exponents. Agglutinative languages Agglutinative languages are languages where a one-to-one correspondence between segments and morphosyntactic properties generally holds. In other words, in these languages most grammatical properties come packaged in clearly differentiated segments. The typical cases of agglutinative languages come from Uralic and Altaic languages, such as Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian or Estonian; other languages classified as agglutinative are Bantu languages, such as Zulu, Xhosa or Kîtharaka, and several native languages of America, such as Nahuatl, Quechua or Salish. An example taken from Turkish is given in (32), where there are distinct morphemes to express case and number. (32) Nominative Accusative Genitive Dative Locative Ablative

Sing. adam adam-i adam-in adam-a adam-da adam-dan

Pl. adam-lar adam-lar-i adam-lar-in adam-lar-a adam-lar-da adam-lar-dan

Each morpheme can be clearly isolated and arranged in predictable linear sequences: the morpheme for [plural] always occupies the same position (adjacent to the base). A morpheme always has only one meaning (e.g. -i always – and only – means ‘accusative’, both in the singular and in the plural). In order to characterize an agglutinative language, we could say that there is a biunivocal correspondence between morphs and morphemes. Fusional languages Fusional languages – also called inflecting languages – are characterized by the fact that the same segment tends to express a bundle of grammatical properties. These languages are characterized by cumulative exponence being the norm rather than the exception. As a result of this grouping of grammatical properties corresponding to single morphemes, a higher degree of irregularity arises in fusional languages than in agglutinative languages. Fusional languages generally have very developed paradigms, and frequently offer situations which suggest analysis of the WP type.

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Typical examples of fusional languages come from the Indo-European family. Spanish, German, Latin, Greek, Italian, Sanskrit and Armenian have all been classified as mainly fusional languages. In contrast with (32), where the relation between plural and case marking was illustrated in an agglutinative language, (33) illustrates the same relationship in Latin. Notice that in this kind of language, two grammatical properties are mapped onto the same segment: for instance, the morph -um expresses at the same time genitive and plural, without it being possible to segment it into two distinct segments, one for each of these two properties. (33) Nominative Accusative Genitive Dative Ablative

Sing. homo homin-em homin-is homin-i homin-e

Pl. homin-es homin-es homin-um homin-ibus homin-ibus

EXERCISES 1. In the languages of the world there is sometimes a relation in form between interrogatives and other pronouns. For instance, DiSciullo (2005) argues that in English some interrogatives can be segmented in two morphemes: wh-ere, wh-at, wh-en. The first morpheme gives the interrogative meaning, while the second is recurrent in other expressions, like th-ere, th-at, th-en. Consider interrogatives in a language of your choice and discuss a possible segmentation from the perspective of (a) isolability, (b) recurrency and (c) association with meaning. 2. The possibility of identifying morphemes which are recurrent, isolable and associated with a meaning is frequently related to whether the forms discussed are regular or irregular, as we have seen in our typological discussion (§2.5). Take the paradigm of the present tense of a regular verb in a language of your choice and try to segment all morphemes presented there; check whether those segmentations respect the relevant criteria. Then take the paradigm of the present tense of the verb to be or another heavily irregular verb in the same language, and see whether it is possible to make an equivalent segmentation or whether there are no empirical reasons to identify discrete morphemes. 3. Consider the following sequences in English. All of them come under at least one of the possible definitions of word. Which definitions? Find similar examples to those in (a)–(e), in English or another language you are familiar with. a. John’s (as in ‘John’s hat’) b. go bananas (meaning ‘to go crazy’) c. pick pocket (as in ‘John is a pick pocket’) d. unrealistic e. blackbird 4. Select a word-formation process in a language of your choice (for instance, in English, you can choose adjectives derived from verbs using -able, nouns derived from adjectives using -ness, verbs derived from adjectives using -ize, etc.) and

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show how the resulting words would be accounted for in (a) an IA theory, (b) an IP theory, (c) a WP theory and (d) CM. 5. In a language of your choice, try to find cases that show (a) a one-to-one correspondence between morpheme and morph, (b) a situation where the same morph expresses simultaneously two or more morphemes, and (c) a situation where two morphs must appear in order to express one single morpheme. FURTHER READING The reader interested in expanding on the traditional notion of morpheme will find it useful to check Bloomfield (1933) and Harris (1942). Problems with this notion were noticed very early, and this is reflected in Hockett (1947, 1954), Nida (1948) and Anderson (1988). Harbour (2009) addresses the problem of how to determine that two morphemes with the same surface shape are distinct. New approaches to the notion of morpheme have been developed significantly in DiSciullo (2005), where a decomposition of small functional words has been proposed, taking to an extreme the segmentability of recurrent units. The problem of how to define a word, noticed already in Togeby (1949) and Lyons (1968), was more recently taken up by DiSciullo and Williams (1987) and is still an issue in morphological research (Julien 2007). The debate between IA, IP and WP theories started as a direct consequence of the problems noticed in the classic works mentioned above. Hockett (1954), Robins (1959), Bazell (1949) and Matthews (1965, 1972) discuss this problem, a discussion which has been continued to the present. The reader will find it useful to check Aronoff (1976, 1994), chapter 1 in Anderson (1992), chapters 2 and 4 of Bochner (1993), and Stump (2001) for this debate. More recent contributions to the debate include the papers collected in Singh and Starosta (2003) and Bonet (2008). The important problem of null morphemes has been addressed in Olmsted (1951), Marchand (1969) and Aone (1990), and more recently in Beard (1995), Beard and Volpe (2005) and Kastovsky (2005). The notion of root in DM has been developed in Marantz (1997), Embick (2000), and Arad (2003) (with a reply in Ussishkin 2006); it is contested also in Lieber (2006). The status of stems has been approached from different perspectives in Aronoff (1992, 1994), Oltra (1999), and Embick and Halle (2005) – developing the notion in DM. A good summary of how constructions can be used as units of analysis is found in Tuggy (2005) and chapters 1 and 2 in Booij (2010). Templatic analyses of the morphology of different languages are found in Simpson and Withgott (1986), Inkelas (1993), Stump (1993a) and Nordlinger (2010). In addition to Swahili and other Bantu languages, others have been analyzed as having templates, such as Kartvelian (Deeters 1930), the Athapaskan languages (Kari 1989) and Japanese and Korean (Sells 1995).

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3 MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURES

3.1 THE MOTIVATION FOR MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURES We have seen in the previous chapter that for IA theories words are combinations of morphemes. Another property of this kind of theory is that the meaning of a word is not obtained just by adding the individual meanings of each morpheme. The way in which they are combined with each other also provides aspects of the word’s semantics in a compositional way (see §8.6 for further developments of the concept of compositionality). This is what is called a structure. Consider the word undecidable. Three units can be recognized here: a prefix, un-, a verbal root, decid(e), and a suffix, -able. Let us see, step by step, how the meaning of undecidable can be derived from the combination of these units inside a structure. The word undecidable means, roughly, ‘cannot be decided’. The prefix un- has a negative meaning, also seen in adjectives such as unaware (not aware), unfriendly (not friendly), uncivilized (not civilized), etc. This prefix, then, is responsible for the negative meaning contained in the word, ‘cannot be decided’. The suffix -able has a more complex meaning: it forms adjectives from verbs, and its meaning is at the same time passive and modal, and can be glossed as ‘that can or deserves to be participle’, where the participle is the one of the verb with which -able combines. We see this in enjoyable (can be enjoyed), pitiable (deserves to be pitied) and readable (can be read). Thus, this suffix is responsible for another part of the meaning of the word. Once we have decomposed the meaning of the word and associated it with each one of its units, we can establish the correspondence in (1). (1) unnot

decid(e)

-able that can be participle

The question that arises at this point is why the meaning of the word is ‘cannot be decided’ and not ‘can be not decided’. In the first case we refer to an entity that, in any case and no matter how hard one tries, cannot be decided; in the second case, we refer to something that can be decided, but which does not need to be. The way in which a speaker uses the word undecidable is the first and never the second. How can we account for this? It is at this point that the notion of structure comes into play. The structure deter44

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mines the morpheme with which another morpheme combines, and therefore how the meaning of each of them relates to the others. Identifying the structure of undecidable involves giving an account of how the three units in (1) combine with each other, and then of how their meanings affect each other. If we simply state that the word has three units, as we did in (1), we do not predict that only one of these two meanings is associated with the word. We need to represent also how the units are organized inside the word, that is, the structure of the word. The difference between the real meaning of the word, ‘cannot be decided’, and the unattested meaning, ‘can be not decided’, has to do with the position that the negative morpheme occupies in the structure: in the first case it modifies the suffix -able, and in the second it relates to the verb. We need to propose a structure where this property is clearly accounted for. In a first step, we combine the suffix -able and the verb decide. (2)

A V decid

A -able

This gives us the meaning ‘can be decided’. One of the units is more important than the other from the point of view of the grammatical category. In this case, this unit is the suffix -able, which combines with a verb, but gives as a result an adjective. The structure represents a possible word in English, the adjective decidable, formed from the verb decide. This complex word, in a second step, combines with the negative prefix un-, as in (3). (3)

A Prefix un-

A

V decid(e)

A -able

In (3), the prefix un- combines with an adjective, decidable, not with the verbal root decid(e). This accounts for the fact that, in the meaning of the whole word (‘cannot be decided’), the negation affects the combination of verb and -able, and not just the verb decid(e). The structure in (3) accounts for the fact that the meaning ‘can be not decided’ does not correspond to the word undecidable. This meaning would need a structure where the negative prefix attaches to the verb ([un[decide]]) and then the whole is turned into an adjective ([[un[decide]] able]), which is not theoretically impossible, but is not the way in which the word has been stored in the English lexicon.

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There is a second reason why un- must combine with the structure built by the suffix -able and not with the verbal root directly. If we make a list of the English words that contain the prefix un-, we will see that the vast majority of them are adjectives (unaware, unclear, untrue, etc.). This tells us that, when the prefix has a negative meaning, it generally combines with adjectives. The prefix un- can combine with verbs, but in these cases it has a reversative meaning, that is, the meaning of reversing an action that had already been performed, as in undo, untie, unzip, unlock or unfold, which do not mean ‘not doing’, ‘not zipping’, etc. The reversative meaning is not the one used in this word, as we expect if the prefix combines with something that is now an adjective. Thus, the structure in (3) not only gives an account of the meaning of the word undecidable, but also motivates why the prefix that appears inside it has the meaning that it has. At this point we are ready to define what is considered a structure in morphology: (4) The morphological structure is the organization of the units that form a word, making it possible to account for its semantic and formal properties. We have already discussed above how the structure in (3) accounts for the meaning of the word. As for the formal properties, the structure in (3) shows several things: a) the grammatical category of the whole word. The whole structure is an adjective. This means that the whole word is an adjective. b) the unit that is responsible for the fact that the word belongs to that particular category. The word is an adjective because its last segment is -able. Units like these, which determine the category of the word, are called heads (§3.2.1). c) the combinations of units that produce possible words, and what their meaning is in each step. The structure in (3) explains that the prefix un- has a negative, and not reversative, meaning in the word undecidable. In this chapter, we will present the properties of a morphological structure, but we will also show the problems that have been identified in trying to assign structure to some words. These problems frequently have to do with the fact that a structural representation does not account for the meaning of the word or some of the formal properties that we have just presented. It is also important to keep in mind that the notion of structure presupposes that inside the word, different units can be identified. The theories called IP and WP in Chapter 2 (§2.3), to the extent that they do not admit that words can be decomposed into smaller units, do not accept that words have an internal structure. We will present the view that words do not have an internal structure in §3.3. 3.1.1 EVIDENCE IN FAVOUR OF WORD- INTERNAL STRUCTURE The evidence for recognizing structure inside words is mainly related to phenomena that operate with constituents – groups of units which hold a direct relationship

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with each other – and are not based on whether units are adjacent or not. In research in the 1960s and 1970s in syntax, movement, coordination and coreference were typically used to show that grammar cares about structures and not about adjacency relationships between units. We will see (in §7.2) that these tests cannot be applied to morphology, due to the Generalized Lexicalist Hypothesis, and therefore different sources of evidence have been used. Complex words with more than one meaning Remember that a morphological structure must represent the semantic and formal properties of a word. Given this, changes to the way in which different units are related to each other automatically result in changes to the meaning of the word. For this reason, the fact that some words are ambiguous between two or more different predictable meanings has been taken as evidence that words have internal structure. If a word has two meanings with the same units in the same adjacency relation, the ambiguity is due to the way in which the units are structured inside the word, that is, how they are organized. Consider the word in (5), taken from Spanish (Varela 1990). It allows for two meanings, represented in (5a) and (5b). (5) Sp.

in-util-iza-ble un-useful-ize-able a. can be made not useful b. cannot be made useful

In the first meaning (5a), we talk about something that generally fulfils some function, but that can be ‘deactivated’. Consider for example a hypodermic syringe whose needle can be removed; here the first meaning could be appropriately applied to it. In the second meaning (5b), however, we are talking about something that does not fulfil any function, because it can never be used. Consider for example a word processor that is not compatible with your operating system; the second meaning could be applied to this kind of item. The difference between the two meanings in (5a) and (5b) does not follow from different meanings of the units. The units have exactly the same meanings in both cases. The prefix in- is a negative prefix meaning ‘not’ and generally combines with adjectives; the adjective útil is ‘useful’, and contributes the same meaning to both paraphrases; the suffix -iza means ‘to make something X’, and combines with adjectives or nouns to produce verbs; finally, the suffix -ble (like English -able) attaches to verbs and produces adjectives, with the meaning ‘can be participle’. The different meanings in (5) arise from two different structures, two different ways in which the morphemes can be organized inside the word, and in particular from the position of in-. The first meaning, in (5a), is obtained if the prefix in- combines directly with útil, to obtain the constituent represented in (6a), whose meaning is ‘not useful’ or, in better English, ‘useless’. Then this constituent combines with -iza in (6b), giving the meaning ‘to make useless’. Finally, the suffix -ble is added (6c), obtaining the meaning ‘can be made useless’, corresponding to (5a).

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morphological structures (6) a. [in[útil]A]A, ‘not useful’ b. [[in[util]A]A iza]V, ‘to make not useful’ c. [[[in[util]A]A iza]V ble]A ‘that can be made not useful’

The meaning in (5b) is obtained as follows. In the first step, the adjective útil combines with -iza, to give the constituent in (7a), which means ‘to make useful’. In the second step, this constituent combines with the suffix -ble (7b), which gives ‘can be made useful’. Finally, in the third step, this constituent combines with the prefix in-, to give (7c), ‘cannot be made useful’. (7) a. [[util]A iza]V, ‘to make useful’ b. [[[util]A iza]V ble]A, ‘can be made useful’ c. [in [[[util]A iza]V ble]A]A, ‘cannot be made useful’ Here we have an example where structures are exploited to give an account of a meaning ambiguity. The units used and the order in which they appear are identical in the two cases, and thus it may be argued that the meaning difference must be due to a difference in the way in which the structure of the word is composed. See, however, §3.3.1. for another view on this. Headedness The concept of structure is associated with the concept of head (see §3.2.1) as the most important unit inside a structure. If units are not organized with respect to each other, none of these units is expected to be more important than the others, because the relation established between any pair of units is always identical when their hierarchical organization is considered. The head, in contrast, imposes its grammatical category and other properties on the whole word, and therefore requires a structure to account for this privileged role. When there is a structure, the grammatical category of the word is explained by the presence of a head carrying this information. The fact that undecidable is an adjective and undecidability is a noun is explained because the head in the former is the unit -able, which takes verbs and produces adjectives, while the head in the latter is the unit -ity, a suffix that forms nouns from adjectives. The two words correspond to two different structures (8a) and (8b) with different heads (the head is underlined). (8) a. [un [[decid(e)]V able]A] b. [[un [[decid(e)]V abil]A] ity]N Combination of morphemes sensitive to the presence of structure A second piece of evidence has to do with some cases where the availability of a morpheme depends on the existence of previous structure. The most-discussed instance of this kind of situation has been identified by Aronoff (1976: 54), and involves the suffixes -ment and -al. Aronoff notices that not all the words ending in -ment can further combine with -al; the contrasts are illustrated in (9).

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(9) a. ornamental, regimental, excremental, medicamental . . . b. *employmental, *shipmental, *agreemental, *basemental . . . Aronoff proposes that the difference between the two series has to do with whether the suffix -ment has been added to a base that already exists in English or not. In all the cases in (9b), the result of subtracting the suffix -ment from the noun gives as a result a verb of English (employ, ship, agree, base), unlike what happens with the cases of the previous series (*orna, *regi, *excre, *medica). The nouns in (9b) are obtained by deriving a verb (for example, employ) with -ment, as in (10b), while the base nouns in (9a) are morphologically simple words in English (10a). (10) a. [ornament]N b. [[employ]V ment]N The generalization seems to be that the suffix -al cannot combine with nouns derived by the suffix -ment, but accepts words that end in this segment when they do not have internal structure. Although not free of exceptions (governmental, developmental, judgemental), this account shows that morphology can be sensitive to whether a word has internal structure or not. 3.2 THE PROPERTIES OF MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURES 3.2.1 THE CONCEPT OF HEAD Any structure is different from a linear series of concatenated units. In the latter, all relationships between units are identical, while in the former there is always a unit which stands in a privileged position inside the structure. This unit is the head, which imposes its properties on the whole word. In the word un-decid(e)-able, the head is the suffix -able, as it transmits a number of properties to the whole word: a) the grammatical category. The word undecidable is an adjective, and the affix -able is responsible for this categorization. Words ending in -able are normally adjectives. b) the semantics. The word undecidable denotes a quality, the quality of being unable to be firmly established or refuted. This meaning contribution is associated with the affix -able, as all words ending in -able (or -ible) denote the quality of being able to undergo a particular process (demonstrable, solvable, deducible, inexpressible. . .). From this we can see that the head inside a morphological structure is identified because the properties of the whole word are the same properties that the morpheme itself contains. The properties carried by the head are crucial in determining the behaviour of the word. The grammatical category is crucial when the word is used in a syntactic context, as it determines what kind of other words it can combine with, and the meaning of the word determines its semantic behaviour.

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In addition to these two properties, there is a third class which is generally referred to as ‘formal’ or ‘morphological’, in the sense that its members do not affect the syntactic distribution of the word or its semantic behaviour, but specify some specifically morphological properties of the word, such as its gender, its conjugation class or whether its inflection is regular or irregular. Consider the English verb undersell, which consists of two units, under- and -sell. The unit -sell is its head, not only because it imposes its grammatical category and crucial aspects of its meaning (the word denotes an action, not an object or a quality), but also because this unit is responsible for the fact that the inflection of the verb is irregular. Indeed, the past tense of sell is the irregular sold, not the regular *sell-ed, and consequently the past tense of undersell is the irregular undersold, not *underselled. In the case of understand, similarly, the head of the word is -stand, because it transmits its grammatical category, a basic component of its meaning and a specific irregular form in the past tense. Readers familiar with traditional syntactic analysis have probably already noticed that this is not the way in which syntactic heads were traditionally identified. In traditional syntactic analysis, a head is the only unit in a structure which can stand alone, without the other units, and which cannot be eliminated from the structure without resulting in an ill-formed construction. Thus, the head of a phrase such as big boy would be boy, as it is the only unit which can stand alone in the same contexts that big boy can occur in (as in A big boy failed the exam) and whose elimination results in ungrammaticality (*A big failed the exam). The head in morphology is frequently a bound morpheme which cannot stand alone without having been combined with other morphemes, as in government, where the head -ment cannot form a word by itself (*This -ment is interesting). Thus, the traditional syntactic criterion of defining the head as the only unit of the structure which can be independent and does not depend on co-occurrence with other units is not met by morphological heads. This property of affixes being morphological heads has a parallel in syntax. In particular, it has been argued that functional categories in syntax – such as determiners – are the head of the structures they introduce, even though they are not autonomous and must combine with the noun. In the phrase the vampire, the head is the determiner the. Indeed, it determines the formal properties of the whole, for example the fact that it may appear as a preverbal subject – unlike the bare noun vampire – as witnessed by the contrast between The vampire came out of the closet and *Vampire came out of the closet. The determiner also determines the semantics of the construction, though in a grammatical sense which ignores the conceptual or lexical meaning of the expression, because it is the presence of the determiner that turns the noun vampire, which denotes a predicate, into a definite description that can refer to an individual. However, the determiner is not a constituent that may show up by itself: *The came out of the closet. Similar reasoning has been used with tense, mood, aspect, degree, conjunctions and other grammatical elements. It is generally believed now, in contrast with the view in the structuralist tradition, that being able to appear without other elements is not a necessary property of heads. By applying the reasoning that has just been presented, it can be proposed that the underlined constituents in (11) are the heads of the words, which account for the

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grammatical category of the words, even if they are not able to appear by themselves in the absence of the base. (11) a. [[white]A ness]N b. [[computer]N ize]V c. [[child]N ish]A More about the identification of heads The fact that a head is the most important unit inside a word has been interpreted in different ways, depending on whether the meaning or the formal aspects of the word are considered. Indeed, some linguists believe that the semantic criterion is not reliable enough. It does not always give clear enough results; consider for instance the verb understand. Despite the fact that -stand seems the head of the word (understand > understood), the meaning of the verb stand is present in the whole word only in a metaphorical sense, if any: it is clear that ‘to understand’ does not refer to any way of ‘standing’. This situation, in which the head of a word does not impose its semantics on the complex word, is referred to as demotivation of meaning or lexicalization (§8.6.). As this phenomenon is very frequent in morphology, some linguists suggest that the semantic criterion cannot be exploited to identify the head of a word. Instead, several authors have proposed criteria based on the formal aspects of the word in order to identify the head of a word. In this approach, one criterion for identifying heads is the proposal that the head of a word is the constituent where the inflection (§1.3.1, §4) of the whole word is manifested; that is, that the head is the ‘locus inflectionis’ of the word. This criterion is useful in cases where the same word contains two or more units that have the same grammatical category, in such a way that the category of the constituent words is not enough to decide which unit is its head. Take for instance the compound strawberry field, a noun composed of two nouns, strawberry and field. When in the plural form, the plural morpheme -s combines with the unit field, resulting in the form strawberry fields, not *strawberries field. This allows us to determine that field is the head of the compound, and not strawberry. Which units can be heads? Most authors have assumed that constituents inside a compound (§1.3.2, §6) and some derivational morphemes (§1.3.2, §5) can be the heads of the word, but not the inflectional morphemes that carry, among other things, agreement with other words. The reason for this is that, as we pointed out in Chapter 1, inflectional morphemes do not change the grammatical category or the semantics of the word. This has generally been interpreted as meaning that inflectional affixes do not carry with them information about the grammatical category of the word, and, therefore they cannot assign a category to the bases with which they combine. For this reason, they cannot be viewed as heads. In English, for example, the final -s in writes is there to mark an agreement relationship with a third person subject (as in She writes), and as such it does not change the semantics or the grammatical category of the verb write, with which it combines. The dominant view in morphology is

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that inflectional morphemes specify different values of a word – organized inside a paradigm – in order to adapt it to a particular syntactic context, but they do not change the substantive properties of a word, such as its grammatical category or the concept it stands for. While derivational morphemes create new words, inflectional morphemes create word forms and not new words. More about this will be presented in Chapter 4. By the same reasoning, most authors believe that in languages like Spanish and English derivational suffixes, but not prefixes, can be heads. In these languages it is generally the case that a prefix does not change the categorial distribution or the morphological properties of the units with which it combines. In the example understand the prefix under- combines with the verb stand, which transmits to the whole word both its grammatical category and its irregularities. Some morphologists believe that this is due to the fact that prefixes do not carry with them information about their grammatical category, unlike derivational suffixes such as -ness, -ize or -ly. In this sense, derivational prefixes are related to inflectional affixes, although their role is very different from other points of view, as we will see in detail in Chapter 4. 3.2.2 THE POSITION OF THE HEAD Consider a language like English. Derivational suffixes can be heads and appear to the right of the word; prefixes show up to its left and cannot be heads; in the same way a compound such as strawberry field has its head to the right. The generalization that can emerge from these data has led to a body of work about whether heads inside morphological structures always occupy the same position. Williams (1981) and also DiSciullo and Williams (1987) propose that a property of morphological structures is that the head is always its rightmost constituent. Consider the following cases (12). (12) a. [high]A - [school]N b. [re] - [write]V c. [lonely]A - [ness]N

→ → →

[[high]A[school]N]N [re[write]V]V [[loneli]Aness]N

This generalization has been explained by proposing a hypothesis, the Right-Hand Head Rule (RHHR; Williams 1981), which states that the head of a word is always its rightmost constituent. Several crucial problems for the RHHR have been identified in the domain of compounding, so that today its status as a universal is dubious. Although in Germanic languages it is generally true that compounds consistently have their head to the right (13), Romance languages generally have their head to the left (14). (13) a. (Ge.) Herz-krank heart-sick, ‘love sick’ b. (No.) kjærlighets-dikt love-poem, ‘love poem’ c. (En.) man wolf

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(14) a. (Fr.) bateau mouche boat - fly, ‘excursion boat’ b. (Sp.) papel moneda paper - money, ‘money paper, bill’ c. (It.) uomo lupo man - wolf, ‘wolfman’ It seems that the RHHR cannot be considered a universal property of morphological structures. How can this variation be accounted for? One possibility is to propose that the position of the head is a parameter, that is, not a universal property but a property which can be different in different language families but always has a fixed value in a given language. Germanic languages fix this parameter to the right, while Romance languages fix it to the left. However, this also proves to be a simplification of the data. A parameter is fixed inside a given language once and for all, in such a way that if a language sets the position of the head to the left, this should apply to all of its words. This is not always the case. According to the information contained in the MorboComp database, which contains a sampling of compounds belonging to languages of different linguistic areas, the position of the head is the following (where Romance, Germanic, Slavic and Eastern Asia languages are distinguished). (15) Right Left

General % 66.7 6.8

Rom. % 40.7 20.3

Germ. % 87.0 1.9

Slav. % 61.9 6.0

E. Asia % 57.5 6.8

This suggests that, at least on the surface, it may be plausible to propose that the head is by default the rightmost element; however, left-headed compounds are attested in all of the linguistic areas proposed. This result is unexpected if the position of the head is said to be a parameter, as we would then expect the values to be 100 per cent or very close to that value. Some languages correlate the position of the head with the nature of the grammatical categories involved. In Chinese, for instance, when two morphemes are combined inside a compound (Chapter 6), the head is found to the left if the word is a verb but appears to the right if the compound is a noun (Packard 2000). 3.2.3 BINARY BRANCHING It has been claimed that another property of morphological structures is that, when units combine with each other, they combine in pairs and never in triplets or bigger sets. This is known as the binary branching hypothesis. Binary branching has been proposed as a property of grammatical structures; the assumption is that the relationship established between any pair of units within a structure needs to be unambiguously stated, and different from the relationship that any of the two units establish with a third one.This need bans a structure such as the one in (16), where four units are combined with each other without creating

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intermediate constituents, in favour of the one in (17), where in each step only two branches are created. Notice that in the structure in (16) the relationship that A has with B is identical to the one that it has with C and D. A

(16) A

(17)

B

C

D

A A

B

B

C

C

D

The structure in (16) only states that A is the head of the structure, but it does not give any hierarchical ordering between B, C and D with respect to each other. We will see, however, that it is far from clear that all morphological structures have binary branching; the phenomenon known as parasynthesis (see §3.3.5)  illustrates a situation where the structure may be interpreted as ternary branching. 3.3 ARGUMENTS AGAINST MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURES The existence of morphological structures is not uncontroversial and, indeed, a number of proposals have been made in the morphological literature to argue that words do not have an internal structure. In this section we will present the most influential theory that argues for this view, and then several phenomena that present problems for morphological structures. 3.3.1 A- MORPHOUS MORPHOLOGY The A-Morphous Morphology Theory, proposed by Anderson (1992), extensively argues that words do not have internal structure. Anderson gives a number of arguments against analyses that propose internal structure in words. We have seen that a structure is defined as a set of units organized in a particular way. Thus, a prerequisite for having a structure is identifying a set of units that can be organized. This commits a theory that argues for word-internal structure

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to an IA view of words (§2.3). Anderson’s first argument against the existence of word-internal structures is that the relevant units, morphemes, do not exist. Anderson’s proposal rejects the IA view of morphology on the basis of the problems that the classic notion of morpheme encounters in real analysis. Anderson’s view of morphology is realizational in the sense presented in §2.3., that is, a system where there are no one-to-one correspondences between the meaning and the form of a word. In a system like this, the meaning of a complex word cannot be established by identifying smaller units which contribute their meanings to the whole. Remember the case of cranberry morphemes (§2.3.3), as in cranberry, where two distinct units could be identified (cran- and -berry) but the meaning cannot be explained by combining the meaning of these units, mainly because one of them does not have any meaning outside of the word (cran-). A-morphous morphology proposes that word meaning cannot be reconstructed in that way precisely because the units that we have segmented are not real. The word cannot be divided into smaller units, and, by implication, it is impossible to identify any internal structure. A-morphous morphology provides a second argument to show that the intuitions of a speaker about meaning–form correlations are not reliable. The argument has to do with phonoaesthemes, that is, sequences of sounds which evoke a particular meaning. Anderson notices that words such as slide, slip, slither, slink and slippery share, in the intuition of most speakers, a part of their meaning and a phonological sequence, /sl/, but it would not be justified to propose that sl- is a morpheme in English. How are words related to each other? In some cases, though, speakers have the intuition that a word can be segmented into two or more units, each one of them with a clear meaning contribution, as in our previous example, undecidable. A-morphous morphology answers that the intuitions of the speaker are due to the fact that speakers relate whole words to each other. A speaker who feels that undecidable has word-internal structure does so because she feels that it is possible to identify pieces with constant meaning (un- ‘negation’, -able ‘can be X’ . . . ). Nonetheless, the reason why speakers feel this way is because they relate undecidable to other words with similar sequences of sounds at the beginning (un-) and at the end (-able), correlated with some shared aspects of meaning. However, from here it does not follow that these sequences of sounds need to be segmented as units. The same relations in shape and meaning could be explained by relating whole words to each other. Let us see how relations between words are accounted for in a-morphous morphology. This is achieved through derivational rules. Let us take the word discontentedness. In morphological description, we want to be able to state that this word is related to content through two intermediate steps, discontent and discontented. The proposal is that content and discontent are related through a derivational rule (the dis- derivational rule) as in (18a); discontent and discontented are related through another derivational rule (the -ed derivational rule) (18b) and so on until we reach the most

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complex form (18c). In this way, only the base of the word and the word itself are related through the rule, but not the previous steps. (18) a. content – [derivational rule 1] → discontent b. discontent – [derivational rule 2] → discontented c. discontented – [derivational rule 3] → discontentedness The sequence in (18) explains the relations between the words, but, crucially, it does not claim that inside the word discontentedness we can find the words content, discontent and discontented. What is the advantage of this proposal, in which relationships are not established between morphemes but between whole words? Let us take the word destructible. According to the a-morphous morphology theory, the meaning of this word is understood because the word is related to words such as edible, eligible or erodible, which also express the quality of being able to undergo a particular action. However, by relating the whole words to each other, and not claiming that they share a unit, an a-morphous morphology analysis does not have to claim that units such as ed-, eligor erod- are segmented as English morphemes, something which is welcome, as most speakers would hesitate to acknowledge that these are morphemes in their lexicon. This procedure of relating words by derivational rules and not by claiming that specific units are added to them inside a structure can also account for meaning ambiguities. The semantic ambiguity that we discussed in §3.1.1 – the Spanish word inutilizable, which can be ‘can be made useless’ or ‘cannot be made useful’ – would be analyzed as an effect of the interplay between the derivational rules involved in the formation of the word. The theory would claim that the word inutilizable is semantically ambiguous because it can be related to two different words by two different derivational rules. The first meaning (‘can be made useless’) is explained by relating the word to the word inutilizar (‘to make useless’) by a -ble derivational rule (19a). The second meaning (‘cannot be made useful’) is accounted for by relating the word to utilizable (‘can be made useful’) via an in- derivational rule (19b). (19) a. inutiliza – [derivational rule 1] → inutilizable b. utilizable – [derivational rule 2] → inutilizable Other consequences of the absence of word-internal structure If a structure is used to represent a complex word, the whole history of the word is represented in that structure. In a structural representation, the word discontentedness literally contains the words content, discontent and discontented. With the a-morphous proposal, in contrast, only the last step – that is, the word that the rule has produced – is represented. Anderson notices that, in morphology, it has been shown that only the information contained in the outer layer of the word is accessible to morphology and to syntax (see also §7.2). In other words, the rule that derives discontentedness from discontented only takes into account the fact that discontented is an adjective, and ignores the fact that this adjective has been derived from a noun with a prefix. The same goes for syntax: when syntax uses the word discontentedness,

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it treats it in the same way as other nouns denoting abstract properties, such as beauty or glory, which have not been derived from any other word. In other words, the selection that a rule makes is strictly local, that is, it only makes reference to the immediate context and not to the previous steps that led to that context. A-morphous morphology argues that if these previous steps are represented in the internal structure of a word, it comes as a surprise that morphological and syntactic operations systematically ignore them. In contrast, if there are no internal structures in words, the fact that these previous steps are ignored follows from the simple fact that they are not represented in any way. Theories of morphology that argue in favour of word-internal structures need to propose additional principles to explain why that structure is not accessible to syntax. The phenomena subsumed under the Generalized Lexicalist Hypothesis – all the cases where it is shown that syntax cannot access internal components of a word, which will be presented in §7.2 – follow naturally if words lack an internal structure. The absence of morphological structures: An empirical case Anderson (1992) observes that the notion of ‘word-internal structure’ would be proven if there were evidence that morphological operations are sensitive to the existence of distinct units inside the word. Aronoff ’s (1976) analysis of truncation seemed to suggest precisely that. Truncation is the process by which a segment of the base is cancelled when another segment is added, as, for example, in demonstrable (not *demonstratable), where the -ate ending of the verb demonstrate has disappeared following the addition of -able. Aronoff claimed that only whole morphemes could be truncated, and this seemed to be evidence that a morphological operation is sensitive to units inside the word. However, Anderson argues that what is truncated is not necessarily a morphological unit, but just a phonological segment which may or may not correspond to a traditional morpheme. The segments which disappear in the pairs in (20) – taken from Corbin (1987) by Anderson –are not in fact generally considered morphemes in French: -us, -um, -ide, -ain. (20) a. virus – viral; cactus – cactée; rectum – rectal b. stupide – stupéfier – stupeur c. certain – certitude A-morphous morphology has it as its central idea that morphemes cannot be identified inside a word, and, therefore, that structures are impossible inside words. However, some other phenomena constitute problems for the existence of wordinternal structures even if the existence of morphemes is assumed. In the following subsections we will review these phenomena. 3.3.2 EXOCENTRICITY It is a property of any structure to contain a head, the most important unit, which is responsible for imposing its properties on the whole object. Exocentricity is a situation in which none of the units that can be segmented inside a word is responsible

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for the properties that the word exhibits. In these cases, it has been proposed that the word lacks a head and, therefore, it is dubious whether there is an underlying structure in that object. Exocentricity has been studied especially in the domain of compounding, so we will concentrate on these cases here. The two cases presented in (21) have been claimed to illustrate exocentricity in compounding, though for different reasons. (21) a. to grandstand b. pick pocket The case in (21a) is exocentric because the unit that seems to impose its grammatical category (verb) on the whole object does not impose the rest of its properties on the word. The participle of grandstand is not grandstood, which is surprising if the head of the construction is the verb stand, whose participle is stood. This case is to be contrasted with understand, derived from stand by the prefix under-. The compound in (21b) is exocentric in the sense that none of its elements can explain the semantics of the word: a pick pocket is a kind of thief, and thus a kind of human being, not a kind of pocket or a kind of pick. Also, the word is a noun, but the unit which is also a noun inside the compound (pocket) is an unlikely candidate for the head of the structure, as it does not seem to be responsible for introducing pick – rather the contrary, as the gloss would be ‘someone who picks the pockets of other people’, not ‘a pocket used to pick’ or something similar. Williams (1981) proposed that these objects are created through exocentric rules, that is, rules that transform the properties of the object, but do not add any new unit that introduces these properties. However, accepting exocentric rules amounts in practice to accepting that some words do not have a complete morphological structure. As we can see, exocentricity is used in practice to label all the situations where the properties that an object has are not the immediate reflection of the properties of one, and only one, of its units. For this reason, it seems appropriate to classify the different kinds of exocentricity depending on the kind of property that shows the mismatch. We will discuss, in turn, category features, semantic features, and morphological features such as whether a verb is irregular or regular, or to which gender it belongs. Mismatches with category features Cases have been reported where apparently none of the constituents transmits its grammatical category to the word. The situation has been identified – to the best of our knowledge – in all languages, and plenty of these cases have been found in languages such as Chinese or Vietnamese. For illustration, consider the Chinese examples in (22). (22) a. cái-feng b. guăng-gào

cut - sew, ‘tailor’ wide - announce, ‘advertisement’

In (22a), we obtain a noun by combining two verbs; in (22b), the noun is obtained by combining an adjective and a verb. The category cannot come, thus, from either of the two constituents of the compound.

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It could be argued that, as Chinese has an impoverished morphology, we do not have direct morphological evidence about the grammatical category of the units in a particular compound. However, this mismatch is also found in languages with richer morphological marking. In these languages it is possible to judge the grammatical category of the constituents from their morphological make-up. One case is found in Romance languages, in nominal compounds with agentive or instrumental meaning, built with a verbal stem and a noun interpreted as the semantic patient of the verb (23). (23) a. It. porta-lettere carry-letters, ‘postman’ b. Sp. abre-cartas open-letters, ‘letter opener’ The noun in the internal structure of the compound cannot be considered the head on semantic grounds, because ‘letters’ cannot be seen as the agent of the action. The verbal stem cannot be responsible for the category of the word, although its semantic contribution is closer to being the semantic head of the word. Neither of the two units, then, seems responsible for the grammatical category of the compound. VN compounds in Romance are plausible candidates for illustrating categorial exocentricity. Mismatches with semantic features The traditional view is that the head of a compound imposes its semantic type on the whole word, in such a way that the compound denotes a hyponym (that is, a particular type of entity inside a bigger class) of the class of objects denoted by the head. This generalization is captured by the IS A rule (Allen 1978): a blackbird, for example, ‘is a’ bird. The intuition behind the IS A rule is that, inside a compound, the constituent which is not the head has as its semantic role that of specifying the denotation of the head. Therefore, in a compound such as blackbird the non-head, black, defines a subclass of bird, which is the denotation of the head. Different situations have been identified where the compound does not follow the IS A rule. The first case refers to co-compounds (Wälchli 2005). Co-compounds (§6.2.4) are compounds where two words – normally of the same grammatical category – which share substantial parts of their semantics are combined together to denote their hyperonym (that is, a superordinate class that includes two or more classes). For example, in Tok Pisin (Mühlhäusler 1979), the compound brata-susa ‘brother-sister’ denotes ‘siblings’. The concept ‘sibling’ is not a subclass of brothers or sisters. It is the superordinate class that includes both classes. The question with this class of counterexamples to the IS A rule is whether we must take these compounds to be exocentric or rather need to define semantic headedness in a way that also covers co-compounds. It seems odd to say that the meaning ‘sibling’ cannot be derived from the combination of the word referring to sister and the one referring to brother. Another relevant case refers to some compounds containing adjectives and nouns, such as paleface, big- mouth, pretty-face, etc. Notice that a paleface is not a type of face, but a class of human beings. These compounds do not follow the IS A rule. However,

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in this case it is also possible to find a way to connect the meaning of the word to that of its constituent parts. Booij (2002) has called this class of word metonymical compounds. All human beings have faces and faces are a prominent part of what we define as a human being. Therefore, the noun ‘face’ can be used to denote, by a semantic association based on the proximity of two concepts, a human being described by a particularly salient property of her or his face. If we accept’s proposal, then, the pale face types of compound have a semantic head which, perhaps not accidentally, is also the constituent that defines the grammatical category of the word, only this semantic head is interpreted via a metonymical relationship. There are also, however, clear cases of semantic exocentricity, next to these intermediate cases. This exocentricity is expected, because a crucial property of words – and, in general, of units stored in the lexicon – is that they may develop demotivated meanings which are underivable from the meaning of their parts. Such examples are frequently words which belong to older stages of the language. For instance, in Spanish, the compound pati-difuso, lit. ‘leg-fuzzy’, has a meaning, ‘puzzled’, which does not seem easily derivable by metonymy or any other semantic operation from its internal parts. It can safely be said, then, that pati-difuso lacks a semantic head, but the question is whether this property altogether denies the existence of structure or can be explained by some specific lexical information, as we will see in §8.6. Mismatches with morphological features Sometimes the constituent that defines the category of the compound – and also its semantics – does not transmit its morphological properties to the word. Consider the pale face class in Romance languages. In this family of languages, gender is lexically defined for each noun (§4.3.1). The translation of skin head in Italian, testa rasata, should be expected to be a feminine word. The reason is that the constituent, testa ‘head’, which defines the grammatical category of the compound, is feminine: for instance the adjective rasat-a ‘hairless’ agrees with it in feminine. This is not how the compound behaves, however. It is not restricted to the feminine form, as it can be used as a masculine noun and combine with the determiner il (il testa rasata), restricted to masculine nouns. In the same kind of compounds, Spanish also shows mismatches. The compound relaciones públicas ‘public relations officer’ contains the feminine plural noun relaciones ‘relations’. This constituent acts as the categorial head, as it is the only noun inside the compound. However, the compound can be used as a masculine singular noun: it can combine with el, the masculine singular determiner, without changing the form of the noun constituent (el relaciones públicas ‘the public relations officer’). Therefore, this class of compounds is morphologically exocentric in Italian and Spanish. 3.3.3 BRACKETING PARADOXES A crucial property of a structure is that both the formal and the semantic properties of the word need to be represented in the structure. For this reason, the situations where the semantic and the formal properties of an object do not coincide are problematic for the idea that words have internal structure. These situations are known as

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bracketing paradoxes (Williams 1981, Beard 1991). There are at least three kinds of bracketing paradox. One kind of bracketing paradox is the situation in which the formal properties of one of the units requires it to combine with a particular base, but the meaning of the word suggests that it combines with a unit smaller than the base. Take the word international. The formal properties of the word require the prefix inter- to combine with the adjective national, as the word *internation does not exist in English. This structure is represented in (24a). However, this structure gives the wrong semantics for the word, ‘relation between at least two national things’. The word means more precisely ‘among nations’. Thus, as far as the meaning of the word goes, the prefix does not combine with the adjective national, but with the noun nation from which national is formed (as in the structure in (24b)). However, (24b) is impossible on formal grounds, because, the prefix cannot combine directly with the noun nation, as *internation does not exist, and this structure contains inside it this impossible word. Thus, the two possible structures make wrong predictions at some level. (24) a. [inter [[nation]N al]A]A b. [[inter[nation]N]N al]A Another kind of paradox comes when a unit combines with a word but semantically modifies not only that word, but a bigger structure in which the word is included. Consider the expression Vulgar Latinist. This does not refer to a Latinist who happens to be vulgar, but to someone who studies Vulgar Latin. This requires the suffix -ist to combine with the whole phrase Vulgar Latin, and not only with the noun Latin, because that would give us the wrong semantics. However, it is generally assumed that one of the properties of affixes is that they cannot combine with phrases, but only with morphological objects (§7.2.1). The last kind of paradox that we will consider requires taking into account phonological factors. In the case of unhappier, there is a paradox in the sense that the meaning of the adjective (‘more unhappy’) requires the suffix -er to combine with the trisyllabic adjective unhappy. However, it is generally the case in English that trisyllabic adjectives require the adverb more in the comparative. Avoiding this phonological infraction implies proposing that -er combines with happy, and then un- (the prefix that means negation) combines with happier. However, this gives the wrong semantics, as it predicts the meaning ‘not more happy’, which is not how speakers interpret this word. There is no analysis for bracketing paradoxes in the general case, that is, an analysis that covers the three kinds of paradox that we have described here. The analyses that try to fit them inside a structure usually involve relaxing some of the formal conditions imposed on affixes, such as allowing them to combine with some phrases provided that they are inside the lexicon – as in Vulgar Latin – or allowing them to combine with words which are non-existent, yet possible and grammatical in the language (Corbin 1987). Sometimes, movement internal to the word has been argued for (Pesetsky 1985) in order to give an account of the interpretation without infracting the formal requisites of the affix; for example, the suffix -er could combine with happy, and then, following addition of un-, change its position inside the word so

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that it takes scope over the negative prefix. There is no analysis of these constructions which is accepted by all authors without dispute. 3.3.4 DOUBLE BASE The structure of a complex word represents the derivational history of the word, such that the structure contains the forms to which the word is semantically and formally related. For this reason, when a word is semantically related to a word from which it cannot have been formally derived, the structural account encounters difficulties. This situation is known as double base, because two different bases seem to be necessary to account for the properties of a word: one to capture its semantics and one to capture its form. The following cases illustrate the situation in Spanish: although the nouns in (25a) are formed by adding the suffix -ncio/-ncia to the verb represented in (25b), they are interpreted as the abstract quality associated with the adjectives or participles in (25c). However, it is not clear that the nouns in (25a) can be derived from the adjectives in (25c). (25) a. [[cansa]ncio], [[abunda]ncia], tired-ness, abund-ance, b. cansa-, abunda-, ignoratire, abound, ignore c. [[cansa]do], [[abunda]nte], tir-ed, abund-ant,

[[ignora]ncia] ignor-ance

[[ignora]nte] ignor-ant

3.3.5 PARASYNTHESIS The phenomenon known as parasynthesis constitutes a problem for morphological structures because it casts doubt on one of its crucial properties, namely binary branching. Remember that non-binary branching was rejected before on the grounds that when more than two units are combined at a time the relationship which is established between them is not unambiguously stated. Parasynthesis is the situation where two different affixes – normally a prefix and a suffix – seem to be added simultaneously to the same base. One example of this is the Spanish verb engrandecer ‘to enlarge’, from the adjective grande ‘big’. Neither the set formed by the base and the suffix (a hypothetical verb *grandecer) nor that which includes the prefix and the base (a hypothetical adjective *engrande) constitutes a word in Spanish. In consequence, if it is assumed that only existing words can form the basis for further derivation, one is forced to conclude that the verb engrandecer has been formed by adding two units at the same time, the prefix en- and the suffix -ece, to the base grande, as represented in (26a), where three units, and not two, have been put together. The same structure, with a zero suffix, has also been proposed in English for words such as enlarge (27b); in this way, the analysis avoids saying that the prefix en- is responsible for the category change, since in English prefixes generally do not have this ability.

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(26) a. [en [grand(e)]A ece]V b. [en [large]A Ø]V It is crucial in parasynthesis that the combination with only one of the two affixes does not produce an existent word in the language. In other words, English discontented is not a case of parasynthesis, because the root and the prefix form an existent word (discontent); equally, the root and the suffix form one (contented). Different proposals have been made to avoid the ternary structure in (26). One of the most widely accepted is to consider the prefix and the suffix to be a discontinuous morpheme, a circumfix (§1.2.1). In this way, the structure would be binary branching, as only two units, [en . . . ece] and [grande], are combined. A phonological property of the first unit would force it to appear around the base and not only to one of its sides. A variation of this analysis, framed in the DM approach, is to consider these discontinuous affixes as single units in the structure which are forced, by a process called fission, to materialize as two different morphemes. More information about this operation is given in §8.2.4. The analysis of parasynthesis as a circumfix, however, has an empirical problem. Notice that the circumfix that should be proposed in the case of engrandecer has a second part which is identical to a Spanish suffix (27) and a first part that, again, is identical to a Spanish prefix (28). The fact that these units exist independently of each other suggests that it is not accurate to propose that a circumfix is responsible for the verb engrandecer. (27) palid-ece fade (from pálid-o ‘pale’) (28) en-frente in-front (‘in front’, from frente front) Another analysis of the parasynthetic formations that is compatible with the binary branching hypothesis can be found in Scalise (1983), where it is proposed that first the suffix is added, transforming the base (a noun or an adjective, as grande) into a verb (grandecer, which would be a possible but non-existent word in Spanish), and only then is the prefix added (engrandecer). The weak side of this analysis is that it has to postulate an intermediate phase with a possible but non-existent word (by hypothesis, grandecer), a possibility that some linguists accept but others deny. A variation of this analysis, applied to cases like enlarge, can be found in Neelemann and Schipper (1992). EXERCISES 1. Explain why the following words have been claimed to be exocentric. From which perspective are they exocentric? Is it possible to analyze some of these words as endocentric? Provide similar examples in another language of your choice. know-nothing, white-collar, see-saw, bacon ’n’ eggs 2. In the following list of English words, determine which ones are parasynthetic.

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Explain your answer and produce similar examples in another language you are familiar with. kind-hearted, impoverishment, outstanding, dishearten, aerodynamics, disembowelled 3. The following English words have been considered bracketing paradoxes. Explain how the words are formed in order to account for their formal properties, and then compare the order of operations necessary to account for their meaning. Can you find similar examples of bracketing paradoxes in another language of your choice? molecular biologist, supernatural, unluckier 4. (a) is the structure of the word impersonal in English. Explain how this structure gives an account of the formal and semantic properties of the word, as well as of possible and impossible formations related to this word in English. Compare it to the structure in (b) and the sequence in (c) and explain what incorrect predictions they make. a. [im [[person]al]] b. [[im[person]] al] c. [ [im] [person] [al]] 5. Take a set of morphologically related words in a language of your choice and explain how the meaning–form relationships in them would be accounted for in (a) a structural approach, (b) the a-morphous morphology theory and (c) CM (remember §2.4.2). FURTHER READING Earlier accounts of the meaning–form relationship inside words by means of an internal structure are found in Siegel (1974) and Selkirk (1982); an opposing view is presented in Matthews (1972), Aronoff (1976) and Anderson (1992, forthcoming). More recent work in the structure of complex words includes Koenig (1999), Hale and Keyser (2002) and DiSciullo (2005), where morphological structures are organized in standard tree structures. Among the recent works that question the existence of word-internal structures are Stump (2001), Singh and Starosta (2003) and Sadler and Nordlinger (2004). The notion of a head has received a great deal of attention in morphological theory: Williams (1981), Trommelen and Zonneveld (1986) and Scalise (1988b), the last of which pays special attention to the position of heads; also Zwicky (1984) and Hoeksema (1988, 1992), specifically about the relation between the notions of syntactic head and morphological head. Studies of category-changing prefixes include Neeleman and Schipper (1992), Drijkoningen (1999) and Amiot (2004). Those further interested in the notion of exocentricity are advised to read Jackendoff (1975), Scalise and Guevara (2006) and Bauer (2008a), the last of which focuses on the specific case of compounds, where most of the discussion has concentrated. Parasynthesis has received some attention, especially in Romance languages. For particularly influential analyses, see Corbin (1980, 1987) for French; Scalise (1983) and Crocco and Iacobini (1993) for Italian; Schroten (1997) for Spanish. There is extensive literature on bracketing paradoxes. Strauss (1982) and Pesetsky (1985) constitute early attempts at analyzing some of them structurally; the second

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analysis started a vigorous controversy, as witnessed in Sproat (1985, 1992), Kitagawa (1986) and Hoeksema (1987). Alternative analyses which give up the traditional notion of structure were provided in Spencer (1988), Zwicky (1988), Beard (1991), Stump (1991), Carstairs-McCarthy (1992) and Becker (1993). Inkelas (1990) approaches bracketing paradoxes by proposing that words and phrases have parallel structures, and Cohn (1989) analyzes them as the result of a particular interaction between morphology and phonology. More recent analyses include Crysmann (1999), Müller (2003) and Booij (2007), the last in CM.

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4 INFLECTIONAL PROCESSES

4.1 PROPERTIES OF INFLECTION A morphological operation is considered inflectional when it fulfils two main criteria. The first one is that it does not change the grammatical category of the base, its meaning or the number or class of constituents selected by it. When the noun car appears in its plural form, cars, it is still a noun and it denotes the same object as before, only now the object is a group of objects. The difference between car and cars depends on the syntactic context in which each form appears: the first in a singular context, the second in a plural context. This leads us to the second property of inflection: inflectional processes do not produce new words, but give us the forms that a single word can adopt in the different syntactic contexts where it appears. Inflection can be understood as a morphological operation that adapts a word to a particular syntactic context manipulating properties like number, gender, case, aspect, tense or mood. Cases where only one of the two criteria are fulfilled are generally difficult to categorize as inflection or derivation; we explore them in §5.7. Inflection and dictionaries This characterization of inflection has several consequences. Consider one: as inflection does not create new words, the inflectional forms of a word are generally not listed in the dictionary. Independently of how complete a dictionary of English is, the form cars will not appear there as a separate lemma. This is so because the plural formation does not alter the grammatical category of the word or the kind of object that it denotes; consequently, any speaker that knows what a car is must also be able to work out what cars stands for. Inflection and productivity A second consequence is that, as syntax is assumed to be maximally productive, the productivity of an inflectional process should also be maximal, because inflection gives the form of words in different syntactic contexts. In general, if a process is inflectional, all words belonging to a syntactic class should be able to undergo this process. Inflection and syntax Inflection closely interacts with syntax, as opposed to derivation or compounding. This can be seen in agreement processes. The inflectional properties of a given noun 66

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(see (1), from Spanish) are copied under agreement with adjectives and other noun modifiers; however, the derivational morphemes of a word, like the agent morpheme in (2), are never copied under agreement. (1) l-as precios-as cas-as the-fem.pl. beautiful-fem.pl. house-fem.pl. (2) l(*-dor)-as precios-(*dor)-as the-Agent-fem.pl. beautiful-Agent-fem.pl. ‘the beautiful cheerleaders’

anima-dor-as cheer-Agent-fem.pl.

This means that some of the inflectional properties of a word are determined by the syntactic context. Consider a language where nouns show case inflection, like Russian. The morphological component is able to determine a great number of the properties of a noun (whether it is derived or not, some semantic and phonological characteristics, etc.), but prior to its insertion in a syntactic context, morphology is not able to know which one of all the case forms will be required by this context, as each of these cases matches a different set of syntactic functions (nominative case is used for the subject, accusative for a type of object, and so forth). The same happens with an adjective in a language like Spanish, where adjectives show morphological agreement with nouns. Until the adjective is inside a syntactic context, the morphology cannot determine which of the forms of the adjective will be required. This close interaction between inflection and syntactic processes has been interpreted by some Lexicalist theories (the so-called Weak Lexicalist theories) as a sign that inflection is not performed in the lexicon, but is a process performed in the syntax. The idea is that morphology forms a word – for instance, a Spanish adjective derived from a noun (3) – which is then introduced inside a syntactic context. However, when inflectional processes are involved, some of the properties are left undetermined by the morphology (which is what we try to convey in (3) with the notation ‘α’ in the place where the agreement markers of the adjective should be). Once inside a syntactic context, a syntactic rule adds the missing properties to the word, here adding those that mark gender and number agreement (4). (3) [fam-os-α] fam-ous-agr. (4) mujeres famos-as women famous-fem.pl. Syntax on its own will not be able to determine the form that the word adopts as an effect of this inflectional process. The shape of the segments used to perform agreement, or the unpredictable forms that the word might adopt when an inflectional process takes place (went, teeth), are determined by the lexicon. Thus, in inflection, according to Weak Lexicalism, there is a division of labour between syntax and the lexicon which is not required in derivation or compounding.

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Inflection and morpheme order The fact that inflection interacts with syntactic processes such as agreement has been related to the tendency of inflectional segments to appear in the outer layer of a word. In this outer layer of the word, the information will be accessible to syntax. Inflection, when marked with affixes, is generally external to derivation, as can be seen in (5a), for English, and the equivalent word in Spanish (5b). (5) a. runn-er-s b. corre-dor-es Inherent and contextual inflection There are exceptions, though, in which properties generally thought of as inflectional (for instance, number) do not appear in the outermost layer of a word or have unexpected effects in the semantic interpretation of the base. (6a) is a German compound and yet the number marking -er appears inside the word. (6b) has a non-predictable meaning (‘intelligence’, as in to have brains). (6) a. Kind-er-wagen child-pl.-carriage, ‘pram’ b. brains Such examples have led some to differentiate between two kinds of inflection: inherent and contextual (Booij 1996); such that the same morphological property can be inherent in one grammatical category and contextual in another category. Inherent inflection refers to cases where the choice of an inflectional form is determined by the speaker’s communicative intention when a word is used, and not by any recognizable syntactic context. In nouns, number is inherent inflection. The choice of whether a noun appears in the singular or the plural is not determined by any formal process of agreement, but depends on whether the speaker intends to refer to a single entity or to a group of entities when using that word. The cases in (6) are instances of inherent inflection. As the inflection in these examples is not directly determined by the syntactic context and is not due to agreement, it is not required to be external to the word; as it is motivated by the meaning, it can have specific semantic effects which might require that the word be listed in the dictionary. Contextual inflection, conversely, is purely motivated by the syntactic context. The clearest example of this is the agreement displayed by a word inside a whole phrase or sentence. Number agreement in verbs, for instance, is contextual inflection. The third person singular -s in the English present verb appears in the outer layer of the word, and its presence is determined by agreement with the subject. Contextual inflection has all the properties expected of inflectional processes: it is in the outer layer of the word and does not trigger unexpected meanings of the word. Notice also that it is more frequent to find irregular forms for inherent inflection than for contextual inflection. Several nouns in English have a special plural form (women, mice, teeth, etc.); these kinds of irregularities, where the root of the word changes, are normally not used to mark the agreement of a word with the syntactic context. Verbs

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in English, with few exceptions (like the verb to be and other auxiliaries), do not use a special form to materialize the third person singular agreement. 4.2 INFLECTION AND GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES Inflection is unable to change the grammatical category of the base, and, precisely for this reason, the inflectional characteristics of each word are determined by the grammatical category of the base. In the Western linguistic tradition it has been customary to identify the different grammatical categories on the basis of their inflectional properties (as opposed to their prototypical meaning or their syntactic position). This tradition started in the second century bc, with the Greek grammarian Dionysius Thrax and his book Art of Grammar. It is crucial to mention, however, that this manner of defining grammatical categories through their inflectional characteristics cannot establish universal definitions of each category, which would make it possible to identify the categories in every language, independently of their typological properties. The reason is that the tradition in Western grammar built the definitions only on the basis of the inflectional properties of words in (some) Indo-European languages. Typological studies have shown repeatedly that, in different linguistic families, the range of properties expressed by inflection in each grammatical class can vary to a great extent. Here we will illustrate this variation by comparing the inflectional marks of the three major grammatical categories of noun, adjective and verb in five typologically diverse languages. This will show that inside a given language this criterion can be applied successfully to the identification of categories, but, at the same time, that it does not allow us to establish universal principles. 4.2.1 A COMPARISON OF FIVE LANGUAGES Table 4.1 gives a short overview of the inflectional properties of five unrelated languages: Spanish (which is a Romance language), Norwegian (Germanic), Classical Arabic (Semitic), Hungarian (Uralic) and the Native American language Navajo (Athabaskan). We consider only those properties expressed in regular forms with a morpheme, thus ignoring constructions involving suppletion (§4.4.3). The first fact that is illustrated by this comparison is that there is wide variation in the languages of the world with respect to which inflectional properties each category allows. There are some typical situations, such as nouns inflecting for number and verbs inflecting for tense or aspect, but these are tendencies more than real generalizations. Moreover, not even the grammatical categories that can be identified in one language are identical to those found in another one: the traditional description of Navajo is that the language lacks adjectives; to express the concepts denoted by this category in languages like English, Navajo uses verbs. Facts like these must be kept in mind when trying to establish generalizations about grammatical categories. With respect to the similarities mentioned, these seem to reflect a syntactic or semantic property more than a morphological one. For instance, the fact that verbs tend to inflect for aspect or tense reflects the fact that sentences are anchored in

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inflectional processes Overview of the inflectional properties of five unrelated languages

Language

Nouns

Adjectives

Verbs

Spanish (Indo- Gender: perr-o/perr-a European, ‘dog’, masc., fem. Romance)

Norwegian (IndoEuropean, Germanic)

Classical Arabic (Semitic)

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Degree: bueno/buenAspect: canta-ba/cant-é ísimo ‘good’, positive ‘sing’, imperfective degree, superlative past, perfective past degree Number: papel/papel-es Agreement in gender: Tense: canta/canta-rá ‘paper’, sg., pl. buen-o/buen-a ‘good’, ‘sing’, present, future masc., fem. Agreement in number: Mood: cant-a/cant-e pobre/pobre-s ‘poor’, ‘sing’, indicative, sg., pl. subjunctive Finiteness: canta/canta-r ‘sing’, finite, non-finite Agreement in person: canta/canta-s ‘sing’, 3rd, 2nd Agreement in number: canta/canta-n ‘sing’, 3rd sg., 3rd pl. Tense: snakke/snakke-t Gender: venn/vennDegree: dyr/dyr-ere ‘talk’, present, past inne ‘friend’, masc., ‘expensive’, positive fem. degree, comparative degree Number: hund/hund-er Agreement in gender: Finiteness: snakke-r/ ‘dog’, sg., pl. liten/lita/lite ‘small’, snakke ‘talk’, finite, masc., fem., neu. non-finite Definiteness: hund/ Agreement in number: Voice: snakke/snakke-s hund-en ‘dog’, dyr/dyr-e ‘expensive’, ‘talk’, active, passive indefinite, definite sg., pl. Agreement in definiteness: dyr/ dyre ‘expensive’, indefinite, definite Gender: ṭa:lib/ṭalib-at Degree: ṣaġi:ru/’aṣġaru Aspect: kataba/taktubu ‘write’, perfect, ‘student’, masc., fem. ‘small’, positive imperfect degree, comparative and superlative degree Agreement in gender: Mood: taktub-u/ Number: malikat/ ğamil/ğamil-a ‘nice’, taktub-a/taktub ‘write’, malikat-a:ni/ masc., fem. indicative, subjunctive, malika:tu ‘queen’, sg., jussive dual, pl. Agreement in number: Voice: kataba/kutiba Case: bayt-u/bayt-a/ ‘write’, active, passive mari:ḍata:ni/ bayt-i ‘house’, mari:ḍa:tun ‘sick’, nominative, dual, pl. accusative, genitive

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Table 4.1

(continued)

Language

Nouns

Adjectives

Verbs

Definiteness: baytu-n/ al-baytu ‘house’, indefinite, definite

Agreement in case: wa:si‘-u/wa:si‘-a ‘white’, nominative, accusative Agreement in definiteness: wa:si‘u-n/al-wa:si‘u ‘white’, indefinite, definite

Agreement in person: ’aktubu/taktubu ‘write’, 1st, 2nd

Hungarian (Uralic)

Navajo (Athabaskan)

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Agreement in number: ’aktubu/naktubu ‘write’, 1st sg., 1st pl.

Agreement in gender: katabta/katabti ‘write’, 3rd sg. masc., 3rd sg. fem. Number: kéz/kez-ek Degree: drága/drág-ább Tense: kérek/kér-t-em ‘ask for’, present, past ‘hand’, sg., pl. ‘dear’, positive degree, comparative degree Case: lámpa/lámpá-t Agreement in number: Mood: kérek/kér-j-ek ‘lamp’, nominative, magas/magas-ak ‘ask for’, indicative, accusative ‘tall’, sg., pl. subjunctive Finiteness: kér/kér-ni ‘ask Agreement in for’, finite, non-finite possession: táská-m/ táská-d ‘bag’, 1st sg. possessive, 2nd sg. possessive Agreement in person: kérek/kérsz ‘ask for’, 1st sg., 2nd sg. Agreement in number: kérek/kérünk ‘ask for’, 1st sg., 1st pl. Agreement in definiteness with the direct object: építettél/ építetted ‘build’, 2nd sg. past, definite, indefinite Number: ’ashki:/’ashi:ké Adjectives do not exist Aspect: nishááh/níyá ‘boy’, sg., pl. in this language ‘arrive’, imperfective, perfective Agreement in person Agreement in with the subject: possession: shi-tsi:’/ yishtin/nitin ‘freeze’, ni-tsi:’ ‘head’, 1st sg. 1st sg., 2nd sg. possessive, 2nd sg. possessive

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Table 4.1

(continued)

Language

Nouns

Adjectives

Verbs Agreement in number with the subject: yishtin/yi:tin ‘freeze’, 1st sg., 1st pl. Agreement in person with the object: yishteeh/nishteeh ‘put on the water’, 3rd sg. object, 2nd sg. object Agreement in number with the object: nishteeh/nihishteeh ‘put on the water’, 2nd sg. object, 2nd pl. object

time and verbs are generally core elements inside sentences. Even if these facts are universal, they are not immediately reflected in the morphology, because these properties do not necessarily have to be reflected as morphemes attached to the lexical category. Even if sentences are interpreted as anchored in time in a language like Chinese, this language chooses not to express this information as a morpheme attached to the verb. Instead, a separate word is used, thus not counting as inflection (cf. §2.5). (7) a. wŏ zài măi I PART buy ‘I am buying books’ b. wŏ măi shū I buy book(s) ‘I bought books’

shū book(s) le PART

4.2.2 NON- INFLECTED CATEGORIES: PREPOSITIONS, CONJUNCTIONS AND ADVERBS In addition to these major grammatical categories, the Western tradition identifies three other categories which cannot be differentiated by their morphological properties alone because, in the languages considered, they do not show any inflection. These are adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions. The differences that led to the division of these uninflected words into three classes are syntactic. Adverbs may occur as modifiers of other categories, but are not used to introduce other constituents (well in John speaks well or John is well fed); in contrast, prepositions and conjunctions are used to introduce new constituents and relate them to the previous structure.

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Prepositions relate nouns or pronouns to something else, as in A man with a hat. Conjunctions are able to relate whole sentences, as in John came and Anna left, Jack asked whether Louise was sick. This traditional characterization, however, is faced with counterexamples in some European languages, as a reminder of our general point that it is not possible to establish a universal association between categories and inflectional properties. For example, in Welsh, prepositions inflect for person, number and gender depending on the properties of the nominal with which they combine. The preposition ar ‘on’ shows the following forms: (8) 1st 2nd 3rd masc. 3rd fem.

Sg. arnaf arnat arno arni

Pl. arnom arnoch arnynt

As for conjunctions, it has been shown that in some varieties of Dutch and other continental West Germanic languages these words take agreement with the subject of the subordinate clause they introduce. The data in (9) illustrate this for South Hollandic Dutch (taken from Zwart 2006). (9) dat-e se that-agr. they ’that they play’

spel-e play-pl.

In conclusion, it might be possible to make generalizations in one language about how the grammatical categories behave with respect to inflection, but it is not easy to find universal principles in this respect. 4.3 DESINENCES AND THEME VOWELS IN GRAMMAR 4.3.1 THE STATUS OF GENDER AND THE NOTION OF DESINENCE The status of gender in the languages of the world is controversial. As opposed to number, which can be associated with a particular meaning (individuals, groups, pairs, etc.), gender is generally not systematically matched with any semantic interpretation. Its two most common values are called masculine and feminine, but it is clear that these labels do not necessarily represent the biological sex characteristics of an entity, as gender is also exhibited by inanimate objects where this categorization cannot be applied. From a semantic perspective, it does not make much difference that the moon is feminine in Italian and masculine in German, but it is certainly relevant for the grammar that the word for ‘moon’ is feminine in the first language (la luna) and masculine in the second (der Mond). Given these facts, gender values are viewed as systems, internal to the language, that formally classify the nouns into different subclasses. Sometimes semantic or phonological criteria are used for parts

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of this classification (Corbett 1991), but the assignment of each noun to a gender class is, in general, idiosyncratic. There are some other differences between number and gender apart from the fact that only the former clearly corresponds to a meaning notion. Number values seem to be limited crosslinguistically to five: singular, plural, dual (exactly two), trial (exactly three) and paucal (a small group); moreover, these values seem to be ordered in a hierarchy, such that languages that have trial usually also have dual, singular and plural, but languages that have singular and plural do not necessarily have dual or trial. In contrast, there is not an equivalent fixed set of gender values. Spanish has two in nouns, German has three and some Bantu languages, like Nguni, have more than a dozen. These values are not ordered with respect to each other; a language with two genders could select masculine and feminine, as Spanish does, or neuter and non-neuter, as Dutch does. Desinences In some languages it is necessary to differentiate gender from a morpheme that marks nouns as belonging to a specific noun class. This morpheme is called the desinence, and it is present, for example, in Spanish. The desinence does not contain the gender information of the noun, as illustrated in (10). (10) a. la the.fem. b. el the.masc. c. la the.fem. d. el the.masc. e. la the.fem. f. el the.masc.

man-o hand-des. pel-o hair-des. car-a face-des. dí-a day-des. frent-e forehead-des. puent-e bridge-des.

The data in (10) show that it is not true that the desinence -o always carries masculine gender or the desinence -a, feminine. The gender of the word is independent from this marker, because words carrying the marker -a can be masculine or feminine, and the same for those carrying -o or -e. These markers determine a particular word class, but do not give any information about the gender value of the noun – as manifested under agreement – or about its semantics. In languages with desinences, three different notions of ‘noun gender’ have to be differentiated: a) a semantic level, where some nouns show gender and desinence distinctions interpretable as biological gender differences; b) a morphological level, where nouns are accompanied by a specific marker – the desinence – that associates them with a particular class of nouns; and

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c) a syntactic level, where there is a gender value which is active in agreement processes. In a noun like niño/niña (‘boy’/‘girl’), the three levels seem to coincide in the information they provide us with, but in a feminine non-animate noun ending in -o, like mano ‘hand’, they need to be kept apart. The role of the desinence seems to be purely morphological. In fact, in languages where nouns have rich inflection (like Latin or Russian) the role of the desinence is to classify nouns into specific subparadigms: this marker determines the segments that mark, for instance, the number and the case of that noun. As an example, consider (11), taken from Latin. We have two nouns, differentiated by their desinence (-a- in the first case, -i- in the second), despite the fact that they are both feminine. The segment used to mark ablative case and plural number is different in the two cases (12). (11) a. ros-a rose-des., ‘rose’ b. nav-i boat-des., ‘boat’ (12) a. ros-is rose-ablative pl. b. nav-ibus boat-ablative pl. 4.3.2 THEME VOWELS In languages like Spanish and Italian, verbs have their own equivalent of the desinence: the theme vowel. Like desinences, theme vowels are morphological markers that do not determine the syntactic or semantic properties of the verb. That is, having a theme vowel -a- or -e- does not determine whether the verb is transitive or intransitive, whether its meaning is dynamic or stative, or any other similar notion. (13) gives an example from Spanish. (13) a. cant-a sing-ThV, ‘sing’ b. cog-e grab-ThV, ‘grab’ As happens with desinences, theme vowels are not copied under agreement processes, but they classify verbs into specific morphological classes that determine the specific segments that they will use to mark other inflectional properties. For instance, a verb like (14a), with the theme vowel -a-, uses the segment -ba- to mark the imperfective past, but a verb like (14b) uses the segment -a- for the same type of inflection (and, additionally, the -e- shows an allomorph -i- in this context).

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(14) a. cant-a-ba sing-ThV-imperfective past b. cog-í-a grab-ThV-imperfective past The existence of desinences and theme vowels, and their nature as purely morphological markers without any incidence in the syntax or the semantics of the word, have been one of the empirical phenomena that Lexicalist theories have used to argue against the possibility of building words in the syntax (§7.2). Lexicalist theories analyze these markers as morphomes (Aronoff 1994), that is, as markers that provide information that is only relevant for morphology, and as such they argue in favour of keeping morphology as a distinct component of the grammar. As an answer, some Constructionist theories, like DM, have proposed that desinences and theme vowels are not present when the word is built in the syntax. These theories agree that it is not possible to match desinences and theme vowels with any syntactic or semantic property, but in this framework they are treated as additional morphology which is added in the morphophonological representation of the word alone, and as such they can play a role in controlling allomorphy, but will never influence the meaning or the syntax of the word. This treatment of desinences and theme vowels as dissociated morphemes has been developed, for instance, in Oltra (1999) for Catalan. This author argues that languages like Spanish have a morphophonological constraint that forces every verb to be marked by a special morpheme – the theme vowel – and that this marking happens at the level of the phonological representation of the word, not at the level of its morphosyntactic structure. A rule in the form of (15) would state that whenever a verb is found, the phonological component has to introduce a theme vowel. (15) v → v + ThV 4.4 PARADIGMS Paradigm is a term which refers to the set of all the different forms that a word adopts depending on the grammatical characteristics that it shows in a syntactic context. Due to this association with the grammatical characteristics, paradigms are related to specific grammatical categories, because each category is frequently characterized by a distinct set of inflectional properties. The paradigm of the word dog in English is very simple and contains only two forms, dog – singular – and dogs – plural; each of the forms stands for a different set of grammatical properties, or cell, inside the paradigm. The paradigm of a verb contains different cells from the paradigm of a noun. A verb like write contains the forms write (for imperative, infinitive and most present forms), writes (for the third person singular of the present), wrote (for the past), written (for the participle) and writing (for the gerund). In languages with richer morphology than English, even if the cells are generally the same for all the words belonging to one category, the patterns of how these cells

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are materialized can differ depending on subdivisions established inside each grammatical category. In these languages, we have subparadigms. This is the case of conjugation classes, which are different patterns of materialization for a verbal paradigm inside a given language. Compare, in (16), the two different ways in which subjunctive mood is realized in Spanish, depending on the conjugation class of the verb. (16) cant-a ‘sing’, first conjugation

beb-e ‘drink’, second conjugation

1st sg.

cant-e

beb-a

2nd sg.

cant-e-s

beb-a-s

3rd sg.

cant-e

beb-a

1st pl.

cant-e-mos

beb-a-mos

2nd pl.

cant-é-is

beb-á-is

3rd pl.

cant-e-n

beb-a-n

In the verbs belonging to the subparadigm of the first conjugation, the present subjunctive is formed by adding the segment -e- (which replaces the theme vowel); in the verbs belonging to the second conjugation, the same form is created by replacing the theme vowel with -a-. The association of a verb with a particular subparadigm is morphologically marked by the theme vowel, -a- and -e- (§4.3.2). A verb is assigned to a conjugation class on the basis of this marking alone, and it has not been possible to establish semantic, syntactic or phonological explanations behind this system of classification. A desinence is a way of subdividing nouns into different morphological classes, without any direct syntactic, semantic or phonological rationale. In nouns, subparadigms are normally called declension classes. (17) illustrates two of them in Modern Russian. The desinence (null in the first case, -a in the second) determines which specific allomorphs the noun takes to express each one of the slots in the paradigm. Notice that both nouns are feminine, but still the declensions are different, which again shows that there is no direct correspondence between gender and desinence marking. (17) dver’-Ø ‘door’, third declension sestr-a ‘sister’, first declension Nominative sg.

dver’

sestra

Accusative sg.

dver’

sestri

Genitive sg.

dveri

sestry

Dative sg.

dveri

sestre

Prepositional sg.

dveri

sestre

Instrumental sg.

dverju

sestroi

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Paradigms as primitives or as derived notions in morphological theory As a descriptive term, ‘paradigm’ is used in descriptive grammars to refer to the set of inflectional forms of a word. However, theories of morphology differ with respect to the status that paradigms have in the organization of the morphological component that they propose. In WP theories, such as that in Stump (2001), paradigms are primitive objects which are used by morphology to organize the inflection of words, and to which specific rules in morphology make direct reference (as we will see in the next sections). Remember that in a WP theory, words are not decomposed into smaller units, such as morphemes. The primitive units of analysis are words, which are viewed as the way in which different sets of grammatical properties are realized in the morphology. Paradigms are the constructs that organize the correspondence between sets of features and specific forms of words, establishing systematic associations between forms and meanings in specific categories or subcategories. As morphemes are not isolated here, the notion of paradigm cannot be reduced to any other simpler object. Several pieces of evidence, which we will review in the following subsections, argue in favour of this view. The alternative would be to claim that paradigms are not primitive notions, but the list of forms that is obtained when a word is combined with all the different inflectional morphemes that it can take. In this view, used in IA theories, each morpheme adds to the word different grammatical properties required in the syntactic context. Once all the possible inflectional morpheme combinations are established for a particular word, we can organize them, descriptively, in a paradigm, but the paradigm is derived from the information added by individual morphemes. Consider the word stolom ‘with the table’ in Russian. In a WP theory, this is the form that fills the cell in the paradigm standing for singular instrumental for the noun stol; in an IA theory, the singular instrumental information is added to the noun by the morpheme -om, without direct reference to a paradigm. Reducing a paradigm to the sum of the information of all the inflectional morphemes that a word carries encounters the usual problems faced by IA theories (§2.3). Associating the inflectional properties with specific morphemes, and not with cells inside a paradigm, has the problem that, when there are no discrete segments associated with each inflectional property, null morphemes have to be postulated. This was already noted in Chomsky (1965). Given the German word Brüder, which stands for the genitive plural of the masculine noun Bruder, decomposing each one of these three inflectional properties (case, number and gender) in morphemes would force the segmentation in (18): (18) Brüder - Ø brother- masc.

-Ø -pl.

-Ø -genitive

In contrast, if the notion of paradigm is introduced here, these cases do not pose additional problems. Given a correspondence like the one in (19a), where the left side is a particular form of the paradigm and the set of features on the right side correspond to the inflectional features the word stands for, no null affixes are proposed.

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This kind of correspondence can be presented in the form of a rule that generates the specific form for a particular word. In WP theories this is captured by a realizational rule (19b). (19) a. Brüder ←→ [Masculine, Plural, Genitive] b. R(Bruder, [Masc., Pl., Gen]) = Brüder The alternative to both pure IA theories and WP theories is not to reduce the paradigm to the sum of all morphemes used, but to the sum of all the independent grammatical features contained in the cells. In other words, the alternative is to divide the set of properties on the right-hand side of (19a) into three independent features, each standing for one of the three grammatical properties presented here. These morphosyntactic features are independent from the phonological materialization that each word uses to spell them out, so the problem represented in (18) does not apply to the proposal. This is the solution generally proposed in IA theories. The idea is that, for instance, a noun is combined with syntactic features that determine its gender, its number and the case that is required by its grammatical function. The sum of these different features can then be spelled out by a single morpheme, or, as in the case of the noun Bruder, by a modification in the shape of the root, Brüder, but this materialization only informs us about the morphophonology of the segments involved. Despite the fact that Brüder is a cumulative exponent of a set of features, the features themselves are independent syntactic properties which do not need a paradigm to be defined. We will revisit this issue in relation to the Separation Hypothesis in §8.2.2. Extending the notion of paradigm to word formation It is worth noting, in any case, that inside WP approaches the notion of paradigm is not restricted to inflectional morphology. In contrast to the use of the term in traditional grammars, paradigms are also used to give an account of morphological derivation and sometimes even compounding. Notice that once the paradigm is introduced as a primitive, it gives us a powerful mechanism for associating different forms of words with sets of specific grammatical properties. If we extend the set of the grammatical properties that we include in the cells of the paradigm to more semantic notions such as agent, instrument, event noun, etc., which are normally understood as involved in word formation, we can also give an account of derivational processes via realizational rules. (20) shows a possible example of this, illustrated with the word destroy: (20) Agent noun

destroyer

Instrument noun

destructor

Event noun

destruction

Predisposition to

destructive

Nevertheless, other scholars argue that the notion of paradigm is not applicable to derivation, due to the lack of full productivity in the case of derivational processes

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(cf. §5.1). Not all verbs have a form for the notions that we have collected in (20). If we consider the verb to moderate, for instance, we find moderator and moderation, but most speakers lack the form *moderative. 4.4.1 SYNCRETISM Consider the forms in (21), which correspond to the present indicative and the imperfective past of a Spanish verb belonging to the first conjugation. (21) Present tense

Imperfective past tense

1st sg.

canto

cantaba

2nd sg.

cantas

cantabas

3rd sg.

canta

cantaba

1st pl.

cantamos

cantábamos

2nd pl.

cantáis

cantabais

3rd pl.

cantan

cantaban

In the present tense, each one of the forms corresponds to a different person and number combination. However, in the imperfective past, the same form, cantaba, stands for first person singular and third person singular. This situation, where the same form of a word fills two or more cells in a paradigm, is known as syncretism (also paradigmatic syncretism, in order to differentiate it from syntagmatic syncretism, another name given to the cumulative exponence presented in §2.3.2) There are two major proposals to account for syncretism. In WP theories, the phenomenon is accounted for with a rule that makes explicit reference to the paradigm: a rule of referral. This is, basically, a rule that states that the cell for a particular set of grammatical properties inside a paradigm is filled by the word form that realizes another set of properties inside the same paradigm. (22) illustrates this kind of rule, using the notation proposed in Stump (1993b), for the Spanish case just presented: (22) Rule of Referral [past, imperfective, 1st, sg] ([σ]) = [σ]/3rd, sg. The rule states that the form corresponding to the set of features Past, Imperfective, First Person and Singular is identical to the form used in the same paradigm to realize the third person singular slot. Rules of referral can be restricted to a specific conjugation class; this is not necessary in the account of the Spanish verb, because the same syncretism happens in the second (bebía ‘I or he drank’) and third conjugations (partía ‘I or he left’). Notice that a rule of referral can in principle relate any two cells inside a paradigm; syncretism is, as such, viewed as a purely morphological phenomenon without connections to syntax. The alternative used in DM – and some other IA theories – is to account for syncretism through feature impoverishment. The idea is that two sets of grammatical

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features are materialized by the same morpheme when the differences between the two sets are eliminated by a rule that erases the differentiating features. Assume that the difference between third and first person is obtained by different features. We can characterize third person with a [person] feature, and first person by adding to it the feature [speaker], meaning that the person refers to the author of an utterance. As such, the difference between first and third person could be captured by a different set of morphosyntactic features: [person, speaker] for the first, [person] for the third; the second person could be characterized by the set [addressee, person]. Assume that Spanish has a rule that states that, in the presence of the features [past, imperfective] for tense and aspect, the feature [speaker] has to be erased. This is a rule of impoverishment that removes a morphosyntactic feature from the representation before the form of the affix is determined. (23) states it like this: [speaker] becomes zero (that is: erase [speaker]) in the context [past, imperfective]. (23) [speaker] → Ø / ____ Past, Imperfective After the rule is applied, the third and the first person have the same feature content (24). (24) a. [speaker, b. [

person, person,

past, past,

imperfective] imperfective]

As now the two forms are non-distinct in their feature content, the same morphophonological form will be used to materialize them both. This rule does not make reference to a whole paradigm, but operates on individual sets of morphosyntactic features. Unlike a rule of referral, feature impoverishment predicts that syncretism will only happen between forms which have a similar feature content, so that feature erasure can give non-distinct forms. It also predicts that, whenever there is systematic syncretism between two elements, the syncretic form will be less specified in its featural content. In our case, the form that is used to replace another one (the third person) is the one that contains fewer features than the form that is replaced (the first person). Rules of referral, in contrast, are a more powerful procedure which allows syncretism between any two cells in the paradigm. 4.4.2 DEFECTIVENESS Inflection is generally expected to be maximally productive. This is indeed the typical situation, but there are exceptions, cases where words lack one or more inflectional forms. For example, in English, modal verbs – such as must or shall – lack a gerund form; *musting or *shalling do not exist and there is no other form in the paradigm that replaces them. Another relevant case is the one of pluralia tantum and singularia tantum nouns. Pluralia tantum (‘plural only’) nouns are ones which do not appear in the singular (for instance, the English noun odds, meaning ‘probability’), and singularia tantum (‘singular only’) nouns are ones without a plural form (English thirst). This situation, where a cell inside a paradigm is not filled by any form, is known as defectiveness.

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Defectiveness, in some cases, can be explained by semantics, namely, when the meaning of the word is incompatible with some grammatical properties. Meaning can explain that the verb to rain in English and its equivalents in other languages generally lack all the person values in the languages except for the third person: as the word denotes an impersonal process whose subject cannot be human or a group, the other combinations would not make sense with what we know of the real world. However, in other cases, no specific semantic reason can be found for the lack of a word form; this would be the case with the lack of gerund form in must (but not in the semantically close predicate be forced to) and other modal verbs like should and can. The reason for this gap in the paradigm is not obviously syntactic either; other auxiliaries allow for gerunds (being, having), and verbs that denote states, too (knowing, owning, etc.). Unless a theory can be developed that motivates modal verbs not inflecting like other verbs in English by some syntactic principle, this absence will be analyzed as the effect of a morphological gap. In WP theories, morphological gaps in the paradigm are easily described, for instance by saying that the paradigm is defective and there is no materialization of one or several of its cells. DM, in contrast, needs to find some morphosyntactic reason that makes it impossible for a modal verb like must to be combined with the features that produce a gerund; in our case, it has to define the defectiveness as some kind of incompatibility between the morphosyntactic properties of the verb and those of the gerund. 4.4.3 SUPPLETION Sometimes, different roots are used inside the same paradigm. For example, the contrast between the present and the past of the verb to go is performed not by adding extra segments to the same basic form, but by substituting the root: go ~ went. In these cases, we do not talk about allomorphy because, as mentioned in §1.4.1, allomorphy in its traditional sense requires the two forms to be derivable from the same phonological representation. Currently, it does not seem motivated by the knowledge we have about contemporary English phonology to propose a set of rules that derive one of these forms from the other (or both forms from the same underlying representation). These cases are known as suppletion. Suppletion has been taken, by itself, as an argument against IA theories. Inside a WP theory, suppletion is easily described via a realizational rule (25a); the same format of rule is used to account for a form where the root is not replaced, but slightly altered (25b) and where the root does not change (25c). Remember that in WP theories the term ‘root’ is only used descriptively, and the word is not required to be segmented into smaller parts. (25) a. R(go, [past]) = went b. R(write, [past]) = wrote c. R(burst, [past]) = burst As we said in §1.4.1, the boundaries between allomorphy and suppletion are sometimes fuzzy. This happens when it is not clear whether two forms can be derived from

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the same phonological representation by a phonological rule. The following alternations present the problem in English: (26) a. sing ~ sang b. sit ~ sat c. write ~ wrote On the one hand, it is clear that no contemporary rule of English phonology changes the vowel of the root in this way, but at the same time the two related forms are phonologically similar enough to make it tempting to have a shared phonological representation. 4.4.4 PATTERNS OF IRREGULARITY One last empirical phenomenon that has been invoked to argue for the autonomy of paradigms is the observation that, inside irregular paradigms, the irregularity follows a pattern and is frequently organized in some coherent way. This observation is illustrated in (27), taken from Spanish (irregular verb val-er ‘to cost’). (27) Present indicative

Present subjunctive

1st sg.

valg-o

valg-a

2nd sg.

val-es

valg-as

3rd sg.

val-e

valg-a

1st pl.

val-emos

valg-amos

2nd pl.

val-éis

valg-áis

3rd pl.

val-en

valg-an

As can be seen, this verb is irregular because the root adopts two varieties, one valand the other valg-. The distribution of the irregularity is clear: first person singular in the present indicative and the whole present subjunctive. Consider now the irregular verb cab-er ‘to fit’. (28) Present indicative

Present subjunctive

1st sg.

quep-o

quep-a

2nd sg.

cab-es

quep-as

3rd sg.

cab-e

quep-a

1st pl.

cab-emos

quep-amos

2nd pl.

cab-éis

quep-áis

3rd pl.

cab-en

quep-an

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This is a different irregularity, but the alternation is distributed in exactly the same way as before: the form used in the first person singular present indicative is used in the forms of the present subjunctive. What this distribution shows us is that irregularity is not chaotic, but follows some rules inside the paradigm, building patterns that tend to repeat themselves for different, historically unrelated irregular forms. There are no phonological, syntactic or semantic connections between the two verbs presented in (27) and (28) and yet the way in which the alternation is instantiated is the same. This suggests that paradigms have an internal structure which is used to organize the distribution of the irregular morphemes; these ‘regular’ patterns inside irregular paradigms have been considered morphomes, because the rationale behind their distribution is morphological, without a clear phonological, semantic or syntactic motivation. EXERCISES 1. Take five typologically different languages and determine the inflectional properties of nouns, adjectives and verbs in them. Make a table like Table 4.1 comparing the results. Remember that you might not find independent evidence that the three lexical categories are attested in the language. 2. Consider the whole verbal paradigm of a regular verb in your own language, and find a counterpart in a foreign language. List all the cases of syncretism displayed by the verb in each of these two languages and write referral rules to account for them. Are there any patterns of syncretism that repeat themselves inside each language or between the two languages? Are the syncretic forms related in their feature content? If so, could you account for the syncretism using feature impoverishment? 3. Notice that, instead of claiming that there is syncretism between two forms inside a paradigm, it could also be claimed that two forms happen to be distinct, though homophonous (much as the noun can and the verb can accidentally sound the same despite being different, unrelated words). What are the disadvantages of claiming that, for example, are (second person plural) and are (first person plural) constitute homophonous forms instead of saying that they are syncretic? 4. Another way of replacing syncretism is to claim that two identical forms are in fact differentiated by the presence of null morphemes (Ø). Imagine that someone claims that are (second plural) is actually are-Ø2nd.pl. and that are (first plural) is are-Ø1st.pl., that is, that despite their sounding alike, the morphological structure is different. What are the problems with such a proposal? 5. Take a sample of irregular verbs in your own language and describe the irregularities that they exhibit. Can you distribute those irregularities in patterns, as seen in §4.4.4? Are these patterns repeated across verbs? FURTHER READING The literature devoted to inflection has mainly concentrated on two topics: the inflectional properties of languages on the one hand and the notion of paradigm and the different morphological relations established inside paradigms on the other. On the

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first topic, there are a number of monographs devoted to the different inflectional properties and how they are instantiated across languages. Gender is studied in depth in Corbett (1991); number in Corbett (2000) – from a typological perspective – and Harbour (2007); case in Blake (2004); and person in Siewierska (2004). Aspect and tense have been studied in Comrie (1976) and (1985), respectively, while the crosslinguistic aspects of mood are studied in Palmer (1986). The reader will find overviews of agreement in Corbett (2006) and Baker (2008). From a theoretical perspective, we can mention Harley and Ritter (2002), who propose an organization of the inflectional features of nouns, and Cowper (2005), who analyzes the same problem in verbs. The status of theme vowels and conjugation markers has been recently explored in Aronoff (1994), Oltra (1999), Galani (2003), Arregi and Oltra (2005) and Trommer (2008); the nature of desinences is discussed in Harris (1991), in the papers compiled in Müller, Gunkel and Zifonun (2004) and in Bermúdez-Otero (2007a). The status of paradigms in morphological theory is discussed in Stump (2001) and Williams (1994), who argue in its favour, and in Bobaljik (2002, 2008) and Halle and Marantz (2008), who propose that pardigms are epiphenomena of how individual morphemes spell out sets of features. We can only mention a small part of the wide literature on processes taking place inside paradigms. A recent typological overview of syncretism is found in Baerman, Brown and Corbett (2005). As for particular analyses, Bonet (1991), Noyer (1992) and Halle (1997) are examples of how to obtain syncretism via impoverishment, a standpoint criticized in Baerman (2004). Stump (1993b), Blevins (1995) and Hansson (2007) are among those that account for syncretism using paradigm-internal relations. Defectiveness – which has a recent overview in Karlsson (2000) – has been studied in some recent papers and monographs: Fanselow and Féry (2002), Frampton (2002), Boyé (2005) and Sims (2006). Suppletion, which has overviews in Carstairs-McCarthy (1994) and Corbett (2009), has been studied in Wurzel (1990), Mel’cuk (1994), Plank (1994) – focusing on its relation to allomorphy – Aski (1995) and Fertig (1998). Patterns of irregularity have been extensively studied by Maiden in a series of papers: (1992, 2000, 2005), among others. The topic is also studied in Bybee and Pardo (1981), Booij (1997), Aronoff (1998) and Magni (2000). The reader interested in paradigms should be aware that they play a role in phonological analysis, something we could not develop in the presentation. The notion of paradigm uniformity is presented in Benua (2000). considering both inflection and derivation, and in McCarthy (2005). The role of paradigms in derivational morphology, which we mentioned briefly, is developed in Corbin (1989), Bauer (1997), Schultink (2000) and Krott (2001).

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5 DERIVATIONAL PROCESSES

5.1 PROPERTIES OF DERIVATION Inflectional processes do not alter the properties with which an item is listed in the lexicon, but rather result in the different grammatical forms that this item adopts in different syntactic contexts. A derivational process alters one or several of the properties associated with an item listed in the lexicon, making it necessary in many cases for the new form to also be listed. Therefore, it is said that derivation (and compounding, see §6) is a process that creates new words; it is a word-formation process. Derivational processes are those that alter one or several of the following properties: a) the grammatical category of the input form. The assumption is that units are listed in the lexicon with their grammatical categories, so when a morphological process changes this information, it produces a new word. Consider, for instance, whiteness, a noun created from the adjective white. b) the conceptual semantics associated with the input form. For example, the word underworld has a different meaning from the word world, from which it is formed. c) the number of arguments of a base (‘subcategorization’ of an item) and the selectional restrictions that a unit imposes on these arguments. The idea is that in the lexicon there must also be information stating that a particular word, such as read, requires two syntactic arguments: one acting as the subject and interpreted as the agent of the action, and one as the object, corresponding to the undergoer of the action (John reads a book). Any process that changes the number or the distribution of these arguments changes the subcategorization of the base. For instance, the verb wail takes a subject, whatever or whoever makes the sound, but the verb never takes adirect object expressing the cause of the pain (*John wailed the dead). The verb be-wail, in contrast, requires a direct object expressing precisely this notion (John bewailed the dead). A change in any of the previous properties often justifies the introduction in a dictionary as a separate entry of the word created by the morphological process. Derivational processes create new words, and the syntactic context will never demand that only a word that has undergone such a process can appear (as it can do with inflectional processes). 86

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Lexical gaps Given that syntactic processes are assumed to be maximally productive, inflection is expected to be more productive than derivation; derivation lists new forms in the lexicon and these forms can be subject to idiosyncratic properties more easily than forms which are not listed in the lexicon. Derivational processes have unexpected gaps in their productivity. Consider the following list of nominalizations (§5.2.1) in Italian. (1) a. b. c. d. e.

pettinare ‘to comb’– pettinatura ‘hairdo’ profanare ‘to profane’ – profanazione ‘profanation’ allontanare ‘to remove’ – allontanamento ‘removal’ indovinare ‘to guess’ – Ø assaporare ‘to taste’ – Ø

All these verbs share similar properties: they are transitive (they take a direct object), they belong to the same conjugation class (marked by -a-), they all allow for human subjects, and they all express actions. Despite these similarities, the verbs in (1d) and (1e) do not have any related nominalizations. This is an unexpected gap in the productivity of the rule. Conditions on the input The closer relation of derivation to the lexicon is shown by the fact that there are aspects of the semantics of the base which are taken into account by derivation, but not by inflection. From the perspective of inflection, different syntactic classes of verbs have the same inflectional properties: in English, for instance, both transitive (explain) and intransitive verbs (sneeze) take -s in the third person singular. The inflectional process, thus, is not sensitive to the subcategorization of the base. However, this lexical information is crucial for derivational rules: an English adjective in -able is normally constructed only from transitive verbs (explainable vs. *sneezable). Language-specific asymmetries between prefixes and suffixes in derivation In most European languages, like English, French or Spanish, it has been observed that prefixes and suffixes typically change different pieces of the lexical entry of the base. Prefixes generally do not change the grammatical category of the input, while suffixes typically do this. If we contrast (2a) and (2b), we immediately observe that the addition of the prefix to the base might change the semantics of the base, but not its grammatical category (2a); but in (2b), the suffix changes the grammatical category of the word, turning it into a noun. (2) a. estimate – underestimate b. estimate – estimation However, this correlation is not perfect. First, not all suffixes change the grammatical category of the base. For instance, collective suffixes take nouns as their input and produce nouns as their output, as in the Spanish example in (3).

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derivational processes (3) rosal ‘rose tree’ – rosaleda ‘group of rose trees, rose garden’

This is not entirely unexpected if the difference between prefixes and suffixes is stated in the following terms: suffixes can change the grammatical category of the base, but prefixes cannot. Against this formulation, however, there is the fact that some prefixes seem to change the grammatical category of the base. Consider the following example, where the first word is an adjective and the second is a verb: (4) rich – enrich The verb is, apparently, created by adding the prefix, without any suffix, so it would seem that the prefix changes the grammatical category of the input. Notice however, an alternative analysis: the verb enrich is a case of parasynthesis (§3.3.5) involving an overt affix and a zero suffix (§2.3.2); the segmentation would be en-rich-Ø. However, as we have already seen, the status of zero morphemes is not clear in morphological theory, as it is not easy to argue against their existence or prove that they are present, and parasynthesis is equally problematic. Despite these problematic cases, it is generally the case that prefixes can attach to words of different grammatical categories, and keep these categorial differences in the output. By contrast, suffixes generally take inputs of a particular grammatical  category and impose a particular grammatical category on their output. Consider the examples in (5), from Spanish. The prefix contra- ‘counter-’ can take adjectives, nouns and verbs, and produces words belonging to these three classes as output. (5) a. ejemplo ‘example’ – contra-ejemplo ‘counterexample’ b. natural ‘nature-like’ – contra-natural ‘counter-natural’ c. decir ‘to say’ – contra-decir ‘to contradict’ Conversely, a suffix such as the one in (6) always takes verbs as its input and always gives nouns as its output; thus, the words in (6b) and (6c), where the suffix combines with an adjective or a noun, are impossible in Spanish. (6) a. explica ‘to explain’ – explica-ción ‘explanation’ b. natural ‘natural’ – *natural-ción c. papel ‘paper’ – *papel-ción This contrast is normally accounted for in IA theories, where affixes have their own lexical entries, by putting more information in the entry for a suffix than in the entry associated with a prefix. More specifically, in the entry for a suffix there is information about its subcategorization frame – that is, the properties of the input category it combines with – and the suffix itself is assigned a grammatical category. In this particular case, for example, the suffix -ción could be represented as in (7), where both the input and the output category are specified.

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(7) ]V -ción ]N (7) reads like this: the suffix -ción takes verbs and turns them into nouns. The idea that one suffix (or one word-formation process) only takes words belonging to one grammatical category is known as the Unitary Base Hypothesis (Aronoff 1976). It is generally the case that one suffix produces only members of one category, which confirms the idea that derivational suffixes belong to particular grammatical  categories. There are exceptions, though, which suggest that the correlation between suffixation and a fixed grammatical category is more of a tendency than a general principle. The English suffix -ly, for instance, produces both adjectives (8a) and adverbs (8b). In Italian and Spanish some suffixes that select verbs, such as the agentive suffixes -dor or -tore, often produce both nouns (8a) and adjectives (8d). (8) a. This is a love-ly house. b. Economical-ly speaking, this solution is unacceptable. c. Esto es un seca-dor. This is a dri-er. d. Este hombre es muy vivi-dor. This man is very live-er ‘This man is very cheerful.’ There are also exceptions to the generalization that a given suffix always selects words of a specific grammatical category. In order to account for the many exceptions to the Unitary Base Hypothesis, the Modified Unitary Base Hypothesis has been proposed (Scalise 1983), according to which a suffix selects either [+N] or [+V] units. A suffix would select either nominal categories (adjectives and nouns), which are defined as [+N] categories, or predicates (adjectives and verbs), defined as [+V] categories, but it is predicted that no affix will select nouns and  verbs.  However, even to this modified proposal there are exceptions. For example, the agentive suffix -dor in Spanish, or -er in English, combines productively with verbs, but exceptionally it can also produce new words from nouns. Consider, for instance, words like Londoner, six-packer, two-decker and others in English. 5.2 CATEGORY CHANGES In this section, we will address the derivational processes that change the grammatical category of the input and imply some formal change in the base, generally expressed by additive morphology. Keep in mind that very frequently this change in grammatical category also implies a change in the semantics of the base, but not always. We will leave the discussion of the processes that change the meaning of the base without altering its grammatical category for §5.3.

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derivational processes 5.2.1 NOMINALIZATIONS

Nominalizations are those derivational processes which produce nouns from verbs or adjectives. Event nominalizations An event nominalization is a deverbal noun that, just like the original verb, denotes an eventuality, be it an event or a state. For instance, the nominalization assassination, related to the verb assassinate, denotes the action of assassinating in sentences like ‘The assassination of Lincoln took place in 1865.’ Given the fact that both the  nominalization and the verb denote the same kind of object, an event, it has been claimed that this type of derived word is a different categorial instantiation of a generally verbal concept. Morphologically derived words of this type, where the semantics of the base are kept almost intact, but where there has been a change in the grammatical category of the word, are called transpositions (Beard 1995). There are different kinds of event nominalization, and they all have in common the expression of an action or a state associated with the meaning of the verbal base. Complex event nominalizations are those that express an action, generally keeping the arguments of the base and allowing for modifiers that mirror the adverbs and prepositional phrases allowed by the verb. Consider the noun phrase in (9), where the head noun is an event nominalization, explanation. This noun is allowed to express all the arguments that the input verb explain allows: a theme, the analysis, a goal, the students, and an agent, Jane. They are expressed as noun modifiers, but the semantic relation that they establish with the predicate is the same. Also, the adjective quick is equivalent to an adverb quickly in the verb phrase to explain quickly, which expresses the manner in which the event of explaining took place. (9) The quick explanation of the analysis to the students by Jane Other deverbal nominalizations denote states. These state nominalizations can, as complex events do, have arguments; they also allow being modified by adjectives or prepositional phrases that require some temporal extension in the head noun, such as two hours long or for several minutes; but they do not denote any action. Consider two possible interpretations of the nominalization sedation, from sedate. (10) a. The sedation of the patient must take place before the procedure. b. The sedation of the patient for three hours is necessary for this procedure. In (10a), the nominalization expresses an action. We know this because it can be the subject of the verb take place, which is compatible only with nouns that denote events (*A book took place yesterday); it means ‘the action of sedating the patient’. In (10b), however, the interpretation is not that of an action, but of a state: the state of the patient’s being sedated for some time.

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Object nominalizations Other deverbal nominalizations denote different participants related to the event that the verbal base expresses. Among these we find nominalizations that denote the result object produced as the result of performing an action, as when we say that The explanation was written on the blackboard. Here, the noun explanation does not refer to the action of explaining, but to the product that resulted from the action. Other nominalizations denote the entity affected by an action. These patient nominalizations are illustrated by many -ee nouns in English, such as nominee, abandonee, addressee, employee or coachee. Nominalizations denoting the agent that performs an action are also very frequent. Agent nominalizations denote the entity that, purposefully, initiates a particular action. Nominalizations such as reader, attacker and driver belong to this class. As can be seen, some of these nouns can be used to denote jobs or occupations (driver, teacher), but they also stand for people characterized by some frequent habits (smoker, drinker). Frequently, the same affixes used to form agent nominalizations are used for instruments (opener, packager, drier); in this second case, the noun does not denote a human being that initiates an event, but an object used by the agent to help perform an action. Sometimes, object nominalizations can express the place where an action typically takes place. For instance, the nominalizer -torio in Spanish frequently forms these place nominalizations, as illustrated in (11a, b). Other Spanish deverbal nouns are time nominalizations, denoting periods of time (11c, d). The typology of object nominalizations can be very detailed and several other fine-grained distinctions can be made in their denotations. (11) a. lava-torio wash-nom., ‘place to wash’ b. pari-torio give.birth-nom., ‘place to give birth’ c. reina-do reign-nom., ‘time of a king’s rule’ d. preside-ncia preside-nom., ‘presidency’ Quality nominalizations Nominalizations coming from adjectives never denote an event or an action, as the semantic information of their bases does not contain this notion. These nominalizations denote the abstract quality or property denoted by the input, as in generosity (from generous), which is interpreted as the property of ‘being generous’. In general, these nouns express ‘the property of being X’, where X is the denotation of the adjectival base. When the property denoted is purely physical, like the size or the weight of an entity, it is also possible that the nominalization denotes the relevant physical dimension, as in depth (coming from deep). It is possible too for a deadjectival nominalization to denote not just the property,

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but a specific degree of that property. If we consider the meaning of the word criminality it cannot be paraphrased as ‘the property of being a criminal’ (where it would denote simply the abstract property), but rather as ‘the degree or the extent to which criminal acts are found’. A similar interpretation is associated with mortality in one of its readings (The mortality of infants is too high in this country), the other one being a purely abstract quality reading (Dorian Gray tried to escape mortality). 5.2.2 VERBALIZATIONS Verbalizations are those derivational processes which turn nouns or adjectives into verbs. It is customary to differentiate between verbs which are derived from adjectives and those which are derived from nouns, because it has been proven that the nature of the base plays a role in determining the kind of verb which is obtained. Changes of state Verbs derived from adjectives very frequently denote changes of state which lead the subject or the object to acquire the properties expressed by the adjective. For example, to widen (using the suffix -en and the adjective wide) denotes a process in which an entity becomes wider. Frequently, change-of-state verbs coming from adjectives allow two readings. The first reading, known as the inchoative, is an intransitive version of the verb where the subject is the entity that changes; for instance, The gap widened, meaning ‘the gap became wider’. In the second reading, the causative one, the verb is transitive, the changing entity is the object and the subject is the agent or causer of that change, as in The crisis widened the gap between the poor and the rich, meaning ‘the crisis caused the gap to become wider’. Some verbalizers tend to be associated with the causative reading, such as -ify. The verb electrify, for instance, only has the causative reading (John electrified the fence vs. *The fence electrified). When the adjectives in the base express a degree, the semantics of the verb frequently also reflect it. The adjective wide has this property (wider, widest), but the adjective electric, in its normal meaning, does not (#more electric). Consequently, the verb electrify is interpreted as becoming electric, that is, as acquiring the property of being electric, which the object previously lacked. If we electrify the fence, it follows that the fence, before we performed the action, was not electric. By contrast, if the adjective expresses a degree, the verb allows for a reading in which the object attains a higher degree of a property that the object already had. Consider the two possible readings of The gap widened. In one of them, the gap was not wide before and becomes wide as a result of the change. However, in the second reading, the gap was already wide but becomes even wider as a result of the transformation. Verbs that allow these two readings, the pure change of state and the gradual change, are known as degree achievements. Changes of place One of the most frequent verb classes that are obtained when the verb is derived from a noun has an interpretation in which the verb denotes a change of location. Take, for instance, the verb imprison. This transitive verb is interpreted as the action of putting someone in a prison. Here, the base noun is interpreted as the place where the object

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is located. The same meaning appears in the conversion verb to box (‘to put something in a box’). Verbs where the base noun denotes a place are known as location verbs. In some other cases, though, the base noun denotes the object which is transferred to another place, such as the conversion verb to saddle, which is ‘to put a saddle on some entity’, generally a horse. These verbs where the base noun denotes the object that changes its position are locatum verbs. In English, verbs denoting changes of place are frequently obtained by conversion. In Spanish, almost systematically, there is a prefix involved , as shown in (12). (12) a. en-carcel-a in-jail-ThV b. en-harin-a in-flour-ThV

‘to put someone in jail’ location ‘to put flour on something’ locatum

The verbs considered up to now denote putting something in a place, but the inverse scenario (‘to remove something from some place’) is also possible. These verbs are known as privative location verbs and privative locatum verbs. An example of the first class is to mine ‘to remove something from a mine’, as in They mined the gold. An example of the second class is to skin ‘to remove the skin from something’, as in They skinned the rabbit. Other readings Deadjectival verbalizations are almost always change-of-state verbs, but other interpretations are frequent with denominal verbalizations. Considering examples from Spanish, the nouns inside a verbalization can be understood as the instrument to perform the action (13a), the object given to something or someone (13b), the object produced (13c), the characteristic way in which the subject acts (13d) or the function performed by the subject (13e), among many other possibilities. (13) a. a-cuchill-a pref.-knife-ThV b. nombr-a name-ThV c. tos-e cough-ThV d. payas-e-a clown-ver.-ThV e. protagon-iz-a star-ver.-ThV

‘kill using a knife’ ‘to give someone a title or a position’ ‘to cough’ ‘to act as a clown’ ‘to be the star of a story’

5.2.3 ADJECTIVALIZATIONS Derivational processes that build adjectives from nouns or verbs are known as adjectivalizations. As in the other cases, we will differentiate between those cases where the adjective is derived from a noun and those where it comes from a verb.

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Relational adjectives Frequently, when an adjective is derived from a noun, the output is a referential or relational adjective, that is, an adjective that does not express a gradable property or a quality of an individual, but rather expresses the relationship that a noun establishes with a class of objects. Consider, for example, the adjective morphological in morphological compound. Here, morphological does not give us a quality of the compound (in contrast with what interesting in interesting compound or difficult in difficult compound does). This adjective, derived from the noun morphology, tells us that the compound is related to morphology in some way. Similarly, the adjective presidential – derived from the noun president – does not express any quality of an aeroplane in the presidential aeroplane, but states that there is a particular kind of relationship – in this case, possessive – between the aeroplane and a president. The possessive relation is frequent, but other relationships are possible: in presidential candidate, the adjective denotes the goal of the candidacy; in presidential system, it denotes one of the constituent parts – the main one – of the system. Some of these ambiguities in the meaning of the same adjective can be formalized in some lexical semantic frameworks, like Pustejovsky’s qualia structure (§8.5.1). Some suffixes frequently give rise to relational adjectives: in English, for instance, derived words ended in -ic or -ical (logical, medical, economical, analytical, etc.) are often relational adjectives. Qualitative adjectives In other cases, adjectives derived from nouns denote qualities which, normally, are prototypical of the noun used as input. For instance, the adjective childish (childish behaviour) expresses properties that are typically associated with a child. The adjective motherly similarly expresses qualities generally assumed to be displayed by mothers. Participles Adjectives can also come from verbs. The participle of a verb is frequently used to denote the state attained after undergoing a process or action – exhausted, cooked, destroyed, etc. as in The resources have already been exhausted – and then, by extension, it can denote the properties associated with that state (as in I am feeling exhausted). Participles are one of the paradigm forms of a verb, and, therefore, are considered inflectional forms when they still behave like verbs; their behaviour as adjectives constitutes a morphological puzzle, related to hybrid categories, which we will discuss in §5.7.2. It is customary to consider as adjectivalizations only those participles that have lost all their verbal properties – for example, the possibility of having agents and adverbs which refer to the manner in which an event is performed. In turn, these participles must be able to allow for degree modification and other adjectival characteristics. Attending to these properties, the word cooked would be a verbal participle from the verb to cook in (14a) – therefore, an inflectional form – but the word worried would be an adjectivalization from worry in (14b). (14) a. a pie quickly cooked by one of the best chefs in the world b. a very worried person

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Modal and dispositional adjectives Some deverbal adjectives involve a modal meaning. This is the case with words ending in -able, such as expendable. Notice that this derivational process, in addition to changing the grammatical category, has two other relevant effects. The first is that the meaning is passive. An expendable warrior is not a warrior that expends things, but a warrior who can be expended. The second is that the adjective has a modal meaning, denoting either that the action can be done or that it must be done. In expendable, the meaning is ‘can be expended’, and thus it denotes the possibility of doing it. In payable, by contrast, the meaning is ‘must be paid’, thus denoting the obligation of performing the action. A dispositional adjective, by contrast, denotes the property of being prone to performing a particular action, expressed by the input verb. This happens frequently in Spanish with words that add -dizo to the verbal stem: (15) a. enamora-dizo fall.in.love-suff., ‘someone who falls in love easily’ b. hui-dizo escape-suff., ‘someone or something that escapes easily’ c. enoja-dizo get.angry-suff., ‘someone who gets angry easily’ 5.3 SEMANTIC CHANGES With the exception of transpositions, where the semantics of the input is preserved in the output, generally processes that change the grammatical category of the base also change their semantics. In this section, however, we will concentrate on those cases where the semantics has been altered without involving a category change. Collective meaning It is common to add some morphology to a noun in order to get a collective noun, a noun that denotes a group of people or things. This can be accomplished by a suffix, as in Spanish, where the suffix -eda is used to form collective nouns from bases that denote trees, plants or some substances, as in the examples in (16). (16) a. álamo – alam-eda cottonwood – group of cottonwoods b. rosal – rosal-eda rose tree – group of rose trees The German prefix ge- plays a similar role in some complex words, as in stein ‘rock’ – ge-stein ‘group of rocks’. Temporal meaning Sometimes, a morphological process can give temporal meaning to the base, making it denote a period or an action previous or posterior to a particular event or situation. This is frequently performed with prefixes in European languages. Consider, for

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example, the cases in (17). In (17a, b), the input is a noun that denotes a particular situation, but the output is a noun that denotes a notion that precedes or follows in time that event. In (17c), the input expresses some action, and the output denotes that same action, only now preceding another event (for example, an eviction) which is not expressed by the word. (17) a. war > pre-war b. modernism > post-modernism c. warning > fore-warning Spatial meaning Sometimes a morphological process can take as input a word that denotes an object and give a word that denotes another object, place or area located with respect to that object. The examples in (18), from Spanish, show that this is generally performed in this language with prefixes: (18) a. cámara > ante-cámara chamber > ante-chamber b. índice > super-índice index > super-index c. suelo > sub-suelo soil > sub-soil Negation It is also possible for a morphological process to express the opposite property to the one denoted by the input, or the absence of a particular notion. Denoting the opposite property by prefixation is frequently possible when the input is a gradable adjective, as in these Spanish examples (19): (19) a. útil > in-útil useful > useless b. leal > des-leal loyal > dis-loyal When the input denotes an event, a morphological process expressing negative meaning frequently gives as a result the reversion of the event expressed by the input. For instance, codify means to turn something into a code, but de-codify means the reverse action: to recover the message by translating the code. Such verbs are known as reversative verbs. Attitudinal meanings Other morphological processes change the meaning in a more radical way. Many words starting with anti-, in English and Spanish, denote a negative attitude towards the concept expressed by the input. By contrast, those that start with pro- generally denote a favourable attitude towards that concept:

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(20) a. American > anti-American ~ pro-American b. abortion > anti-abortion ~ pro-abortion c. catholic > anti-catholic ~ pro-catholic Quantities and degrees Frequently, a morphological process adds a quantity meaning to the input. The following examples show this kind of process. What (21a) expresses is that the noun associated with the input, colour, appears in many different ways; (21b) has a distributive meaning (‘two every year’); (21c) and (21d) express a particular fraction of the notion denoted in the input. (21) a. b. c. d.

coloured > multi-coloured annual > bi-annual circle > semi-circle second > milli-second

When the notion quantified is a property, it is common to use the term ‘degree’; some morphological processes also express the degree to which a property appears, or the intensity with which a process is done: (22) a. cool > super-cool b. perform > under-perform Repetition Other processes, when they operate over verbs, can denote that the action denoted by the base is performed once again. For instance, this is the meaning that is obtained when a verb is prefixed with re- in English (rewrite, reconstruct, rephrase, etc.). This meaning of repetition is sometimes interpreted as restitution, when the meaning of the verb is such that one of the arguments has been restored to a previous state, even if the action itself only takes place once. For example, in the sentence They replanted a very old sequoia, it is not necessary that the people involved had planted it before; the only requisite is that the tree once got removed from the soil and now is once again with its roots in the ground. Other meaning changes The variety of meanings that can be expressed with morphological processes is very wide. In addition to the processes mentioned before, there are many others, of which we will give just a few examples. Some languages, like Spanish, can express different kinds of blows by deriving a word from the noun that expresses the object or body part used to hit (23a) or from the noun expressing the part of the body where someone is hit (23b). (23) a. bastón > baston-azo stick > blow with a stick b. barriga > barrig-azo belly > blow on the belly

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It is also possible to find semi-productive processes which derive the name of the offspring of an animal from the name of the animal, as in ballena (Spanish for ‘whale’) and ballena-to (Spanish for ‘baby whale’). 5.4 CATEGORY CHANGES WITHOUT FORMAL MARKING: CONVERSION Derivational processes reflect the change in the properties of the base by some phonological change in it, frequently by adding an affix to it. By contrast, conversion alters the grammatical category of the base without imposing any phonological change. Several examples of conversion are given in (24); notice that the word that undergoes conversion (underlined) is pronounced exactly the same in both cases, that is, there has been no phonological change. (24) a. the red apple (red is an adjective) a9. I like dark red (red is a noun) b. They always attack us (attack is a verb) b9.We are under attack (attack is a noun) c. The screen will clear (clear is a verb). c9. Everything is clear now (clear is an adjective). As seen in (24), conversion can operate between any two of the three major lexical categories noun, verb and adjective. Sometimes these conversions also involve prepositions: down is a preposition in down the hole, but it can be a verb (He downed a pint), an adjective (I feel very down) or a noun (The Downs are beautiful) as well. Conversion poses problems for directionality. What is meant by the directionality of a morphological process is that in a pair of morphologically related words, one is the more basic form, the input, and the other is the result of applying the operation, the output. In general, it is the case that the morphologically simpler form is the input and the output is the more complex word (with the exceptions that come from backformations and subtractive morphology; §2.3.1). The output form, also, frequently takes its semantics from the input form, in such a way that its definition includes, in some sense, the meaning of the input form. For example, in the pair of words read ~ reader, the directionality of the morphological process that relates them is quite clearly from the form read to the form reader. This second form, apart from being morphologically more complex, entails the meaning of ‘read’ in its definition: ‘someone who reads’. More often than not, this is not the case in conversion. The first two criteria, that the output form is phonologically marked and is morphologically more complex, are not applicable here, as by definition, conversion involves change of grammatical category without any marking. The semantic criterion does not give clear results either and can be arbitrary. Consider, for instance, attack. We could define the noun from the verb (‘the action of attacking’), but we could equally well define the verb from the noun (‘to perform an attack’); there is no clear direction involved in the semantic rela-

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tion. Identifying the direction of the conversion process that relates the verb attack and the noun attack does not seem to follow from general principles. The possibility of determining directionality in conversion cases has attracted the attention of morphologists: works like Allen (1978) and Don (1993, 2004) present some arguments for directionality in such cases. In the reminder of this section we will review the two major proposals that have been made in order to account for conversion when the directionality is not obvious. Conversion and lexical storage The first proposal involves treating conversion as a process that does not make a more complex form out of a simpler one, but relates two equally complex words without deriving one from the other. This relational view of conversion has Lieber (1981) as its main proponent. The idea is that the lexicon stores two words with the phonetic form attack, one listed as a noun and another one listed as a verb, as in (25). (25) attackN ←→ attackV redundancy rules Some information will be common to the two words: their phonological representation and the fact that they denote the same concept. In order to avoid listing this shared information twice in the lexicon, the relation is intermediated by redundancy rules which state that, unless specified otherwise, the two items are associated with the same information. In this view, conversion is very different from derivation; derivation builds new words from simpler objects, while conversion relates words of equal complexity. Conversion in a grammar with category-less roots From a DM perspective, the solution for the directionality problem comes from the proposal that both words are equally complex, because they are both derived by a zero morpheme from a shared base, a root without any category information (remember the special status of roots in DM; §2.4.1). Consider the pair formed by the noun attack and the verb attack (see (26), where nP = functional noun projection and vP = functional verb projection). The proposal is that both words involve derivation from the same root, √attack, which does not have any category information. The noun is formed by adding a zero morpheme that turns the word into a noun (26a); the verb is formed not by building on top of the noun, but by building again on top of the root with the addition of a zero morpheme that turns it into a verb (26b). (26) a. n Ø

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nP

b. √ATTACK

v Ø

vP √ATTACK

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The verb does not come from the noun and the noun does not come from the verb; hence the impossibility of establishing any directionality between the two forms. The process is, however, formally like derivation in that in both cases a new word is built from a base by adding some structure. 5.5 ARGUMENT STRUCTURE CHANGES Derivational processes may also alter the argument structure of the base, that is, the set of complements and modifiers that a predicate can or must take. Changes in the argument structure of the base can be manifested in several ways, which we will consider in turn. Changes in the number of arguments Some processes change the number of arguments required by the word. For example, the Spanish verb volar ‘to fly’ is intransitive and only requires a single argument, the entity that flies (27a). However, the derived verb sobre-volar (‘to fly over’) requires two arguments: in addition to the first one, now it is also necessary to specify the place where the flying event is happening (27b). (27) a. El pájaro vuela. The bird flies. b. El pájaro sobrevuela * (la casa) The bird over-flies (the house) ‘The bird flies over the house’ Changes in the syntactic projection of the argument Sometimes, the number of arguments is not altered, but the way in which they are marked in the syntax is. For example, in Spanish again, both the verb decir ‘to say’ and the verb des-decir ‘to go back on something said’ require an argument which expresses, generally with a subordinate clause, the thing said. However, with the first verb, this argument is introduced without a preposition, as a direct object; the second verb, derived from the first, introduces the same argument with a preposition de: (28) a. Juan dijo [que todo estaba bien]. Juan said that everything was fine. b. Juan se desdijo [de [que todo estaba bien]]. Juan SE took.back of that everything was fine ‘Juan went back on his saying that everything was fine.’ Changes in the selectional restrictions A derivational process can keep the number of arguments and their syntactic projection the same, but change the semantic restrictions that the predicate imposes on the arguments. For example, in Spanish, the verb callar ‘to silence’ can only take nouns which denote human beings as its direct object, as in (29a), but not nouns which denote a message which is not being transmitted (29b). By contrast, the verb a-callar,

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derived from it by prefixation, can take both human and non-human objects, as seen in (29c) and (29d). (29) a. Juan calló al niño. Juan silenced the child. b. *Juan calló las noticias. Juan silenced the news. c. Juan a-calló al niño. Juan silenced the child. d. Juan a-calló las noticias. Juan silenced the news. Changes in the relations between the arguments Finally, a derivational process can also require that the different arguments of a predicate must be related in some specific way. Take, for instance, the process that adds self- to a verb. Verbs derived with self- require that the subject and the object be the same entity, that is, these verbs must be reflexive (30). As a consequence, the argument that must be reflexive (the direct object in (30a) and the prepositional object in (30b)) cannot be expressed independently. (30) a. destroy something > self-destroy (*something) b. impose something on someone > self-impose something (*on someone) 5.5.1 LEXICAL ALTERNATIONS Processes that change the properties of the argument structure of a verb without any morphological marking have been classified as lexical alternations. The concept of lexical alternation is used to describe the situation in which, given a particular verb, its argument structure is variable. Take, for instance, the verb boil (31). This verb can be used in two ways: with a single argument playing the role of a subject, expressing the entity that undergoes the boiling event (31a), or with two arguments, one being the entity that undergoes the event and another one being the agent of that event (31b). (31) a. The milk boiled. b. John boiled the milk. In these cases, there is no morphological marking on the verb in English. This is similar to conversion cases where the grammatical category of the word is altered. There are a number of common lexical alternations. The one illustrated in (31) is the causative–inchoative alternation: a single verb, without modifying its morphological shape, can express both a change of state undergone by an entity (as in 31a) – which is the inchoative version – and the causation of a change of state, involving an agent and an undergoer (as in 31b). Other lexical alternations do not change the number of arguments, but do change the way in which they are projected in the syntax. This is the case with the locative

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alternation, illustrated in (32). In the locative alternation the same verb can take as its direct object an object that gets displaced to a location, and that location as a prepositional phrase (PP) complement (32a) or, alternatively, the direct object can be the location and the object displaced is then a PP (32b). (32) a. John loaded b. John loaded

hay the truck

on the truck. with hay.

Lexical alternations in a Lexicalist theory The analysis of lexical alternations depends on the assumptions that a theory makes about the relation between syntax and the lexicon. In a Lexicalist theory, the idea is that the lexical items have grammatical properties previous to their insertion in the syntax, and they project these properties once they are part of a syntactic structure (Projectionism; see §7.1.1). From this perspective (adopted by Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995 among others), a verb like boil must be associated with two (or more) different argument structures in the lexicon. How is this performed? The idea is that the lexicon, which under this theory is a generative component where new forms are created, contains rules that can modify the lexical entries of verbs. For instance, a possible rule would be the one in (33), which increases the number of arguments of the base: (33) boil (Undergoer)

→

boil (Agent, Undergoer)

When there is more than one argument, underlining one of them is the convention used to state that that one is the most salient argument in the group and, thus, the one which will become the subject of the sentence, once the verb projects its properties in a syntactic structure. The lexical rules can also modify the syntactic manifestation of an argument, as in the locative alternation. This is performed on the assumption that the lexical entry can also determine how an argument will be materialized in the structure. (34) load (Agent, Undergoer, Place) → undergoer: Direct Object place: PP

load (Agent, Undergoer, Place) undergoer: PP place: Direct Object

See §7.1.2 for the treatment of lexical alternations in a Constructionist theory. 5.6 QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE ANALYSIS OF DERIVATIONAL PROCESSES IN A SINGLE LANGUAGE In this chapter we have described as exhaustively as possible the derivational processes found in the languages of the world and what kind of properties they modify in their bases. However, it is also useful to concentrate on a single language and see what kinds of derivational process it allows and how they are formally marked in the word. This makes it possible to address other important aspects of derivational processes.

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analysis of derivational processes Table 5.1

103

Nominalizations

Category of the base

Semantic notion

Affix

Example

From verbs

Agent or instrument Patient Product Eventuality

From adjectives

Quality

-ar -sel -(l)ing -ning -else -eri -(n)ing -nad -sel -d -dom -eri

brenne ‘burn’ > brenn-ar ‘burner’ brenne ‘burn’ > bren-sel ‘fuel’ lære ‘teach’ > lær-ling ‘apprentice’ bygge ‘build’ > byg-ning ‘building’ lide ‘suffer’ > lid-else ‘suffering’ fri ‘propose’ > fri-eri ‘proposition’ skyte ‘shoot’> skyt-ing ‘shooting’ lese ‘read’ > les-nad ‘reading’ føde ‘be born’ > fød-sel ‘birth’ høg ‘high’ > høg-d ‘height’ rik ‘rich’ > rik-dom ‘richness’ kokett ‘flirtatious’ > kokett-eri ‘coquetry’ god ‘good’ > god-het ‘goodness’ gamle ‘old’ > gaml-ing ‘old person’

Person characterized by a property

Table 5.2

-het -(l)ing

Adjectivalizations

Category of the base

Semantic notion

Affix

Example

From nouns or other nominal category

Similarity to

-aktig -en -sam -ig -al

barn ‘child’ > barn-aktig ‘childish’ gull ‘gold’ > gyll-en ‘golden’ ein ‘one’ > ein-sam ‘lonely’ blod ‘blood’ > blod-ig ‘bloody’ frost ‘frost’ > frost-al ‘sensitive to the cold’ arbeid ‘work’ > arbeid-sam ‘industrious’ dag ‘day’ > dag-lig ‘daily’ regel ‘rule’ > regel-messig ‘regular’ Island ‘Iceland’ > island-sk ‘Icelandic’ ete ‘eat’ > et-ande ‘edible’ dyrke ‘cultivate’ > dyrk-bar ‘cultivable’ brenne ‘burn’ > brenn-ande ‘flammable’

Possession Predispositional

Relational adjective From verbs

Passive Predispositional

-sam -lig -messig -(i)sk -ande -bar -ande

In this section we will concentrate on Nynorsk, a variety of modern Norwegian. Our data are taken mainly from Johannessen (1993). We will restrict our discussion to productive processes that change the grammatical category of the base and show phonological marking. See Tables 5.1–5.3. Even though this collection of processes is not exhaustive, we see several problems that arise whenever one is trying to account for the derivational properties of affixes.

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104 Table 5.3

derivational processes Verbalizations

Semantic notion

Affix

Example

Causative (typically from nouns)

-ere -isere -fisere -ne

adress ‘address’ > adress-ere ‘send’ katalog ‘catalogue’ > katalog-isere ‘catalogue’ eksempel ‘example’ > eksempl-ifisere ‘exemplify’ sjuk ‘sick’ > sjuk-ne ‘to fall ill’

Change of state (typically from adjectives)

First of all, notice that the same process uses different affixes. For instance, to build nouns denoting actions from verbs, Nynorsk has five productive affixes that can be used: -else , -eri, -(n)ing, -nad and -sel. The immediate question is how these five markers are distributed. There are two main possible answers. The first is to find fine-grained semantic or grammatical differences between the affixes (so that nouns derived with each of them have slightly different properties from nouns derived with the other four), or between the verbs that combine with each of them (so that depending on subtle properties of verbs they can be divided into classes, each class always combining with the same affix). The alternative, which is the answer authors generally adopt, is to list the possible combinations, marking bases with some specific diacritic that states which one of the available affixes that base takes when nominalizing. In this second case, combinations of bases and affixes are viewed as idiosyncratic in nature, and the speakers cannot derive by general rules which one of the affixes will be used for a given process. Speakers will have to store that knowledge in a lexical list. Another problem is that sometimes the same affix is used for a variety of processes. For instance, in Nynorsk the affix -(l)ing is used both to derive patients from verbs and to derive names for classes of human beings from adjectives based on their typical properties. In each of these cases the affix takes a different category as its base, and in both cases the meaning contribution seems to be different. The question in this case is whether we want to assume that we have only one affix, with very underspecified meaning and selectional restrictions, or whether it is a better alternative to propose that we have two different affixes that happen to be pronounced in the same way. 5.7 THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN INFLECTION AND DERIVATION We have already seen cases where inflection does not have the prototypical characteristics that differentiate it from derivation or compounding. For instance, inflection is expected to be maximally productive, but some paradigms are defective (§4.4.2.). It is not true that all nouns can take, for instance, plural; as we have seen, so-called singularia tantum nouns are words, like hunger, thirst or sincerity that are not attested in the plural. Moreover, inflection is not expected to change the meaning of the word. However, some nouns get a special meaning in the plural form: looks, humanities, damages or

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spirits. In such cases, the presence of plural morphology triggers a meaning which is not available in the singular form. These exceptions have been interpreted by some authors as evidence that the distinction between inflection and derivation is arbitrary and both processes are equal in nature, with the differences having more the status of tendencies than of generalizations. Authors like Marantz (2001) point out that the fact that a word is in the plural (drivers) is just as syntactically relevant as its being a noun (driver, not drives); from this perspective the information that derivational morphology adds also interacts with the syntactic context, even if it is not typically copied in agreement. Also, given the fact that paradigms can have gaps, the choice of whether a process is part of a paradigm or not is quite arbitrary: why not consider the ‘agentive’ form part of the paradigm? In the next sections we will review two phenomena that fall between inflection and derivation, since they have mixed properties. 5.7.1 APPRECIATIVE MORPHOLOGY Appreciative morphology refers to the processes which add to the base an evaluative meaning related to its size, intensity or degree or to the opinion that the speaker has of it. Typically, the following are classified as appreciative morphemes: diminutive affixes, if they suggest small size, intensity or degree, or, by extension, endearment; augmentative affixes, if they suggest big size or increased degree of something; and pejorative affixes, which are used to connote that the entity denoted is evaluated negatively. A language like Spanish has segments that reflect the three classes: among the diminutive affixes, the most common are -it(o), -ill(o) and -ic(o), depending on the dialect; -ón, -ot(e) and -az(o) are examples of augmentative morphemes and -uch(o) is a case of a pejorative affix (35). (35) a. lejos – lej-it-os far – far-dim., ‘a bit far’ b. grande – grand-ot-e big – big-aug, ‘quite big’ c. profesor – profesor-uch-o teacher – teacher-pejo., ‘bad teacher’ Appreciative morphology in Spanish has some inflectional properties. For instance, it never changes the grammatical category of the base. The word in (35a) is an adverb and remains an adverb after the affix is added to it; (35b) is an adjective and remains an adjective, and (35c) is a noun and remains a noun. Another property of this process that makes it look inflectional is that it is very productive, and can affect all classes of nouns, all gradable adjectives and many adverbs. Words with appreciative morphology are generally not listed in the Spanish dictionaries, as their meaning and formal properties are easily predictable from those of the base. Other properties of appreciative morphology, however, relate it to derivational processes. As was said in §4.1, inflectional affixes appear in the external layer of the

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word. However, appreciative morphemes tend to appear in the internal layer of the word; in the examples in (35) we see that desinences like -o are external to these suffixes; this includes the number marking too, which is also always external to them, as shown in the plural of (35c), profesor-uch-o-s, ‘bad teachers’. Other examples make it clear that the position of appreciative morphemes is between the derivative morphemes that can change the grammatical category of the base and these inflectional markers (36): (36) corredorrun er ‘little runners’

citdim.

odes.

-s pl.

Another derivational property of these affixes in Spanish is that they are not copied in agreement processes; any adjective agreeing with (35c) or (36) will have to copy the gender value associated with the desinence -o and the number value associated with -s, but it will not copy the diminutive value. Finally, in some cases the appreciative morpheme gives the base an idiosyncratic meaning which cannot be predicted by the speaker on the basis of her knowledge of each separate morpheme. In consequence, these cases have to be listed in the lexicon and are generally included in dictionaries. An example of this is the noun man-ecill-a ‘watch hand’, constructed over the word for hand, mano, with the allomorph -ecill- and a desinence associated with feminine gender. Speakers cannot guess from the meaning of the word ‘hand’ that this kind of ‘small hand’ refers to a piece of a watch used to point to numbers, and thus it is necessary to list this form in the lexicon and include it in dictionaries. 5.7.2 HYBRID CATEGORIES A different kind of phenomenon that casts doubt on the existence of sharp boundaries between inflection and derivation is hybrid categories, that is, words which display a behaviour that mixes properties of two or more grammatical categories at the same time. If we take the case of infinitives, constructed in Spanish by adding the segment -r to the verb stem, we can see that in some cases they act like verbs (37a): they can take a direct object and they can have aspectual morphology. The same word in (37b) behaves like a noun, and in this case it disallows direct objects and takes number morphology. Both sets of properties, nominal and verbal, can show up simultaneously in the same word, as in (37c). Notice that it combines with determiners and adjectives, as nouns do, but at the same time it allows for direct objects and aspectual auxiliaries. (37) a. Juan prometió cantar-lo. Juan promised sing-it ‘Juan promised to sing it.’ b. Los hermosos cantar-es de Juan The beautiful song-s by Juan c. El constante estar cantando óperas de María

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The constant to be singing operas of María ‘Maria’s constant singing operas’ In English, this kind of mixed behaviour is displayed by gerunds, which allow for nominal (38a), verbal (38b), and mixed usages (38c), in addition to an adjectival usage unavailable for the Spanish infinitive (38d). Notice that in (38c) the gerund has a possessive, but still keeps the verbal direct object, expressed as an of-phrase in (38a). (38) a. b. c. d.

Everyone enjoyed his singing of the Exsultet. Having sung the Exsultet, John knew the score by heart. John’s singing the Exsultet John, the singing detective

Given this behaviour, the relevant question is what kind of affix Spanish -r or English -ing is. If inflectional morphology does not change the category of the base, -r and -ing behave like inflection when the verb is still used as a verb, but like derivation in the other cases. One potential solution is to claim the existence of two distinct, but identical sounding, affixes -r and -ing; for each of them, one would be inflectional and the other derivational. However, this does not explain the mixed cases where the same word displays the behaviour of two categories (37c, 38c); such cases seem to indicate that the same affix (or process) is simultaneously associated with two or more distinct grammatical categories. Another relevant example is the case of participles, which can be used as verbs (39a) or adjectives (39b). Only in the first case can they accept manner modifiers and agents; only in the second case can they accept degree modifiers (too). Notice that English participles do not show clear instances of mixed behaviour where adjectival and verbal properties cooccur. (39) a. They served a chicken, wonderfully cooked by Mary. b. He was too frightened. From the perspective of productivity, these processes seem inflectional because it is almost always the case that a verb has an infinitive, gerund or a participle, with few language-specific exceptions, like those mentioned in §4.4.2. The meaning of these forms also tends to be predictable, which is another typical property of inflection; if a speaker knows the meaning of a verb, she will also be able to know the meaning of the infinitive, the participle or the gerund in the vast majority of cases. There are exceptions, though. Some Spanish infinitives that have a robust behaviour as nouns have a special meaning that is not related to the meaning of the verb, or sometimes the meaning is related to verbs that are no longer used in contemporary Spanish. (40) shows some of these words, which never have a verbal use in this reading and allow for plural forms. (40)

poder ‘power’ (from ‘can’); haber ‘belongings’ (from the auxiliary ‘to have’); sentir ‘opinion’ (from to feel); pesar ‘grief ’ (from ‘to weigh’)

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These cases seem to be the result of a derivational process, as there is a category change (from verb to noun) and the necessity of listing the meaning of the word in the lexicon (and the dictionary). The tendency is, therefore, for the loss of the verbal properties in these forms to be associated with unpredictable meanings that need to be listed. This suggests another way of interpreting the relation between inflection and derivation, more like two sets of prototypical properties that are distributed along a continuum. Some processes fall almost systematically to the inflectional end, such as person–number agreement on the verb, while others fall to the derivational end; many processes lie in the middle and have mixed properties which are reflected in the changes that they produce on the individual words they apply to. Hybrid categories would be such a case; having mixed properties, the effects of these processes have both derivational and inflectional characteristics, with individual uses of words sometimes falling more clearly to one of the two ends of the continuum. EXERCISES 1. In our discussion of prefixes and suffixes, we have mentioned that, in languages like English and Spanish, it has been claimed that prefixes do not change the grammatical category of the base. This is not a universal property of prefixes; for instance, in Malagasy (an Austronesian language spoken in Madagascar) the prefix mp- derives agent nouns from verbs (anjaitra ‘sew’ > mp-anjaitra ‘tailor’). Pick a language of your choice and find cases where it could be argued that some prefix is responsible for a category change. Is it possible to argue that in such cases we have parasynthesis with a zero suffix? 2. In a language of your choice, make a list of the productive processes that are available to produce nouns, adjectives and verbs from other lexical categories (as we did in §5.6, Tables 5.1–5.3). Consider the result, and identify the cases where the language has more than one productive affix for the particular process. Do you think that, when several affixes are available for the same process, it is possible to find generalizations on their distribution, or is listing of idiosyncratic combinations needed? 3. Select a productive derivational process in a language of your choice and produce a short account of how this process works. In order to do this, you need to cover at least the following points: (a) the meaning that the derivational process adds to the base; (b) the grammatical category (or categories) of the words produced by that process; (c) the grammatical category (or categories) of the base words; and (d) the semantic restrictions (human, animate, abstract, state, etc.) or syntactic restrictions (transitive, ditransitive, etc.) that the process imposes on the bases it can take as input. 4. It is sometimes not easy to determine whether a process is a case of conversion or a case of overt derivation. One instance of this is found in languages that mark verbs with theme vowels and nouns with desinences. Consider the following pair, taken from Spanish. (i) a. descuent-o discount-des., ‘discount’ (noun)

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b. descont-a discount-ThV, ‘discount’ (verb) Consider now the next two examples. In what way do they help us determine whether (i) is a case of conversion or overt derivation? (ii) a. person-ific-a person-ify-ThV, ‘to personify’ b. caramel-iz-a caramel-ize-ThV, ‘to cover with caramel’ 5. The formation of adverbs from adjectives (for example, in English, happy ~ happily) has sometimes been understood as an inflectional process and sometimes as a derivational process. From an inflectional perspective, the adverb is taken to be a non-agreeing form of the adjective, and as such has to be used in cases where the adjective modifies a verb, an adjective or some other category which cannot agree with it. Discuss whether this approach is tenable from a morphological perspective in a language of your choice. Are the properties of adverb formation in your language those expected from inflection (productivity, predictability of meaning, interaction with syntactic processes, etc.)? FURTHER READING Most of the research on morphology has considered word-formation processes, so the existing literature is enormous and we will be able just to start scratching the surface here. In Lieber and Štekauer (2005), the reader will be able to find specific chapters on different theories of word formation, where different analyses for the main processes discussed in this chapter are summarized. It will be impossible in this short section to give a list of the papers, articles and monographs that have studied specific processes in specific languages. Some analysis of conversion are developed in Clark and Clark (1979), Aronoff (1980), Lieber (1981), Don (1993, 2004) and the collection of recent papers in Bauer and Valera (2005). The analysis of transpositions is discussed in Beard (1995) and Spencer (1999, 2005a). Papers and monographs on nominalizations include Chomsky (1970), Grimshaw (1990) from a lexical perspective and Alexiadou (2001) from a Constructionist perspective. Koptjevskaja-Tamm (1993) offers a general overview of the topic. The study of verbalizations is taken up in, among others, Rose (1973), Kiparsky (1997), Arad (2003) and Harley (2005). There are fewer studies about adjectivalizations, among them Sleeman and Verheugd (2000) and Fábregas (2007). The Unitary Base Hypothesis, which we mentioned briefly, was introduced in Aronoff (1976) and later modified by Scalise (1983). Specific studies on prefixation in the main European languages and how it differs from suffixation include Lieber and Baayen (1993), Gràcia and Azcarate (2000), Mateu (2001), Booij and Van Kemenade (2003), Di Sciullo (1997, 2005) and Iacobini and Scalise (2008).

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The study of lexical alternations has also produced a wide variety of papers and monographs. It is possible to find an overview of the alternations in English in Levin (1993). The causative alternation has been studied by, among many others, Hale and Keyser (1986); Haspelmath (1993), which gives a crosslinguistic overview; Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1994, 1995), from a Lexicalist perspective; Härtl (2003); Kalluli (2007); and Koontz-Garboden (2009). There is also a recent compilation of papers on the topic (Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou and Everaert 2004). Among the many studies on the locative alternation, we can single out the recent contributions in Mateu (2002) and Iwata (2008); the reader will find further references in these works. See Dowty (2000) for a critique of the notion of argument alternations. The boundaries between inflection and derivation have been explored recently in Scalise (1988a), Haspelmath (1996), Van Marle (1996), Blevins (2001, 2005) discussing the specific case of gerunds, Bauer (2004) and Janssen (2005). The study of participles as mixed categories, which we have not discussed in depth, is discussed in Wasow (1977), Levin and Rappaport (1986) and Kratzer (2000). Among the works that study appreciative morphology, we find Nieuwenhuis (1985); Dressler and Barbaresi (1994), which also offers a typological perspective; Jurafsky (1996); Ferreira (2005); and Wiltschko (2006). Grandi (2002) is a study of appreciative morphology in several Mediterranean languages.

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6 COMPOUNDING AND OTHER WORDFORMATION PROCESSES

6.1 PROPERTIES OF COMPOUNDS Compounding is a word-formation process that combines two or more roots inside the same word. The relation which is established between the elements combined inside a compound is generally not very different from the relations seen between phrases in syntax: modification, coordination or subordination (as we will see in §6.2.). Additionally, the distinction between phrases and words is not as sharp in compounding as it is in inflection or derivation (see §6.3). All of these characteristics invite a view of compounding as a morphological operation which is close to syntax. Some authors (Jackendoff 2007) have argued, even, that compounding might reflect some kind of primitive syntax which is able to create a more complex structure by combining units which are morphologically independent, as in the cases in (1), without introducing functional material, such as determiners (the, a) or prepositions (of). (1) a. b. c. d.

police dog apple pie razor sharp pick pocket

Nature of the units combined Given the fact that police, dog, apple, and pie are not morphologically bound forms, compounding – judging from (1) – does not seem too far away from a protosyntax that assembles words into more complex structures. However, this conclusion is not uncontroversial, and if we examine morphologically richer languages, we see that compounds do not always contain syntactically independent objects. The cases in (1) are called root compounds, because the objects combined within them are identical to morphological roots. In English, the root and the word can be the same, but in a language with stems (§2.4.1) and rich inflection, like Spanish, a root compound does not involve the combination of syntactically free objects. The examples in (2) combine stems, in one case nominal (notice the desinence -o at the right of each root in (2a)) and in one case verbal (notice the theme vowel -a at the right of the first root in (2b)). (2) a. sord-o-mud-o deaf-des.-mute-des., ‘deaf and mute’ 111

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word-formation processes b. par-a-sol stop-ThV-sun, ‘parasol’

A closer examination shows that these stems are not words, as they cannot show inflection independently of each other. The feminine plural of (2a) is the one in (3a), where the whole word takes only one inflection, not the one in (3b). The verb stem in (2b) does not allow inflection either, as demonstrated by the ungrammaticality of (3c). (3) a. sord-o-mud-as deaf-des.-mute-fem.pl. b. *sord-as-mud-as deaf-fem.pl.-mute-fem.pl. c. *par-a-n-sol stop-ThV-3rd pl.-sun There are some exceptions where the internal parts of a compound show contextual inflection (§4.1) or where both stems inside a compound can inflect at the same time. (4a) illustrates the first case in Danish, from Bauer (1978); (4b) illustrates the second case, from Spanish. (4) a. ny-t-år new-neu.-year, ‘New Year’ b. poet-isa-s pintor-a-s poet-fem.-pl. painter-fem.-pl., ‘women who are poets and painters’ In the first case, the adjective ny ‘new’ shows gender and number agreement with the second constituent of the compound, år, which is neuter. In the second case, the two members of the compound have to exhibit feminine and plural inflection, so the same word has two instances of inflection. These cases argue in favour of letting syntax interact with compounding in some way, allowing its internal members to show traces of agreement, an operation determined by syntax. Linking elements Sometimes, morphological markers appear between the two units combined inside the compound. These elements are called linking elements (LE) and, historically, they are frequently related to genitive case markers. Diachronically, these genitive markers have become fossilized and, despite the fact that they might be absent from the modern syntax of the language, they remain inside compounds. The examples in (5) illustrate LEs in Spanish and English. (5) a. pel-i-rroj-o hair-LE-red-des., ‘red-haired’ b. guard-s-man

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LEs help illustrate how compounds and syntactic phrases are related: their origin is related to a need to mark the non-head of a syntactic phrase with a special case. However, they are preserved in many compounds despite the fact that modern English and Spanish do not have this form of case marking any more. In so-called neoclassical compounds, where at least one neoclassical stem is involved, we find a clear distinction between those with a Latin stem and those with a Greek stem: in the first case the LE is -i- (e.g. homo + cide > hom-i-cide); in the second, it is -o- (music + logy > music-o-logy). Positional freedom As compounds are made by combining free forms, the same free form can appear in different positions in different words. Notice that the components apple and pie can exchange their positions (6). In the first case we define a type of pie made with apples; in the second, a type of apple specially used in pies. (6) a. apple pie b. pie apple This contrasts with any prefix or suffix, which must occur in a fixed position inside the word, to the left and to the right of the root respectively. (7) a. un-happy ~ *happy-un b. happi-ness ~ *ness-happy Given this property, words formed combining a root with a neoclassical unit (§1.2) or two neoclassical stems are considered compounds, neoclassical compounds. These stems also show positional freedom. (8) a. log-o-graph-y b. graph-o-log-y The morpheme log- can appear to the right (8a) or to the left (8b), and exchange its position with the morpheme graph- ((8b) vs. (8a)). Given the positional independence of the elements that form these two words, they are considered compounds. 6.2 BASIC CLASSES OF COMPOUNDS In our discussion about morphological structures, we considered the notion of head (§3.2.1) and we noticed that some words, particularly some compounds, have been argued to be exocentric because none of their internal constituents seems responsible for the grammatical category or the semantics of the whole compound (§3.3.2). This is the first division that has to be taken into account: compounds in which one of the constituents can be claimed to be the head (endocentric) and compounds whose properties do not follow from any internal constituent (exocentric). In a word like high school, the second constituent (school) is claimed to be the head, because the

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semantics of the whole word is derived from the meaning of this constituent (‘a high school is a kind of school’) and because, just like the constituent school, the whole word is a noun. This example is a case of an endocentric compound: one of the constituents can be singled out as the head, while the other is the non-head. By contrast, a noun like pick pocket can be argued to be exocentric. It denotes a kind of person, but neither of the two elements denotes this semantic notion; it is a noun, but the only noun present inside the compound (pocket) is an unlikely candidate for head, because its meaning does not provide the basis for the meaning of the whole word. Remember that endocentric compounds can differ in the position that the head occupies, to the right or to the left; we refer to §3.2.2 for discussion of this property. 6.2.1 CLASSES ACCORDING TO THE RELATION ESTABLISHED BETWEEN THE TWO ELEMENTS With respect to the relationship that the two roots establish inside the compound, it is traditional to differentiate between subordinative and coordinative compounds. Subordinative compounds In a subordinative compound the meaning of the word is a reflection of the meaning of the head; the other constituent is a modifier of this head. The relation established between the head and the non-head in a subordinative compound is sometimes similar to the one established between a predicate and its arguments or modifiers: the non-head gets a semantic role assigned by the head. Consider the following examples from Spanish (9). (9) a. tela-araña web-spider, ‘spider web’ b. drog(a)-adicto drug-addict Here, the relationship between the two constituents is one of subordination: araña ‘spider’ takes its semantic role from the noun tela ‘web’, as shown by the gloss ‘a web made by a spider’; the constituent droga ‘drug’ takes its semantic role from the noun adicto ‘addict’, ‘someone who is addicted to drugs’. Coordinative compounds By contrast, the two constituents of a coordinative compound contribute equally to the meaning of the whole word and neither of them determines the semantic role of the other. The relation is similar to the one obtained in syntactic coordination. Consider the Spanish examples in (10). (10) a. filósofo economista philosopher economist b. bar pizzería bar pizzeria

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A philosopher economist is a person who is at the same time a philosopher and an economist, and a bar pizzeria is a place which functions both as a bar and as a pizzeria. These compounds are also similar to syntactic coordination in the sense that the elements combined generally need to have the same grammatical category. In the cases in (10) we combine two nouns; we can also obtain these compounds by combining two adjectives (bitter-sweet) or two verbs (drink drive). Given that inside a coordinative compound the grammatical category of the two constituents is identical and the meaning contribution of each constituent is equal, the identification of the head in these cases is not trivial. One solution that can be imagined is that in coordinative compounds both constituents act as heads, in such a way that these compounds have two heads. One property of coordinative compounds that might support this view is that sometimes in this class each constituent must carry its own inflection. This is expected if the two elements are heads in these compounds, as words are generally inflected on their heads (§3.2.1): (11) a. filósofo-s economista-s philosopher-s economist-s b. bar-es pizzería-s bar-s pizzería-s Attributive compounds The distinction between coordinative and subordinative compounds is relatively traditional, but the typology has been increased by the addition of attributive compounds (Scalise and Bisetto 2005). In these compounds, which would traditionally be classified as subordinative, the non-head does not get a semantic role from the head, but rather predicates some of its properties, acting like the attribute inside a noun phrase (NP). Consider, for example, the examples in (12), again from Spanish. (12) a. hombre lobo man wolf, ‘werewolf ’ b. corbata mariposa tie butterfly, ‘bow-tie’ In these cases, the constituents lobo ‘wolf ’ and mariposa ‘butterfly’ modify the heads hombre ‘man’ and corbata ‘tie’ in the manner in which an adjective would modify a head noun (a clever man): by adding some special properties to its denotation and giving as a result a specific kind of the object denoted by the head. A werewolf is a man who has some properties similar to those of wolves, and a bow-tie is a tie which has some properties (the shape) in common with butterflies. Unlike coordinative compounds, these have the meaning of the word – the type of object denoted –determined by the head, but unlike subordinative compounds, they do not have a semantic role assigned by the head to the non-head; rather, the non-head adds some special properties to the head. Depending on the grammatical category of the constituent which expresses the properties that further specify the head, two classes can be differentiated. The first

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one, appositive, is that in which the non-head is a noun (as in English snail mail); the second one, pure attributive, is that where the non-head is an adjective (as in English pale face). Grammatical differences between these three classes of compounds The three kinds of compounds may differ in their relative productivity in a given language. In English and other Germanic languages compounding is very productive and gives rise to subordinative, attributive and coordinative compounds. However, in Romance languages subordinative compounds are less productive than the attributive and coordinative ones. An English attributive compound such as pale face can be translated into Spanish by merely changing the position of each component, as in rostro pálido. However, a subordinative compound such as tree house (‘house in a tree’) cannot be translated so easily to Spanish: casa árbol tends to be interpreted as an attributive compound – namely, a house that has some properties of trees, such as its ecological nature – or a coordinative one – namely, a house which is at the same time a tree – but it will not be interpreted as a house which is placed in a tree. This subordinative meaning is conveyed by a syntactic phrase which involves a preposition, as in casa del árbol, lit. ‘house of the tree’. These classes of compounds also show different behaviour with respect to recursion. A process is recursive when it can be applied several times to the same object. Coordinative compounding is recursive in Romance because, given a coordinative compound, it can be made longer by adding a third constituent to it, provided it is also interpreted as coordinative (13). (13) a. bar pizzería bar pizzeria b. bar pizzería discoteca bar pizzeria disco In Romance languages, subordinative and attributive compounds are not recursive. If  we take the Italian attributive compound uomo lupo ‘man-wolf, werewolf ’, the word cannot be made longer by adding a third constituent interpreted as an attribute, as in (14), which should mean, if possible, ‘a werewolf that has some properties of frogs’. (14) *uomo lupo rana man wolf frog Subordinative compounds are highly recursive in Germanic languages. Taking English as an example, the compound in (15a) can be made longer by adding other constituents which are subordinated to the non-head. (15) a. [garden decoration] b. [[rose garden] decoration] c. [[[tea rose] garden] decoration]

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In Romance languages, recursivity is not accepted in subordinative compounds, and instead these languages need to use whole syntactic phrases with prepositions to introduce the subordinate constituents. (16) translates into Spanish the examples in (15). As we see, in general compounding is less frequent in Romance languages than in Germanic ones. (16) a. decoración de jardín decoration of garden b. decoración de jardín de rosas decoration of garden of roses c. decoración de jardín de rosas de té decoration of garden of roses of tea 6.2.2 SYNTHETIC COMPOUNDS In languages like English the class of compounds of which truck driver is an example has attracted special attention. The interesting property of this kind of subordinative compound is that its head is a word derived from a verb and the non-head typically plays the role that the direct object would have played with the base verb (to drive trucks). Other examples involve other derivational affixes, such as -al (snow removal), -ing (house building) and -ment (system management). The combination of derivation and compounding in this kind of compound has attracted the attention of morphologists, who have tried to determine the order in which the structure is formed. There are basically two options to consider. The first is that the derivation process precedes compounding (following the order drive > driver > truck driver); the second is that the compounding precedes the derivation process (following the order truck drive > truck driver). In a theory where words have internal structure, these two sequences would be represented as the structures in (17): in (17a), a compound contains a derived word; in (17b), a compound is the input to a derivational rule. (17) a. [[truck] [[driv]er]] b. [[[truck] driv] er] These two proposals have problems. The analysis in (17b) has the immediate problem that the verb *to truck drive does not exist in English, despite the fact that in this analysis it is the base of the derivation process. By contrast, (17a) has the problem that the constituent truck combines with the noun driver, not the verb to drive; this makes it surprising that truck is interpreted as an argument of the verb and not as a modifier of the noun. Synthetic compounds have been the object of extensive work in morphology (see the further reading section at the end of this chapter for a summary). Ackema and Neeleman (2004) provide a recent example of an analysis that argues for the structure in (17b). They explain the non-existence of a compound like truck drive as a form of blocking (§1.1.3) between a syntactic and a morphological structure. The idea is that the compound to truck drive does not

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exist because there is already a syntactic structure (to drive trucks) which is identical in meaning to the compound. This account presupposes that syntax and morphology compete in such a way that syntax takes preference in building a structure and morphology takes over when there is some requirement that syntax cannot meet (as, for example, to be a proper base for a derivational operation, which then requires a compound). Languages like French, Italian and Spanish do not have productive synthetic compounds of the English type, although there are some isolated cases which it has been claimed have been borrowed from English (18). (18) radio-transmis-or ‘radiotransmitter’ To express the same subordinative relation between a verb and one of its arguments, these languages use a type of compound that involves a bare verbal stem as first constituent and a noun as second constituent. (19) abre-cartas open-letters, ‘letter opener’ It has been claimed that this compound is exocentric, because it is interpreted as an agent or an instrument in the absence of any explicit marking of this relation. Notice that, in contrast with the English examples, the verb is not derived by -er or any similar morpheme. Some analyses (Varela 1989) have argued that, despite appearances, the verb is derived just like the English counterpart, but with a null morpheme Ø (§2.3.2). Thus, the structure of (19) would be the one in (20), which means that the compound contains a derived constituent (as in 17a); the parallelism with English is almost perfect, except for the position of the head. (20) [[[abre]Ø] [cartas]] open-er letters 6.2.3 PARASYNTHETIC COMPOUNDS One of the properties of the English synthetic compounds is that the two constituents cannot form a compound unless the second one is derived. Parasynthetic compounds are those words which cannot be derived unless the head combines first with another free morpheme. Consider the contrast in (21): (21) a. *[ey(e)]-ed b. [blue-ey(e)]-ed It is not possible to derive an adjective from eye as in (21a), but as soon as this word forms a sequence with blue (or other forms, like one, dark, etc.) the word becomes possible. The example in (22) further illustrates this type of word in Spanish.

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(22) a. *mund-ista world-ist, ‘related to the world’ b. tercer-mund-ista third world-ist, ‘related to the third world’ These compounds are called parasynthetic from their resemblance to parasynthetic words that are derived by simultaneously adding a prefix and a suffix (§3.3.5); in this case, the complex word is also possible only when the base is simultaneously modified by an element to its left and another to its right. The difference is, however, that in these cases the element to the left is a free form and not an affix. Moreover, frequently, the set formed by the first element and the base is also a grammatical sequence in the language (23). (23) a. blue eye b. tercer mundo ‘third world’ However, these sequences do not behave like compounds when they appear outside the parasynthetic word; their behaviour is the one expected from phrases. For example, it is possible to coordinate the first member of the sequence with another constituent or introduce other elements between the two constituents. See §6.3 for other differences between compounds and phrases. (24) a. big and blue eyes b. primer y tercer mundo first and third world 6.2.4 CO- COMPOUNDS A subclass of coordinative compounds is co-compounds (Wälchli 2005). In a coordinative compound, the meaning of the word is determined by adding the meaning of each of the two components; the resulting meaning is the intersection between the meanings of the individual words. In philosopher economist we combine the meaning of philosopher and the meaning of economist, and use the word to refer only to the individuals that belong to the two classes. The result is a more specific class of entities than the one expressed by either of the two words separately. By contrast, in a co-compound the meaning is not a more specific class of entities, but a more general class where both members can be included. Consider the following co-compound, from Georgian: (25) dá-dzma brother-sister, ‘siblings’ There is a connection between this class of compounds and natural coordination, that is, the coordination of semantically close words that tend to be grouped together because they belong to the same category. The coordination wife and children is

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natural, as these notions are semantically related in the mind of most cultures, but not children and turnips; relatedly, there is no co-compound, to the best of our knowledge, which puts together these two constituents. Its meaning would be unclear, as there is no obvious class which can be defined by containing both children and turnips. 6.3 COMPOUNDING BETWEEN SYNTAX AND MORPHOLOGY Compounds are a kind of complex word whose relation to syntax deserves a specific section; compounding has been identified by some with a protosyntax, as in many cases it involves putting together morphologically free forms, and the possible relationships established between its two constituents are generally similar to those that are attested in syntax. Despite these similarities, compounds are different from phrases in a variety of phenomena, while at the same time there are structures which display an intermediate behaviour between what we expect from a phrase and what we expect from a word. Here we will explore the differences between compounds and phrases and, then, consider these intermediate cases. 6.3.1 SOME DIFFERENCES BETWEEN COMPOUNDS AND PHRASES Some empirical differences between compounds and phrases suggest that the former are not built by syntactic rules. These restrictions seem to be stronger in some languages than others. First of all, consider coordination. Coordination is possible with a constituent inside the syntactic phrase (26a), but in some languages, like Spanish, not with one inside the compound (26b). Coordinating constituents inside a compound seems to be possible in English, at least in cases such as (26c). (26) a. He drinks [tea and coffee]. b. *un [limpia [-botas y -ventanas]] a polish [-boots and -windows] c. a [[tea and coffee] drinker There are also differences with respect to ellipsis. One of the members of a phrase can undergo ellipsis, but not any of the internal constituents of the compound. In (27) we use the kind of ellipsis known as verb phrase replacement (VP replacement), which in English requires the auxiliary to do: the sentence in (27a) allows it, but not the compound in (27b). In other cases, ellipsis seems to be possible, like (27c), where the sequence is likely interpreted as tea-(cups) and coffee-cups. (27) a. He drives trucks and he does it every day. b. *He is a [truck driver] and he does it every day. c. tea- and coffee-cups Consider now the possibility of having an element modifying an internal constituent of the structure (as opposed to modification of the whole structure); this is, again, possible with phrases (28a) but not always with compounds. The restriction seems,

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once more, to be stronger in Romance languages: compare the grammatical English example in (28b) to the ungrammatical Spanish example in (28c). (28) a. He sells [red balloons]. b. [red balloons] seller c. *un [limpia- [ventanas grandes]] a polish windows big (Intended: ‘a cleaner of big windows’) Finally, consider the possibility of displacing a constituent inside the structure. This is possible in a syntactic phrase, but not in a compound. In (29), the line shows the intended original position of the unit truck inside the structure. (29) a.*Truck is what he likes a [_____ driver] b. Trucks are what he [drives _____] These contrasts suggest that compounds are not built by syntactic rules.Therefore, the statement that compounds represent a protosyntax is only valid if protosyntax is understood as a grammatical component distinct from syntax in natural languages, since the behaviour of compounds is distinct. Empirical differences such as these have led morphologists to propose the Generalized Lexicalist Hypothesis, which argues that morphology and syntax are two distinct grammatical components. This theory, along with other phenomena, such as those just described, which involve systematic grammatical differences between syntactic objects and complex words, is studied again in §7.2. There are other kinds of differences between phrases and compounds. For instance, it has been claimed that the behaviour of phonological stress is different in English for the two kinds of structures. In a compound involving two nouns, stress is assigned to the first constituent (30a); when the same two nouns form a phrase (30b), stress falls on the rightmost element. In cases like this the different stress pattern comes accompanied by other differences; for instance, the fact that the structure with compound stress has a non-compositional meaning, while the one that has the stress pattern expected from phrases has a compositional interpretation (‘a board which is black’). (30) a. bláck board b. black bóard 6.3.2 INTERMEDIATE CASES There are some grammatical objects which, given their empirical behaviour, seem to fall into an intermediate position between syntax and morphology. These are the topic of this section. Phrasal compounds Phrasal, or syntagmatic, compounds are structures with a non-transparent meaning and low productivity formed by morphologically free forms but which, unlike compounds, contain function words inside them. Compare the two examples in (31).

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(31) a. apple pie b. rock ’n’ roll In (31b) there is a function word, a coordinate conjunction, while in (31a) all the constituents of the compound are lexical elements, in this case nouns. Remember that the reason for saying that compounds reflect a protosyntax is that, among other things, they do not contain markers of grammatical functions, such as conjunctions or prepositions. From this perspective, (31b) cannot be considered a compound. However, in its meaning of ‘a particular music style’, the combination in (31b) is not semantically predictable and, moreover, it is not possible to replace any of its constituents with another noun (for instance, rock ’n’ slide does not denote a standard musical style). The example in (31b) is a phrasal compound. Sometimes a language has two words, both a proper compound and a phrasal compound, which denote exactly the same object. Consider these two Spanish examples: (32) a. tela-araña fabric-spider b. tela de araña fabric of spider Both words mean ‘spider web’. Notice that in both cases the structure has to be stored in the lexicon, because the noun tela ‘fabric’ does not mean ‘web’ in isolation, and no speaker would use it to refer to the substance produced by spiders. The relation between the two members of the structure is the same, but the difference is that only (32b) has a function word (the preposition de). (32b) is a phrasal compound, but (32a) is not. Phrasal verbs A good question would be whether English phrasal verbs – for example, throw up – could be considered compounds. The meaning of these combinations of verbs and particles is not compositional and has to be stored in the lexicon and learnt by speakers as a special, non-productive combination of free forms; these are properties that are generally identified with morphological units, although certainly listing is not enough to classify something as a word (as we saw in §1.1.3 and §2.2). Therefore, we would need additional criteria to determine their status. Consider the possibility of displacing a constituent out of the structure (see also §7.2.3.). The two constituents of a compound are not grammatically independent of each other and, in consequence, cannot be separated (contrast the phrase Trucks are what he drives with *Truck is what he is a driver, where we tried to displace the noun truck out of the compound truck driver). Some phrasal verbs can be separated (33a), while others resist it (33b). (33) a. John threw the spaghetti up. b. *Mary gets with John along.

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This contrast shows that some phrasal verbs behave more like normal syntactic phrases and others behave in a way formally closer to compounds. Separable prefixes In a related contrast, languages like German and Dutch differentiate between two kinds of particle–verb combination. In the first kind, the particle behaves as we expect from a bound form and can never be separated from the base verb (cf. überlegen ‘deliberate’ in (34a, b)). In the second case (aus-gehen ‘exit’), the particle must separate from its base if the verb is in the so-called ‘verb second’ position in German main clauses (34c, d), as opposed to what we see in embedded clauses (34e). In this second case we have what has been called a separable prefix. In such cases, the separable unit tends to correspond to a preposition and keeps its normal meaning in the construction, which makes it difficult to treat it as something different from the preposition aus ‘from’. (34) a. Ich über-lege mir etwas. I ponder myself something ‘I think about something’. b. *Ich lege mir etwas überI ponder myself something PART c. *Ich aus-gehe heute zum Essen. I out-go today to food ‘I go out for lunch’. d. Ich gehe heute aus zum Essen. I go today out to food ‘I go out for lunch’. e. Ich denke dass ich zum Essen aus-gehe. I think that I to food out-go In some cases, the same particle-plus-verb combination behaves like a separable prefix or not depending on whether the meaning of the whole is more or less predictable. For example, über-setzen (lit. ‘over-bring’), in the sense of ‘translate’, where the space meaning of the particule über ‘over’ is not immediately present, behaves as a non-separable construction (Ich über-setze das Buch ‘I translate the book’), but in its compositional meaning, where it literally means ‘to bring something over’, it behaves as a separable unit, as in Der Fährmann -setzt das Boot über- ‘The ferryman brings the boat over’. Contrasts like these illustrate the fact that the presence of lexical idiosyncrasies, such as a non-compositional meaning, are often accompanied by word properties, although being listed in the lexicon does not automatically imply being a morphological unit (remember §1.1.3) and being a separable verb does not automatically imply having compositional meaning. Separable verbs in Dutch have received a recent analysis in the framework of CM (Booij 2010: 118–45). This author proposes that separable verbs are syntactic objects which instantiate a construction (§2.4.2). To the extent that they are syntactic objects, it is expected that the particle and the verb can be separated. To the extent

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that they are constructions, they are objects stored in the lexicon and therefore they are expected to receive a non-transparent meaning in some cases. Booij offers the following examples from Dutch, all resulting from the combination of the verb vallen ‘to fall’ with different particles; unlike the previous German examples, these separable verbs do not have compositional meaning. (35) aan vallen ‘to attack’; af vallen ‘to lose weight’; bij vallen ‘to applaud’; in vallen ‘to set in’; om vallen ‘to fall down’ Given their mixed properties, separable verbs constitute one empirical domain which argues in favour of theories where the division between syntax and morphology is not strict, and where a certain gradient is allowed between the two levels. Mismatches between stress assignment and other properties In other cases, the syntactic and semantic criteria normally used to identify something as a compound do not coincide with the phonological criteria. In work by Giegerich (1992, 2004) it has been shown that units which according to syntactic and semantic criteria are classified as compounds can have the final stress characteristic of phrases in English. This is typical, among other cases, for N-N compounds whose first element denotes place, time or material. (36) a. b. c. d. e.

Christmas oratório morning cóffee London fóg stone wáll village shóp

As Giegerich notices, final stress is generally accompanied by more transparency in meaning, although not always ((36e) is not just any shop in a village, but a particular kind of shop). One way of interpreting these data is that examples such as those in (36) have an intermediate status between phrases and words: their stress is determined by phrasal properties, while their syntactic behaviour and the potential bleaching of meaning are lexical properties. As in the case of separable verbs, an analysis in terms of constructions could be conceived of. 6.4 COMPOUNDS AND GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES: JAPANESE AND ENGLISH In this section we will address the question of how different grammatical categories can combine inside a compound. Given a single language, not all combinations of grammatical categories are equally possible or equally productive. Here we will briefly compare the main grammatical category combinations inside compounds in two unrelated languages, Japanese and English. The data are taken from the MorBoComp database. Let us start with coordinative compounds (Table 6.1).

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Table 6.1 Coordinative compounds Language

Combination of grammatical categories

Grammatical category of the compound

Example

Japanese

A+A N+N V+V A+A N+N V+V

A N V A N V

atsu kurushi ‘hot strenuous, stuffy’ chichi haha ‘father mother, parents’ naki sakebu ‘cry shout, to cry and shout’ deaf mute king emperor sleep walk

English

For this class of compounds, both Japanese and English allow for combinations of the three major grammatical categories in order to give a coordinated compound of the same category as the two constituents. There are differences, though. The example chichi haha ‘parents’ is a case of co-compound; in general, co-compounds are more frequent in Japanese than in English; an N-N compound in English, with very few exceptions, refers to a single individual who displays properties of two objects, not a collective notion formed by adding distinct objects, as with co-compounds: a king emperor is a single person with both titles. Another category combination that Japanese allows with more freedom than English is verbs formed by two verbs. Examples such as sleep walk are very rare in English; however, Japanese allows this kind of combination more productively. As we will see in the discussion of subordinative compounds, Japanese uses compound verbs for notions that English expresses with syntactic combinations involving a periphrasis, as in arai ageru ‘to wash to finish’, equivalent in meaning to English to finish washing. Consider now attributive compounds (Table 6.2). Quite systematically for this class of compounds, both in English and in Japanese, the rightmost element is the categorial head of the word.

Table 6.2 Attributive compounds Language

Combination of grammatical categories

Grammatical category of the compound

Example

Japanese

A+A A+N N+N V+N V+A A+N A+A N+A N+N A+N

A N N N A A A A N N

aka guroi ‘red black, reddish black’ aka hige ‘red beard, red-bearded person’ hime yuri ‘princess lily, star lily’ kai neko ‘keep cat, house cat’ mushi atsui ‘steam hot, sultry’ barefoot red hot ice cold iron curtain red skin

English

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In this category we find some minor differences between the two languages; for instance, the fact that in English, but not in Japanese, it is possible to form attributive compound adjectives where the non-head is a noun, such as ice cold or razor sharp. More interestingly, though, we see that Japanese can form attributive compound adjectives and nouns where the non-head is a verb, like kai neko ‘house cat’, where the form kai is the verb ‘to keep’. This possibility is not available in English; in order to express attributive relations, English would have to turn the verb into a category that can function as a modifier, as in steaming hot (vs. *steam hot, which is ungrammatical in English). An interesting question is whether we have to accept that Japanese can use verbs inside compounds in a way which is substantially different from English or, on the other hand, whether the difference might just be superficial. Perhaps Japanese is a language that uses conversion (§5.4) more productively than English, and despite not reflecting it in the overt morphology the verb has actually been turned into an adjective. We will come back to this possibility after presenting the third class of compounds, subordinative compounds (Table 6.3). Here we see that English can combine almost any two grammatical categories in subordinative compounds, although not all of them are equally productive: for instance, N-A is generally only possible when the adjective is derived from a verb (as washable, from to wash). There are some combinations which are not attested, though: the pattern V-A is not found in English, but it is found in Japanese (hanashi nikui ‘difficult to say’). In contrast, MorBoComp does not attest Japanese subordinate compounds of the form A-N or A-V, which are possible in English (although cases like dry clean are not very productive in English). Table 6.3 Subordinative compounds Language

Combination of grammatical categories

Grammatical category of the compound

Example

Japanese

N+N N+V V+N V+V N+V N+A

N N N V V A

V+A

A

N+N N+V A+V N+A A+N V+N

N V V A N N

aki zora ‘autumn sky’ ame furi ‘rain fall, precipitation’ cho kin, ‘save money, saving money’ arai ageru ‘wash finish, to finish washing’ awa datsu ‘bubble stand, to bubble’ gaman zuyoi ‘patience strong, strong with respect to patience’ hanashi nikui ‘to say difficult, difficult to say’ apron string pan fry dry clean nationwide high school kill joy

English

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In this class of compounds we find some cases of categorial exocentricity. In all English cases the category of the compound corresponds with that of the second constituent. However, in the case of kill joy it is dubious whether the noun joy is the categorial head of the word, as it is interpreted as an argument of the verb kill; this case rather should be assimilated to the class of pick pocket (cf. (1d) and §6.2) as an exocentric nominal compound that contains a noun which cannot be considered the head of the word. Categorial exocentricity is more dramatic and clear in Japanese. The class of nominal compounds with the pattern N-V is quite productive in this language, and they are equivalent in meaning to English synthetic compounds where the head is a deverbal noun that takes a non-head interpreted as its complement. Japanese ame furi ‘rain fall’ can be literally translated into English as rain fall, but other similar cases cannot: house building is possible, but not *house build. These exocentric compounds could be analyzed as endocentric compounds with the head to the right if the second element had been turned into a member of another category before forming the compound. This is Kageyama’s (2009) proposal for some apparent cases of exocentricity involving the noun and verb categories. For instance, in (37), the compound can be analyzed as endocentric (and with its head to the right) if the verb yomi ‘read’ has been turned into a noun without any morphological marking. English marks this category change, but in this analysis Japanese does not. (37) [[hon]N- [yomi]V]N bookread ‘book reading’ Notice, for instance, that the participle interpretation of the verb in the compound yude-tamago ‘boil-egg’, translated into English as boiled egg, is not morphologically marked either, so it is not stipulative to propose that Japanese tends to leave category changes involving verbs unmarked. Once we have made this analytic assumption, it can be applied to other cases where Japanese and English seemed to differ. For instance, the claim that Japanese allows verbs to be the non-heads in attributive compounds could be explained as a case where the verb, before becoming part of the compound, was turned into an adjective (Japanese ‘steam-hot’ meaning steaming hot). 6.5 OTHER WORD- FORMATION PROCESSES We have examined the two most common morphological processes for creating new words, namely derivation and compounding. In the remainder of this chapter we will examine other less common word-formation processes that are used in languages across the world. 6.5.1 CLIPPING Clipping is a process by which a word is phonologically reduced by subtracting a segment from it. Examples in English are ad (from advertisement) and gator (from alligator). As can be seen, clipping is a process which operates on the phonological

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shape of the word; the elements subtracted (-vertisement, alli-) do not correspond to morphemes. In English, as can be seen from these two examples, clipping does not always keep the initial segments of the word; in other languages, like Italian or Spanish, there is a strong tendency to keep the initial part of the word. Clipping is a process that does not change the grammatical category of the original word, and the meaning is also generally preserved. A clipped word, though, has some usage differences with respect to the non-clipped version: it frequently belongs to a more colloquial style and is not used in formal settings. We do not expect to find words such as doc (doctor), tec (detective) or jams (pyjamas) in a formal text or a speech intended for a formal audience. Clipping, being a process that operates on the phonological representation of the word, conforms to some phonological tendencies. Despite the fact that the resulting segment is not necessarily a morpheme, it tends to contain only whole syllables. The clipping of alligator is gator, corresponding to the two last syllables of the word, and not *igator or *ator, which do not correspond to the syllables found in the original word. Another property of clipping is that the result very frequently conforms to a phonologically typical word of the language. In Spanish the unmarked phonological shape of a word tends to consist of two syllables with stress falling on the first one (a trochee, in prosodic terms). Clippings normally correspond to trochees, sometimes ignoring the position of stress in the original word. Consider the cases in (38), which illustrate some pairs of clippings and their source word. (38) a. universidad /u-ni-beɾ-si-dád/ ~ uni /ú-ni/ university b. facultad /fa-kul-tád/ ~ facu /fá-ku/ faculty c. profesor /pɾo-fe-sóɾ/ ~ profe /pɾó-fe/ teacher The clipping of universidad ‘university’ is uni, a trochee with stress on the first syllable, even though this syllable does not bear stress in the original word; the same happens with the two other examples, irrespective of the fact that stress fell on the last syllable in all these cases. 6.5.2 REDUPLICATION Another word-formation process that operates on the phonological side of the word is reduplication. In a reduplicated word, the whole original word or some of its phonological segments (generally consisting of one or two syllables) are repeated. The reduplicant, that is, the repeated segment added to the original word, can appear to the left or to the right of the base. One of the clearest cases of reduplication is found in Maori (see Bauer 2003), where the plural form of some adjectives is performed by reduplicating the first two segments of the first syllable of the word. In these cases, the reduplicant is attached to the left of the base:

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nonohoi small.pl. papai good.pl.

It has been frequently noted in the literature that reduplication tends to have an iconic role; that is to say that the repetition of a part of the base is semantically interpreted as some kind of collectivity, plurality or intensification of the meaning of the base. However, the variety of roles that reduplication can perform crosslinguistically is wider. In Burmese, for example, some adjectives are turned into adverbs by reduplicating separately each syllable of the word (here, in a simplified phonological representation): (40) a. lapa ‘beautiful’ b. lala papa ‘beautifully’ In the languages of the world reduplication can be used not only for inflection and grammatical category changes. It can be used to express notions that in languages like English or Italian are normally performed by appreciative morphemes, as in Malagasy aloka ‘shadow’ > alokaloka ‘small shadow’. Although they are not reduplications in the strictest sense of the term, in English and other European languages some words are formed by repeating an almost identical sequence. The identity is not perfect because sometimes different vowels are involved, and sometimes the first segment of the two forms also differs: willy-nilly, razzle-dazzle or knick-knack are examples of this. Ideophones and onomatopoeias (that is, words that try to reproduce sounds made by objects or actions in the real world, and sometimes also other sensory emotions) frequently follow this pattern: chit-chat, ding-dong, tic-tac, zig-zag, etc. In all these cases, the meaning is non-compositional, and sometimes neither of the two components of the word has a meaning in isolation. 6.5.3 ACRONYMY Acronymy creates new words by combining the initials (or the initial segments) of a sequence of words. For this reason it is also known occasionally as initialism. Examples of acronyms in English include some common words that are not felt as such any more, like radar (from radio detection and ranging) and scuba (from selfcontained underwater breathing apparatus). Other examples, such as NATO (from the subordinative compound North Atlantic Treaty Organization) and AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome), are still felt as acronyms, since most speakers are still aware of the origin of the acronym. For a sequence of letters to be considered an acronym (and therefore a word) it is necessary that it be pronounced by speakers as a word, as opposed to spelling out each one of the initials separately or reading instead the sequence of words that the initials correspond to. In the second situation we have an abbreviation, not an

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acronym. Something like Mr is not considered a word, but an orthographic convention, because speakers pronounce it as /mɪstər/. By contrast, radar is not pronounced as ‘radio detection and ranging’. As can be seen in the case of radar, when the result of combining the initials is not pronounceable in a particular language, other letters of one or several of the words involved may be taken: as the sequence *rdar, which would contain only the initials of each word, does not comply with English phonology, the second sound of the first word is also included in the acronym. 6.5.4 BLENDING Blending takes two different roots or words, generally belonging to the same category, and combines them into a single word. Each one of the roots loses some of its segments in the combination, and they are substituted by segments of the other root. For example, brunch is a blend from the words breakfast and lunch. This blend contains a segment of the first word (br-) and one from the second (-unch). Similar examples of blending in English include motel (motor + hotel) and chunnel (channel + tunnel). The previous cases cannot be analyzed as compounds formed with clipped words, because br- and -unch are not possible clippings in English. Moreover, in other cases the combination inside the blending is clearly non-linear and segments of the two roots overlap. In the word foolosophy (fool + philosophy) the two consonants of fool overlap with the two first consonants of the word philosophy (as, despite the different orthography, they are identical sounds). For this reason, words which have sound similarities – including not only segments, but also the position of their stress and their number of syllables – are more likely to combine in a blend. Blends give rise to new meanings in a non-compositional way. In a blend, the meaning of the word is not determined by combining single units inside the same structure, but by combining the concepts denoted by two different words in some novel way, sometimes with an artistic or humorous goal. The particular contribution of each of the words is not clear and, as the combination is not amenable to a structure in any obvious way, no structural relation specifies the relationship that is established between the two words. Someone who uses the word foolosophy normally suggests that he or she refers to a type of philosophy characteristic of foolish people, but this meaning is not explicit in the structure of the word. EXERCISES 1. Determining whether a word is a compound or derived is not easy when one of its constituents is identical to a preposition (or a postposition) in a given language. Consider the following words in English, formed by combining a lexeme with over, which in principle could be an English preposition. Which words could you consider compounds, and which ones could be prefixed words, and why? overabound, overachieve, overarch, overbed, overbuild, overbuy 2. It has been noticed that compounds frequently involve a combination of two nouns (tablecloth) or two adjectives (blue-green), but those that combine two verbs

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are much less common and typically have a very lexicalized and unpredictable meaning (cf. see-saw). Moreover, compounds consisting of two nouns are generally nouns, and those with two adjectives are adjectives, but those that combine two verbs are rarely verbs. Check whether this statement is true in your own language. 3. Consider a language of your choice and explore what kinds of productive compound are found in this language (as we did in §6.4). Classify those compounds with respect to (a) categories combined and resulting category, (b) position of the head, (c) presence or absence of an LE, and (d) semantic relation between the constituents. 4. One possible analysis of parasynthetic compounds (one-eyed) would be to claim that the suffix attaches to a whole phrase (one eye in our example) in order to form a derived word out of a syntactic structure. Given the differences in behaviour between compounds and phrases examined in §6.3.1, what would be the advantages and disadvantages of this kind of analysis? 5. Consider a language of your choice and explore what other morphological wordformation processes are available in this language, in addition to derivation and compounding (blending, acronymy, reduplication, etc.). Are they general in the language or are they restricted to specific styles and registers, as we have seen in many cases in §6.5? FURTHER READING As was the case with derivation, the literature on compounding is so extensive that we will be unable to give any kind of exhaustive list. Some classic references in the study of compounds (especially N-N compounds) include Allen (1978), Bauer (1978), Levi (1978), Roeper and Siegel (1978), Lieber (1983) and DiSciullo (1992). There are two recent and significant collections of papers covering an extensive set of topics about compounding: Lieber and Štekauer (2009) and Scalise and Vogel (2010). With respect to specific theoretical treatments of compounding, syntactic treatments of compounding include Lees (1960), Baker (1988), Roeper (1988) and Harley (2009). From a construction grammar perspective, see Masini (2009) and Booij (2010); Ryder (1994) proposes an analysis in terms of cognitive linguistics compatible with these works. The relation of morphology and syntax in compounding is explored in Borer (1988), Shibatani and Kageyama (1988), Bauer (1998), Ralli and Stavrou (1998), Bisetto and Scalise (1999), and Ackema and Neeleman (2004). The interaction between compounding and stress is explored in Bauer (1983), Cinque (1993), Nespor and Ralli (1996), Peperkamp (1997), Giegerich (2004, 2009), Plag (2006b) and Vogel (2010), among many others. There are also several works dealing with the classification of compounds, including Olsen (2001), Bauer (2008b) and Scalise and Bisetto (2009); see Wälchli (2005) for co-compounds and coordinative compounds, Bisetto and Melloni (2008) for the specific case of parasynthetic compounds, and Bresnan and Mchombo (1995) and Wiese (1996) for phrasal compounds, among many others. An interesting question which we have not touched on is how compounds are acquired; this question is explored in Clark and Berman (1987), Clahsen,

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Marcus, Bartke and Wiese (1996) and Krott, Gagné and Nicoladis (2009). The universal properties of compounds are explored in Guevara and Scalise (2008). Clipping and reduplication have been studied from the perspective of the interaction between phonology and morphology. See, for clipping, Benua (1995), Ito and Mester (1997), Wiese (2001) and Roca and Felíu (2003). For reduplication, see Marantz (1982), McCarthy and Prince (1995), Inkelas and Zoll (2005), Caballero (2006), Gouskova (2007) and the collection of papers in Hurch (2005). There are fewer studies on acronymy (Algeo 1975) and blending (Cannon 1986, Lehrer 1996, Kelly 1998).

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7 MORPHOLOGY’S RELATION TO SYNTAX

7.1 THE PLACE OF MORPHOLOGY IN GRAMMAR: LEXICALISM AND CONSTRUCTIONISM One of the main controversies in modern morphology is the exact nature of its relation to syntax. Theories dealing with the relation between these two components  fall into two main classes: those which argue that morphology is a distinct generative component, and those which claim that the only generative component in grammar is syntax, and morphology either does not exist or is an interpretative component that follows syntax. The first hypothesis is generally called Lexicalism or Projectionism, while the second has been labelled Constructionism. 7.1.1 LEXICALIST THEORIES Lexicalism’s main claim is that grammar contains two distinct components able to create new forms: syntax, which is responsible for creating phrases and sentences, and the lexicon, which creates new words. The lexicon in this approach is a complex component that contains both a list of forms (the mental dictionary) and a set of rules which create new words. Thus, the component that generates the phrase a person who writes is syntax, while the word writer is built in the lexicon. As these two linguistic objects have been formed in different components of the grammar, they are expected to be different in nature: they would be affected by different processes and have different properties. The architecture of grammar according to Lexicalism is presented in (1). The first generative component is the lexicon, which feeds units to syntax, the second generative component. Once syntax has combined these units into phrases, they are transferred to two further components, called interfaces: LF (Logical Form), responsible for the semantic interpretation, and PF (Phonological Form), which deals with its materialization as a physical signal.

133

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(1)

The lexicon

Syntax

Phonological Form

Logical Form

In Lexicalism, the lexicon is not just a list of stored units, but also contains all morphological processes needed to create words. Historically, modern Lexicalism was a reaction against theories that explained the semantic properties of words and their relations with syntactic phrases – for example, deriving writer from a structure equivalent to a man that writes – by attributing the same basic structure to both objects. In some approaches during the 1960s (Katz and Postal 1964, McCawley 1968 or Lees 1960) a word is analyzed as the manifestation of a complex structure, and processes similar to those that apply to syntax have to apply to morphological objects, as well. The following example is taken from Katz and Postal (1964: 129–35), and shows the internal structure of the word where. (2)

AdvP

P at

NP

DetP wh

N a

place

This complex structure gives an account of the meaning of the word: it is an adverb (adverbial phrase, AdvP) that asks (wh-) about the identity (determiner phrase, DetP) of the place at (preposition, P) which some entity is located (roughly equal to ‘at which place’). The underlying structure is no different from the one underlying the equivalent syntactic phrase, and is generated by the same kind of rules. In order to surface as where, this structure has to undergo various operations similar to those that related two different syntactic phrases to one another (for example, an active and a passive sentence). Chomsky (1970) is generally viewed as reacting to this particular view of word formation and morphology. Chomsky shows that there are empirical differences between words and phrases which the Generative Semantics take on these issues cannot explain. His three main points are presented now; the reader will probably identify them as three topics that have already come up in this book.

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Productivity Syntactic operations are assumed to apply without exception to each phrase of a certain kind. However, it is not possible to claim, for example, that all verbs of a certain kind allow for a nominalization; that is, given a set of properties, it is not the case that a morphological process applies to all bases displaying these properties. A modal verb like must can turn into a noun (This is a must), but shall cannot (*This is a shall). If morphological processes are not productive in this sense, they cannot be assimilated to syntactic processes. Idiosyncrasies and unpredictability Word formation is sensitive to idiosyncratic properties of the input and can give an output that has unexpected characteristics. Continuing with nominalizations, a few English verbs nominalize with -th, like grow – growth; others, with -ation, as in explain – explanation; others, with -ing, such as build – building; others do not change their shape when they behave like nouns, such as kick – kick, without any clear semantic, phonological or syntactic generalization arising from the distribution. Notice, also, that the output of these processes sometimes has unexpected properties, such as the change in vowel quality in the noun explanation with respect to explain, or the very specific meaning of the noun building. In contrast, syntactic operations apply to all phrase structures that share some relevant properties. Inaccessibility to the internal structure of words When a morphological process applies to an input, the output does not show any memory of the previous properties of the input. The result of nominalizing a verb is indistinguishable from a non-derived noun in many respects. Nouns that come from verbs, such as explanation, require a preposition to introduce an argument (the explanation of the problem), just like morphologically simple nouns such as father or dog (the father of philosophy). A noun derived from a verb does not show any of the syntactic properties of verbs; the fact that it came from a verb is obliterated as far as syntax is concerned. Some verbs allow Exceptional Case Assignment, by which the subject of a subordinate predicate formally becomes the direct object of the main verb (3a). However, the nominalization corresponding to these verbs does not allow the same process (3b), showing that in syntax the noun does not keep traces of its verbal origin. (3) a. Laura considered [him to be a genius]. b. *Laura’s consideration [of him to be a genius]. It is perhaps historically accurate to say that the way in which Chomsky (1970) was understood at the time meant that it was necessary to postulate a set of morphological rules to capture the empirical differences between words and phrases. The first explicit attempt to create this kind of device was Halle (1973), where it was stated that the internal structure of words is constructed in an independent generative module known as the Lexicon. The different productivity of morphological processes is explained if they are different in nature from the rules that build and

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manipulate phrases; the unpredictable and idiosyncratic properties involved in morphology are due to the fact that the units used by this component are different from those used in syntax and are typically stored in a list – the lexicon – where they can be paired with different sets of information. Finally, the fact that syntax can only have access to the result of morphological processes and does not access the internal structure of words follows from the two previous properties: as the processes and the units used in morphology are different to those used in syntax, this second component is blind to them and can only read the result of these processes, that is, the whole word. Morphology takes priority over syntax: Projectionism In the Lexicalist architecture, the lexicon feeds syntax. This means that syntax will receive objects created by the lexicon as its input to construct a syntactic structure, not the other way round. As a result, when syntax puts together a syntactic phrase, it will have to satisfy the properties that the lexicon associates with the units used to build that phrase; for example, the lexicon dictates whether a verb requires a direct object (devour) or not (fly); syntax has to satisfy this requirement. Thus, the properties of a word determine the properties of a well-formed syntactic construction which includes that particular word: the lexicon determines the way in which units will be combined in a syntactic structure. Words come out of the lexicon containing a number of properties referring to their meaning, their grammatical category and their possible and preferred combinations with other units. When they become part of a syntactic structure, in a sense, they project these properties to the whole structure and determine what a well-formed phrase looks like. This metaphor, of a single word projecting its lexical properties to the whole structure, explains why Lexicalist approaches have also been called Projectionist. Consider, for example, the verb devour, which must have a direct object. In the lexical component, this word is paired to some information relevant to syntax. (4) devour

Category: V Subcategory: Transitive

These properties must be met by syntax, or else the sentence will be ungrammatical. The fact that devour is listed as a verb determines that the word can only be the head of a VP, and the fact that it is transitive determines that in that VP, some other constituent must be its direct object. In other words, the fact that devour has that information in the lexicon determines that any syntactic construction built with it must contain the phrase in (5), where the DetP is the constituent that acts as its direct object. (5)

VP

V

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DetP

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One consequence of this view of grammar is that the lexicon can be viewed as the place where all syntactic differences find their origin. In the same language, using different verbs can entail differences in the syntactic structure, to the extent that each verb can be associated with potentially different lexical information. The same reasoning can be extended to the differences between languages. If two languages differ with respect to the properties of their words as they are stored in the lexicon, the syntactic differences can also be due to these lexical differences. Strong and Weak Lexicalism The division between Strong and Weak Lexicalist theories is based on the way in which they view inflection. The place of inflection and its relation to syntax is subject to discussion because inflectional processes interact with syntax in a direct way. This is visible in agreement: inflectional properties of a word can be copied under agreement, but derivation is never copied (cf. §4.1).Thus, the question is whether this tight connection means that inflection is directly performed in the syntax. In Strong Lexicalism, all morphological processes, including inflection, are performed in the lexicon. Halle (1973) is the earliest example of this view in the generative tradition. In that article, Halle acknowledges that it is not possible to determine the specific inflectional form of a word before its insertion in a syntactic structure. Consider case, for example. In a language that inflects nouns for case, the specific case that a noun requires is not identifiable until the syntactic function of that word inside the sentence is determined. The lexicon, being prior to syntax, cannot know this information. Halle’s solution to this problem is to propose that in such cases, the lexicon introduces in the syntax not a single noun form, but the whole case paradigm, and leaves the work of choosing the appropriate form that will surface to syntax, once the syntactic role of the element has been determined in the context. Therefore, one difference between inflectional and derivational processes is that the latter are solely determined by the lexicon, which imposes all the properties of the word on syntax; with inflection, by contrast, there is a part of the specification of the word which is chosen by syntax, but the choice has to be made out of the set of forms provided by the lexicon. The alternative view inside Lexicalism is to accept that inflection is not performed in the lexicon. This is known as Weak Lexicalism. The proposal in Chomsky (1965, 1970) is that words come out of the lexicon with many specified properties, but their inflectional properties are unspecified, in the sense that they do not have a value. With respect to case marking, Chomsky proposes that the noun is inserted in the syntax without any case value. The value that case will adopt then depends on the syntactic context in which it finds itself. Other Lexicalist researchers, including Siegel (1974), have adopted the assumption that syntax determines the inflection of words. 7.1.2 CONSTRUCTIONISM The alternative to Lexicalism is Constructionism, which argues that the only generative component in grammar is syntax. There is a lexicon, but it does not contain a word-formation component: it is just a list of stored units associated with some

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idiosyncratic meanings. In these frameworks, morphology has a purely interpretative role: it interprets structures generated by syntax and modifies them to meet some formal properties, but cannot create any new structures. Let us take as an illustration DM (Halle and Marantz 1993). Consider its architecture in (6). (6)

←

Narrow lexicon

←

Computational system

PF

←

←

Morphology LF

The first difference from Lexicalism is that morphology and the lexicon are now placed in separate components. DM considers the lexicon to be a list of units which can only be combined through the computational system, in practice normally called syntax. This lexicon (‘narrow lexicon’) contains the pieces that syntax combines to create structures. All structures, including those that underlie words, are built in syntax and therefore have syntactic properties. Notice, incidentally, that both Constructionism and Lexicalism need to assume the existence of a lexicon as a list of stored items. The term ‘Lexicalism’ can thus be misleading, because Constructionist theories also have a ‘lexicon’ in this particular sense. Syntax is prior to morphology The operations of the component known as morphology take place after syntax, the inverse precedence relation of that assumed in traditional Lexicalism. If syntax feeds morphology like this, this means that no morphological property can determine the well-formedness conditions of a syntactic structure. Rather, it is the opposite: the syntactic properties of a structure determine its morphology. Instead of having a Projectionist theory where syntax reads the properties of words, we have a Constructionist theory where syntax builds the properties of words and morphology only has to read them. The place of the idiosyncratic properties of words and morphemes: The postsyntactic vocabulary One of the main tenets of Constructionism is that the lexical properties of individual words are due to syntactic requisites. No verb is, by itself, stored in the narrow lexicon as having a set of special properties, like requiring human objects or belonging to an irregular paradigm. All idiosyncratic properties of an item – that is, those which

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cannot be derived from general rules or principles – are absent from the syntactic computation and are only added to the representation at a later stage, when syntax has been completed. In a first step, syntax takes elements from the narrow lexicon (a head with verbal features, a determiner, and so on) and builds a structure such as the one we saw in (5). Then, when the syntactic structure has been built and all of its syntactic properties have been satisfied, the grammar goes to the PF branch and checks a second list of stored units, the vocabulary. the difference between the vocabulary and the narrow lexicon is that the latter contains just syntactic features, but no phonological or morphological information; this secondary information is stored in the vocabulary. A narrow lexicon entry is just a bundle of abstract features (abstract in the sense that no information is provided about how they will surface), such as (7a). A vocabulary entry is more complex: it is a pair that relates a set of abstract features with a morphophonological representation, as in (7b). Notice that this entry contains unpredictable information having to do not only with how something sounds, but also, if the language requires it, with respect to idiosyncratic morphological properties such as the declension or conjugation class of that particular form. (7c) shows that kind of entry for the Spanish roots cant- ‘sing’, beb- ‘drink’ and viv- ‘live’. (7) a. [√], [Determiner], [Noun], [Plural]. . . b. [Plural] ←→ /s/ c. [√] ←→ /kant-/, Conjugation 1 or /beb-/, Conjugation 2 or /bib-/, Conjugation 3 In Lexicalism, the specific word is present in the syntax from the beginning, as it is taken from the lexicon. In DM, the specific form used to spell out a set of features is selected after syntax and introduced in a structure that is already built. This procedure is known as late insertion, and has consequences for the relation between morphology and phonology which we will explore in §8.2.3. The proposal that syntax builds structures without information about the morphological properties of specific words or morphemes is reflected in several tenets of DM, for instance in the idea that the grammatical category of a root is not specified in the lexicon, but is determined by the syntactic structure where the root is introduced (§2.4.1.). In other words, a root like English walk is not listed in the lexicon as a noun or a verb; when it is inserted in a structure like (8a), it is a noun (take a walk); when it is inserted in (8b), it is a verb (to walk). The notations v and n represent the heads that, according to DM, verbalize or nominalize a root inside the structure. (8)

a. n

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nP

b. √

v

vP √

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Restricting productivity: The licensing environment In a system like this, where syntax does not have access to the idiosyncratic information of items and where the basic units – roots – do not even have a grammatical category, one of the main problems is that syntactic rules and principles have a lot of power and can overgenerate; that is, they allow us to produce structures which are not well-formed in the language. DM, like other Constructionist theories, avoids this problem by giving the post-syntactic component the power of filtering the structures generated by syntax. A vocabulary entry can determine the syntactic context where an element is introduced. This is known as the licensing environment of a root. When the same root can be used in both a causative and an inchoative configuration, the vocabulary entry will specify this. Consider a verb like grow, which allows for a causative (transitive) construal (John grows tomatoes) or an inchoative (and intransitive) one (Tomatoes grow). The idea is that this root will have in the vocabulary an entry like the one in (9) (Harley and Noyer 2000), where the feature ‘cause’ allows for two values – positive and negative. (9) Context for insertion of grow: [±cause] This allows the root to be inserted into a transitive configuration, but also into an intransitive one. In contrast to this, a root like arrive, which is only possible in an intransitive configuration, will have an entry like the one in (10), where the licensing environment determines that it can only appear in the absence of a causative verbal head (*John arrived Mary vs. John arrived). (10) Context for insertion of arrive: [−cause] This means that if, after syntax, the root arrive is introduced in a causative configuration, the result will be ungrammatical because the item is not licensed in that context. This is filtering: the transitive or intransitive configurations themselves are grammatical in the syntax, but some lexical items cannot be used to materialize them: arrive will not be able to materialize a transitive configuration. The storage room of non-predictable semantics: The encyclopaedia The context for the insertion of a vocabulary item is tightly connected to its meaning. Intuitively, the fact that grow is possible both in a causative and in an inchoative configuration is due to the fact that grow can be interpreted both as an event caused by some external agent and as a change of state undergone by some entity without specific external causes; conversely, arrive is only possible in a non-causative environment because this action is conceptualized as not being caused by external forces. This takes us to the third list that DM proposes: the encyclopaedia. If the vocabulary is placed in the phonological branch of the grammar (PF) component because it contains information about the phonology of a lexical item, the encyclopaedia is placed in the semantic component, because it contains information about the nonpredictable meaning that a lexical item contains. Encyclopaedic entries are pairs

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that relate a morphophonological representation to a specific meaning. (11) shows a simplified encyclopaedic entry for the word dog, with its pairing of phonology and unpredictable semantics (§8.6.2). No rule of grammar allows speakers to figure out the meaning of the sequence of sounds that we write as dog; its meaning has to be stored somewhere. (11) /dɒg/ ←→ Animal with four legs that barks and likes bones Idioms and words whose meaning is not predictable are stored in this list as combinations of units denoting a special concept which cannot be derived from the combination of their parts. An idiom like kick the bucket (meaning ‘die’) will have an entry in the encyclopaedia like the one in (12a); a semantically exocentric compound like skinhead, whose meaning is not the combination of the meanings of the two roots combined (skin and head), would have an entry like (12b). (12) a. kick-the-bucket ←→ die b. skin-head ←→ supporter of Nazism Remember that, unlike in Lexicalism, this stored information is accessed after syntax. Therefore, Constructionism makes a prediction that Lexicalism does not: only sets of units that form a syntactic constituent can have unpredictable meanings. Constructionism predicts that idioms must be formed only by elements belonging to the same syntactic domain (cf. §7.2.3). Currently it is believed that the verb forms a syntactic domain with its internal argument(s), in the absence of the agent or causer of the action. The prediction is that the set formed by the verb and the internal arguments can have an idiomatic meaning, but not the one formed by the verb and its agent or causer. Although most verbal idioms involve the verb and some internal argument (e.g. (13)), there are some idioms which include the agent (e.g. (14), where the bird is the agent of an action); this case constitutes a counterexample to the prediction made in DM. (13) a. go bananas b. bet one’s bottom dollar c. bury the hatchet d. eat one’s words (14) A little bird told me that . . . What is morphology in Distributed Morphology? At this point it should be apparent that the name ‘Distributed Morphology’ comes from the fact that this framework scatters the notions that Lexicalism puts in the lexicon among different components of the grammar. Word-formation processes of any kind are handled by syntax, because they involve the combination of units, and syntax is considered to be the only component able to combine objects into structures. All idiosyncrasies and unpredictable properties of structures are not caused by syntax, but by the information contained in the vocabulary and the encyclopaedia,

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which is subsequent to syntax. The declension and conjugation classes of a word, the places where a morpheme can be inserted or not, the special meaning acquired by a word and so forth are handled by storing the forms in a list (just as in Lexicalism), but crucially these pieces of information are not present in syntax, but inserted late (unlike in Lexicalism). But, if word formation is performed by syntax and idiosyncrasies are explained by storing units in different lists, what then, is the role of morphology in this framework? DM considers morphology to be a set of operations that interpret the output of syntax and adapt it so that several language-specific morphological principles are met (Embick and Noyer 2001). Morphology gets a syntactic structure as input and needs to map the syntactic constituents onto morphological constituents in order to satisfy some formal conditions that are specific to each particular language. This gives rise to a series of post-syntactic morphological operations that modify a syntactic structure in a variety of ways; these operations take place between the phonology and the syntax, so they will be reviewed in §8.2.4. 7.2 THE GENERALIZED LEXICALIST HYPOTHESIS: EMPIRICAL DATA The basic argument of Lexicalist theories is the following: if morphology is not autonomous and properly belongs to syntax, then it follows that morphological rules and syntactic rules are identical, and also that the units that morphology operates on are identical to the units that syntax can handle. As a consequence, the internal structure of words must be visible for syntactic operations, and, conversely, complex syntactic structures should be allowed inside a word structure, for they are the same type of construction. However, if morphology is distinct from syntax, as Lexicalism argues, the prediction is in fact that the internal elements of morphological structures will not be accessible to syntax and the internal elements of syntactic structures will not be accessible to morphology. If the internal structure of words is not visible to syntax, then distinct morphological rules must be able to generate words, since it is a property of syntactic rules that they are not blind to the internal structure of syntactic objects. The proposal that morphological structures are not visible to syntax has received several formulations in Lexicalism. Here are three of them: a) the Generalized Lexicalist Hypothesis (Lapointe 1980: 8). No syntactic rule can refer to elements of morphological structure. b) the Word Structure Autonomy Condition (Selkirk 1982: 70). No deletion or movement transformation may involve categories of both M(orphological)structure and S(yntactic)-structure. c) the Atomicity Thesis (DiSciullo and Williams 1987: 49). Words have features or properties, but these features have no structure, and the relation of these features to the internal composition of the word cannot be relevant in syntax. Let’s now take a look at the empirical evidence that has been gathered to argue in favour of the distinctness of morphology and syntax.

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7.2.1 SYNTACTIC MATERIAL INSIDE WORDS: THE NO PHRASE CONSTRAINT If words are syntactic phrases, we expect other syntactic phrases to be able to appear inside a word, just as a phrase can appear inside another phrase ([the answer [to the question]]). Botha (1983) noticed that this is generally not possible, an observation he dubbed the No Phrase Constraint: (15) a. truck driver b. *[metal truck] driver However, phrases are attested inside words. The compounds in (16) (see Lieber 1992) contain constituents which are syntactic phrases, and, yet, they belong to a bigger word. Even the name given by Botha to this constraint violates the constraint itself, as it contains a phrase (16d). (16) a. b. c. d.

a-pipe-and-slipper-husband a-slept-all-day-look bikini-girls-in-trouble genre [[No Phrase] Constraint]

If phrases can be used inside words, then it is possible that syntax and morphology are non-distinct. Some morphological analyses, however, argue that these cases are not arguments against the separation of morphology and syntax. These analyses propose that the apparent phrases inside words have actually been fossilized and stored in the lexicon. Frequently, the meaning of these phrases involves concepts which represent typical situations which are standardized enough to become part of a dictionary available for a language. Nonetheless, as Lieber and Scalise (2006) point out, these phrases are very frequently used as creative formations in the oral language, which makes the suggestion that they are listed forms in the lexicon somehow far-fetched. Remember, also, that the lexicon contains listemes (§2.2) which may be syntactic, phonological or morphological objects, so belonging to the lexicon does not automatically mean that something is a morphological object. Notice, however, that even if it is true that phrases can be used as internal constituents of words, it does not follow that morphology is non-distinct from syntax. The presence of phrases inside words argues against a strict ordering between morphology and syntax, that is, against the proposal that the lexicon does not act after it has fed syntax with words (as in Lexicalism) or, conversely, that syntax does not do anything once the morphology of a language is accessed (as in DM). If morphology and syntax are two independent modules which interact simultaneously at different points of the grammar, then we expect phrases to be used inside words, because in that case syntax could put together a phrase, then morphology would use that phrase inside a word, and then syntax would take the complex word again and construct a new phrase using it. This particular view of morphology as an independent module

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that is not ordered with respect to syntax has already been proposed as Parallel Morphology (Borer 1993), as represented in (17). Syntax ←

Morphology

←

← PF

←

(17)

LF

The conclusion seems to be not only that the No Phrase Constraint does not hold empirically, but also that the existence of phrases internal to words does not per se provide evidence for or against the autonomy of morphology. 7.2.2 NON- MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSES AND THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF WORDS Consider the nouns in (18). The adjective hard does not refer to a property of the individual that is said to be a worker, but rather modifies the verb work which is inside the internal structure of the noun. (18a) is used to refer to someone who works hard, not to a worker that is hard; this means that the adjective must be able to modify a part of the noun, namely the base verb. Similarly, beautiful in (18b) can modify the verb dance, triggering the meaning ‘someone who dances beautifully’ in addition to the meaning ‘a dancer who is also beautiful’. (18) a. hard worker b. beautiful dancer These examples, though, do not show by themselves that syntax can access the internal structure of words. Booij (2009), among other authors, has noticed that here we refer to semantic modification, not to syntactic modification. Booij acknowledges that semantics can see inside words, something which is independently granted by the fact that semantics needs to process the internal structure of words, but syntax does not necessarily play a role here. One argument in favour of Booij’s take on this matter is that the same semantic reading of the adjective as some sort of adverbial modifier of an event arises in cases where there is no verb in the internal morphological structure of the word. Consider (19), from Spanish. (19) mal profesor bad teacher Here, the adjective bad is interpreted as an adverbial modifier of an event closely related to the semantics of the noun profesor: it denotes a person that teaches badly, not a teacher who is bad or evil as a person. However, the verb to teach, enseñar in Spanish, is not represented in the morphological structure of the word. If the interpretation is available in the absence of a constituent which represents the verb, then,

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it is plausible that the reading does not rely on a structural property of the word, but on a purely semantic rule. In similar cases, however, other languages show special agreement effects, which suggests that semantics might not be enough to account for them. In Dutch (Ackema and Neeleman 2004: 166–70), adjectives inside a definite NP display an agreement marker -e (20a). This regular process is impossible in some cases similar to (18), as shown by (20b). These authors propose that at least in these cases the adjective forms a constituent with the base of the derived noun, as shown in (20c), so it is not a modifier of the definite noun. (20) a. de beroemd-e gitarist the famous-agr. guitarist b. de klassiek(*-e) gitarist the classical-agr. guitarist, ‘someone who plays classical guitar’ c. de [[klassiek gitar] ist] 7.2.3 ABSENCE OF MOVEMENT AND THE THEORY OF SYNTACTIC DOMAINS It is well known that some syntactic constituents can be displaced from the position that they occupy in a simple declarative sentence. In the sentence in (21), we see that the object the boy occurs immediately to the right of the verb. But in particular types of sentences, the object can be placed in the first position of the sentence instead. This can happen, for instance, when the object is questioned (22a), focused (22b) or contrasted (‘topicalized’) (22c). (21) We visited the boy at the hospital. (22) a. Which boy did we visit ____ at the hospital? b. What a (great) boy we visited ____ at the hospital! c. The boy we visited ____ at the hospital, not the girl. Internal constituents of words robustly resist this kind of displacement. From the compound in (23), none of the structures in (24), intended to be similar to those in (21), can be derived. (23) John is a truck driver. (24) a. *What does John like a ___ driver? b. *What a (great) truck does John like a ____ driver! c. *Truck- does John like ____ drivers, not train-. This empirical difference clearly differentiates morphological from syntactic structures. Some analyses have been proposed where morphemes undergo movement to a position inside a word (as in the incorporation of an object into a verb; Baker 1988), but even if these analyses are correct, the fact remains that, once inside a word, constituents cannot move out.

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The answer from Constructionism: Islands The reply offered from Constructionism to the data presented in (24) is that by themselves, they do not show that words are not syntactic phrases, simply because it is not true that it is possible to displace a constituent out of any syntactic structure. The questions in (25) are ungrammatical, despite the fact that the constituent from which the interrogative comes is syntactic: a definite DetP in (25a), an interrogative in (25b) and a conditional in (25c). (25) a. *Who did [the dog of ____] eat that bone? b. *What didn’t she know [who has read _____]? c. *Who will Mary talk to John [if _____ asks her to do it]? The standard analysis of these cases has always been to propose that the constituents from which movement is impossible act in some way as closed syntactic domains, descriptively called islands. The problem with the sentences in (24) is that it is not possible to connect the position that the moved element comes from with the one to which it is displaced. When a syntactic domain is an island, elements within that domain cannot be extracted from it. This is what happens in cases like (25). Words as closed syntactic domains Imagine that we wish to use this last concept to explain the absence of movement through syntactic principles. Imagine that we claim that words are islands of some sort. This has in fact been suggested in DM (Marantz 2001, Arad 2003). We will briefly illustrate how this proposal can be used to explain the absence of movement and the presence of idiosyncrasies. Assume that the structure of truck driver is the syntactic tree in (26), as proposed by Harley (2009). (26)

nP -er

√P nP

√ drive n Ø

√P truck

Arad (2003) argues that a structure like this defines a closed syntactic domain at the word level. Inside the framework of DM, the categorizer n assigns a grammatical category to a root that otherwise lacks this information (turning it into a noun), and as such it creates a syntactically autonomous object that behaves as a closed domain. If (26) is a closed domain, just like the syntactic objects in (25), we predict precisely

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that it will be impossible to replace ‘truck’ with an interrogative and successfully move it outside the word to form an interrogative sentence. 7.2.4 ABSENCE OF COREFERENCE TO WORD- INTERNAL CONSTITUENTS We will see, however, that even if we accept that words are islands there are phenomena which show that words do not have the behaviour expected from syntactic constituents. This can be illustrated with pronominal coreference. Nominal expressions can be taken as antecedents of a pronoun. In (27), the pronoun it can be coreferential with the NP the car that precedes it, although, of course, other readings could be allowed. Coreference is frequently represented as coindexation, as here. (27) John bought the cari and then sold iti. In sharp contrast with (27), if the same noun is inside a compound, the coreference is no longer available (28). (28) *John went to the [cari washer] and washed iti. This suggests, again, that syntactic operations, such as the one that involves determining the reference of a pronoun, cannot access the internal structure of words, which would be straightforwardly explained if morphology and syntax did not share the same language. This contrast cannot be explained by the proposal that words are islands. Notice that there is no problem in a pronoun’s being coreferential with something that is included inside an island closed syntactic domain like those in (25). Even if words were islands, we should expect them to allow coreference as in (29). (29) a. [Maryi’s friend] saw heri. b. John does know [who cooked the cakei], but he ate iti nonetheless. c. [If Mary finds Johni], she will have a fight with himi. Thus, there seems to be a contrast between being coreferent with an element in a syntactic constituent (even if that constituent is an island) and coreferring with a wordinternal element. This contrast casts doubt on the kind of analysis of the absence of movement presented in the previous section. In this short overview of the phenomena used to argue in favour of the Lexicalist Hypothesis, we have seen that some of them are tendencies rather than generalizations, while others could be explained by independent syntactic principles. However, at the very least the absence of coreference to word-internal constituents still shows that words do not behave as we would expect from syntactic phrases. This empirical situation seems to confirm the main hypothesis of Lexicalism: that the linguistic objects generated by morphology are different in nature from those generated by syntax.

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7.3 THE RELATION BETWEEN SYNTAX AND MORPHOLOGY IN DIACHRONY: MORPHOLOGIZATION Up to now, we have analyzed the relations between syntax and morphology from a synchronic perspective, that is, within a particular historical stage of the language. The two components also interact when we consider the different historical stages of a language. This is particularly noticeable in the fact that syntactic constructions in an early stage of a language might become morphological objects at later stages. This historical process that turns a free form into an affix is called morphologization. Morphologization is part of a more general phenomenon called grammaticalization, which, through historical change, turns lexical words (like verbs) into grammatical words (like auxiliary verbs) and can culminate in morphologization when the grammatical word becomes a bound morpheme (for instance, to mark a particular form inside a verbal paradigm, as we will shortly see). Inflectional and derivational morphologization One famous example involves the formation of the morphological future in Romance languages like Spanish, French and Italian. The source of the future tense in these languages is a Latin periphrasis, that is, a phrasal structure containing one or several auxiliary verbs and a verb with lexical meaning and argument structure. The particular periphrasis involved the verb habere ‘to have, must’, and the infinitive form of any verb, as in (30). (30) cantare habeo sing.inf. have, ‘I have to sing’ > ‘I will sing’ The auxiliary verb habere evolved in Romance languages and gave rise to an inflectional marker of future tense: in Spanish, the form in (30) becomes the one in (31), where the affix that carries stress is the result of different changes undergone by the form habeo. (31) cantar-é sing-fut., ‘I will sing’ It is generally agreed that a precondition for morphologization is that the syntactic structure that turns into a single word must be a frequent combination of words in the early stage. Therefore, the structure must be highly productive and the word that becomes a morpheme must be able to appear with most, if not all, words belonging to a particular grammatical category before it can become morphologized. Consequently, morphologization gives rise more frequently to inflectional affixes than to derivational affixes, because the productivity of inflectional processes is higher than that of derivational ones (§4.1). However, some other cases of morphologization involve derivations. Consider the examples in (32), taken from English.

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(32) anchorman, artilleryman, barman, businessman, cameraman, cavalryman, chairman, congressman, craftsman, doorman, ferryman, fireman, guardsman, infantryman, juryman, kingsman, mailman, etc. The origin of these words is a compound formed with the word man as its head. However, a more accurate description of the common properties of these words at the present stage of English would be to analyze man as a morpheme that creates agent nouns by attachment to a noun that denotes an institution or an object. In the first case, the meaning contribution of -man is ‘person that belongs to’, as in congressman or juryman; in the second case, the contribution is ‘person whose job or occupation is related to’, as in barman, doorman or mailman. Notice that this has become a relatively productive way of forming agent nouns in English and that frequently the female form involves the form -woman (businesswoman, congresswoman). Attrition Apart from the fact that a free form becomes an affix, under morphologization several other properties change. Morphologization usually comes with a process, called by McMahon (1994) attrition, by which the morpheme becomes semantically and phonologically reduced with respect to its syntactic counterpart. In the evolution of the future, attrition is clearly visible. The form habeo had three syllables in Latin (ha-be-o), but in the course of the change it became a single stressed vowel -é. The meaning also became reduced; from the obligation or intention meaning that habere had in Latin, the suffix moved on to express just a notion of temporal succession. This is also visible in the case of -man. When used as a free form, its vowel is pronounced as [æ], but inside the words in (32) it can be reduced to a schwa [ә], showing that it has become phonologically weaker. The emergence of morphological properties Other changes due to morphologization are expected given the different properties of syntactic and morphological objects. The word man does not have a fixed position inside a compound or a phrase (33), but once it morphologizes, it must occur at the right edge of a word, like any other suffix. Positional fixation is, thus, another effect of morphologization. (33) a. b. c. d.

frog man man power A man’s obligations The obligations of a man

Another expected effect of morphologization is that elements that could occur between the two elements in the syntactic phrase stop being allowed. This follows from the general principle that words are closed domains inside which some syntactic processes cannot occur. In the periphrasis cantare habeo, it was possible to insert the negative marker between the two words, as in (34a). This was only possible because that structure was syntactic, but in the Romance equivalent, where the auxiliary

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became an inflectional morpheme, the negation must occur before the whole word (33b): (34) a. cantare non habeo sing not will, ‘I will not sing’ b. *cantar-no-é; no cantar-é sing-not-fut.; not sing-fut., ‘I will not sing’ Morphologization as a cline It must be kept in mind, though, that morphologization is a diachronic phenomenon and, as such, at some stages of a language it might not have arrived at its endpoint. In these cases we find constructions which are morphological in nature but which, for instance, keep some syntactic properties. The future in Portuguese illustrates this situation where the evolution has not turned an object into a morpheme in all respects. In this language, the future form comes from the periphrasis that we have been discussing. Despite the fact that the auxiliary has become an inflectional marker and it has undergone attrition, it is still possible to insert some elements between it and the verb (35). This phenomenon, in which it is possible to introduce some elements between a base and an affix, is known as tmesis or mesoclisis. The introduction of the third person pronoun in the position where the juncture between the two words was in the original Latin expression is possible in Portuguese (35a), but not in Spanish (35b). The idea is that the morphologization has reached a later stage in the latter language. (35) a. falar-lhe-ei speak-3rd sg.-fut.1st, ‘I will speak to him/her’ b. le hablar-é 3rd sg. speak-fut.1st, ‘I will speak to him/her’ EXERCISES 1. Lexicalism and Constructionism have different approaches to how to account for idiosyncrasies, and as such they will explain in different ways the fact that an affix only combines with particular bases. Take a word-formation process in a language of your choice and, following our presentation of the two models in §7.1, explain how the restrictions on that process can be explained. 2. As we have seen (§7.2.), the set of phenomena used to argue in favour of the Generalized Lexicalist Hypothesis might have counterexamples. Taking data from your own language, evaluate to what extent these phenomena are attested in your language, and what possible counterexamples you can identify. 3. Some grammaticalization cases are very typical across the languages of the world: a verb becoming an auxiliary (such as English go in John is going to get sick), an auxiliary becoming an inflectional marker (as in the case we studied in the Romance future), a noun becoming an expression to determine a quantity (for example, cup in to drink a cup of tea), etc. Identify one such case in your own lan-

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guage and describe it according to the parameters that we have used in §7.3. From a morphological perspective, in the case that you have chosen, are there grounds to say that the item is becoming a morpheme? FURTHER READING Since the early 1980s there has been a proliferation of studies and monographs that discuss whether the lexicon has to be viewed as a generative component or just as a list of items, and whether morphology is an independent component or not. In the Lexicalist field, the reader will find it useful to read Anderson (1992), Aronoff (1994), Ackema and Neeleman (2004) and Williams (2007), the last being a critique of DM. Some articles and monographs on DM include Halle and Marantz (1993, 1994), Noyer (1997), Harley and Noyer (1999), Harbour (2007) and Embick (2010). Other takes on Constructionist theories include Lieber (1992), Borer (1998, 2005a, 2005b), Julien (2000) and Li (2005). There are also some mixed approaches where the lexicon is an independent generative component, but where idiosyncrasies are explained by structural requisites, like Hale and Keyser (2002). The Lexical Integrity Hypothesis has remained at the centre of this debate. Lieber and Scalise (2006) constitutes a recent evaluation of the relevant phenomena, summarizing the issues as they stand now. Other recent studies evaluating these topics include Bresnan and Mchombo (1995), Ackerman and LeSourd (1997), Kageyama (2001), Kornfeld and Saab (2003), Booij (2005a) and Spencer (2005b). There are also a large number of recent works dealing with grammaticalization. Recent collections of papers on the topic include Traugott and Heine (1991), Giacalone Ramat and Hopper (1998), Fischer, Rosenbach and Stein (2000) and López-Couso and Seoane (2008). Recent monographs include Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca (1994), Lehmann (1995) and Hopper and Traugott (2003). Chapter 5 of Newmeyer (1998) offers a critique of the concept and argues for a structural approach to the empirical phenomena, without the use of changes driven by communicative requisites or frequency.

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8 MORPHOLOGY’S RELATION TO PHONOLOGY AND SEMANTICS

8.1 RESTRICTIONS IMPOSED BY PHONOLOGY ON MORPHOLOGY One immediate sign that phonology and morphology interact is that, across languages, there are frequent cases where specific morphological units, structures or processes are forced to meet some phonological requirements. We start this chapter by reviewing some of these cases. Phonological restrictions in morphological units The most basic way in which phonology influences morphology is by imposing a particular phonological property on the units which compose words. For example, in Spanish all desinences (§4.3.1) must be unstressed. (1) a. cas-a (/ká.sa/) house-des. b. man-o (/má.no/) hand-des. c. clas-e (/klá.se/) class-des. This contrasts with theme vowels (§4.3.2), which can carry stress: (2) a. cant-a-r (/kan.táɾ/) sing-ThV-inf. b. com-e-mos (/ko.mé.mos/) eat-ThV-1st pl. The phonological weakness of desinences is also manifested in the fact that they disappear when the noun is derived (3b); the theme vowel, in contrast, remains after derivation even if another vowel follows it (3d). (3) a. perr-o dog-des. b. perr-era (not perr-o-era) dog-place, ‘dog shelter’ 152

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c. cant-a sing-ThV d. cant-a-or sing-ThV-agent, ‘flamenco singer’ Another well-known case is roots in Semitic languages. In Hebrew and Arabic, roots must have three consonants. In Arabic, for example, when a word contains four or more consonants, the additional consonants belong to affixes intertwined with the root (remember transfixes in §1.2.1). Vowels in an Arabic word belong to these affixes, not to the root, unless additional phonological processes take place to materialize a consonant as a vowel. (4) shows some of these roots. (4) a. √ktb ‘write’ b. √fqh ‘understand’ c. √hml ‘carry’ Phonological restrictions on morphological structures Coordination of word-internal constituents is generally disallowed, as we saw in §6.3.1. Some authors, however, have proposed that coordination is generally impossible because of the phonological properties of the resulting structure (Plag 2003). According to this proposal, coordination is only possible if all the segments that are coordinated are phonologically independent, that is, if they can be treated by phonology as self-sufficient units. When two morphemes can be coordinated, it is because neither of them forms a phonological unit with the base (Plag 2003: 84). (5) a. b. c. d.

[word and sentence] structure [over- and under-]determination [computer- and internet-]wise *[feder- and loc-] al

The cases where coordination is impossible are those where the element outside the conjoined constituent needs to get integrated with its base. We can show that -al must integrate phonologically with its base because it can change its pronunciation (6). We will come back to the difference between suffixes that trigger phonological changes in their bases and those that do not in §8.2.1. (6) presiden[t] > presiden[ʃ]-al Now, in the examples in (5), -al cannot have a conjoined element because it does not combine directly with its base, but with the whole conjoined constituent. This prevents the phonological integration required by this affix. Restrictions on morphological processes It is common to find that a word-formation process is only possible when the base or the resulting word meet some phonological principle. For example, Marchand (1969:

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236–7) notices that the English suffix -al, used to derive nouns from verbs, requires bases which bear stress on the last syllable; compare (7a) to (7b). (7) a. arriv-al, committ-al, referr-al, refus-al b. *abolish-al, *benefit-al, *develop-al, *examinal The difference between the two groups in (7) is not semantic or syntactic; what the verbs of each group have in common is a purely phonological property, namely the position of stress. Another well-known case of phonological restriction on a morphological process is that of the English comparative and superlative adjectives, which are restricted to bases with a particular number of syllables – two or fewer. Therefore, from red it is possible to get both redder and reddest, but with magenta it is not possible to obtain *magent(a)-er and *magent(a)-est; the explanation does not seem semantically or syntactically based, but due to the fact that red has one syllable, while magenta has three. Such constraints are also present in inflection. Carstairs-McCarthy (1998: 145) reports that in Classical Greek (Attic dialect) the suffix -ntai, corresponding to the third person plural perfect indicative passive, could only be added to bases which ended in a vowel, as in pe-paideu-ntai ‘they have been trained’. For bases which ended in a consonant, such as tag- ‘draw up’, the suffix was unavailable. In these cases, the suffix -mai was used. The form for ‘they have been drawn up’ was te-tag-mai, not *te-tag-ntai. Phonological independence inside compounds Phonological constraints on word formation have rarely been identified in compounding. This absence may be related to the fact that, typically, the constituents of a compound remain phonologically independent from each other. For example, in some languages, such as Turkish, there is a process of vowel harmony by which the phonological content of the vowels of an affix must share some properties with the vowels of the base. (8) shows that the vowel of the plural suffix -lVr (where V is a wild card for several possible vowels) and that of the causative affix -Vr share a phonological property with that of the base: the frontness or backness of the vowel. (8) a. zil-ler bell-s b. çocuk-lar boy-s c. bit-ir-mek finish-caus.-inf., ‘to make finish’ d. doy-ur-mak be.satisfied-caus,-inf., ‘to make satisfied, to satisfy’. This process does not apply inside compounds. Each constituent in the compound of (9) has vowels with different qualities: the first constituent has front vowels, and the second, back vowels.

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(9) büyük- baba big- father, ‘grandfather’ However, some compounds also seem to be restricted by phonological principles. Fábregas (2004) argues that a particular type of N-A compound in Spanish is restricted in such a way that the first member plus the LE must form a bisyllabic constituent, which explains the ungrammaticality of (10b). (10) a. brac-i-largo (/bra.θi.laɾ.go/) arm-LE-long, ‘long-armed’ b. *naric-i-largo (*/na.ɾi.θi.laɾ.go/) nose-LE-long, ‘long-nosed’ Since the segment narici- is trisyllabic, (10b) is ungrammatical, while (10a) is licit because braci- only contains two syllables. 8.2 THE PHONOLOGICAL MATERIALIZATION OF MORPHEMES Given the evidence that morphology and phonology interact, the question of how this interaction takes place presents itself: how is the phonological shape of a morpheme determined? To answer this question, researchers have concentrated on two issues. The first is the ordering between phonology and morphology: are they components that act in tandem, feeding information to each other, or are they strictly ordered, in such a way that all morphological operations must take place before the phonological ones start? The second issue is how the grammar determines which one of the different allomorphs (§1.4.1) of a morpheme is used in a given context. This section concentrates on the first issue, while the next section (§8.3) discusses the case of allomorphs. 8.2.1 MORPHOLOGY AND PHONOLOGY FEED EACH OTHER: LEXICAL STRATA A theory that proposes that morphology and phonology feed information to each other is Lexical Strata Theory (Siegel 1974, Kiparsky 1982). This proposal argues that the lexicon is divided into ordered levels or strata. Different morphological operations are associated with each of these levels. There is a set of morphological operations that take place in a first round; these operations are then fed to phonology. The result of these operations then returns to morphology, where the morphological processes belonging to the second level take place; then the result is again sent to phonology, where the second-level phonological operations are applied to it. This system, where phonology and morphology are divided into levels that interact with each other in an ordered way, implies that the lexicon is ordered in different strata. Each stratum contains a set of affixes; an affix, thus, can belong to stratum 1 (the first level) or to stratum 2 (the second level). Belonging to one stratum or the other implies differences in the phonological behaviour of the affix and how it

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interacts with its morphological base. Affixes in stratum 1 are phonologically more cohesive and must form a single prosodic unit with the base; consequently, they are likely to trigger idiosyncratic phonological changes in the base. Affixes in stratum 2, in contrast, have more phonological independence and are less cohesive with the base, which manifests itself in their not triggering idiosyncratic phonological changes in the base. The ordering between levels determines that an affix belonging to stratum 1 must always be closer to the base than an affix belonging to stratum 2. This is forced by the proposal that morphological and phonological operations on the first level precede those on the second level. This ordering is, in principle, irreversible. For example, the base person can combine with the suffix -al, which belongs to stratum 1; its output personal can then combine with another stratum 1 suffix, -ity, to form personality. These words that come out of stratum 1 can undergo processes associated with stratum 2, such as the one that adds -less and forms personality-less. Any attempt to reverse this order of operations gives an ungrammatical result: despite the fact that -less forms adjectives and -ity takes adjectives as its base, *person-less-ity is not a word of English. Lexical Strata Theory argues that this ungrammaticality is caused by the operations on the second level being applied before those on the first level. Empirical motivation: Phonological differences The proposal that affixes and processes are divided into levels mainly finds its empirical basis in the different phonological behaviour associated with the affixes in each stratum. Affixes and processes on stratum 1 are able to change the phonological properties of the base, such as the position of stress in the base, the vowels and consonants, and so on. Consider the affixes -ic and -ity, which belong to stratum 1. The base atom carries stress on the first syllable, but in the word atom-ic stress has been displaced to the second syllable. Also, the velar stop [k] that ends the word atomic turns into [σ] when combined with -ity in atomic-ity; this process is known as ‘spirantization’. The intuition – which goes back at least to Jespersen (1933) – is that these changes are possible because the process happens at a very early level and the affix forms a very tight unit with the base. Stratum 1 affixes are also known as cohesive affixes, because they phonologically integrate with the base. In contrast, stratum 2 affixes tend to leave the phonological properties of the base intact. Notice that the affix -less, classified as stratum 2, does not displace the position of the stress in atom-less or personality-less. It does not change the nature of the last consonant of the base either. Kiparsky (1982) differentiated between three different lexical strata, represented in Table 8.1 with a non-exhaustive list of the affixes associated with each level. Other lexical strata proposals, such as Halle and Mohanan (1985), split stratum 2, with compounding belonging to a specific third level and, therefore, regular inflection being placed in a new stratum 4. The general intuition is that the higher a stratum is, the more regular it is, the less likely it is to alter the phonological or semantic information contained in its base, and the more productive it is. Regular inflection is highly productive, is semantically predictable and generally does not trigger idiosyn-

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the phonological materialization of morphemes Table 8.1

Morphological processes and affixes associated with three lexical strata

Stratum

Morphological processes and affixes

1

Irregular inflection (oxen) Derivation with: (suffixes) -ion, -ity, -y, -al, -ic, -ate, -ous, -ive (prefixes) be-, en-, in-, pre-, conCompounding (wolfman) Derivation with: (suffixes) -ness, -less, -ful, -hood, -ly, -like (prefixes) un-, non-, semi-, antiRegular inflection

2

3

157

cratic changes in the phonology of the base; irregular inflection, on the other hand, is non-productive, is sometimes accompanied by semantic idiosyncrasies (as in brother > brethren, where the second is semantically specialized), and triggers unexpected changes in the base. With respect to compounding, as we have noticed, it tends to keep the phonological independence of each of the components to some extent. For this reason, it is not situated in stratum 1. Technical implementation: Kinds of word-internal boundaries The difference between the two strata is often implemented by proposing that there are different kinds of boundaries between morphological units, depending on the relative independence of these units after derivation. The boundary usually represented as ‘+’ is a weak boundary that allows the affix to influence the phonological shape of the base through a sandhi rule. A sandhi rule produces a phonological change in the base triggered by the presence of a particular morphological element. An example of this kind of rule is spirantization, demonstrated above. Processes belonging to stratum 1 are associated with these weak, more transparent, boundaries. In contrast, the boundary that separates a stratum 2 suffix such as -less and its base is typically represented as ‘#’, a strong boundary that does not allow phonological interactions because it isolates the base from its context. Other possible implementations of this distinction include a syntactic account; socalled stratum 1 processes happen in the same syntactic domain as the base, and thus are able to influence the way in which the base is pronounced. In contrast, those associated with stratum 2 take place external to the domain where the base is included, and thus are unable to influence its shape. More specifically, stratum 1 affixes attach at the root level, that is, to a unit which is not independent; consequently, it is expected that the set formed by the root and the affix will be very cohesive and that the whole can have unexpected phonological and semantic properties (11). (11)

√ Affix

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In contrast, stratum 2 affixes attach not to the root level, but to a stem or a whole word (12). As the base contains more information, it exhibits more independence from the affix, and thus we do not expect the two units to integrate into a whole with idiosyncratic semantic or phonological properties. In DM, where a root with a functional projection (FP) forms an independent syntactic domain (Arad 2003), the affix does not properly form a unit with the base. (12)

Affix Affix

FP F

√

Criticism of lexical strata Lexical Strata Theory allows for three possible orderings of affixes. A stratum 1 affix can be followed by another stratum 1 affix (as in ton-ic-ity); a stratum 1 affix can be followed by a stratum 2 affix (as in the technical term ton-ic-ness); finally, a stratum 2 affix can be followed by another stratum 2 affix (as in care-less-ness), but never by a stratum 1 affix (*care-less-ity). Problems appear when this last order is found. The suffix -able undergoes a phonological change in contact with the affix -ity, belonging to stratum 1. Thus, Lexical Strata Theory has to assume that -able also belongs to stratum 1. However, as Aronoff (1976) shows, some cases of -able suggest the opposite conclusion, namely that it belongs to stratum 2, and even in these cases it can be followed by -ity, which then also triggers phonological changes. In the forms in (13), -able behaves as a stratum 2 affix, as it does not trigger any change in the phonology of the base, stress position and nature of final segments included (notice that the absence of the final -e is orthographic, as it is not pronounced in the verb). (13) a. b. c. d.

demonstrat-able mutat-able navigat-able appreciat-able

If -able belongs to stratum 2 here, how can it be followed by -ity from stratum 1, resulting in forms such as demonstrat-abil-ity or navigat-abil-ity, attested English words? One solution (suggested in Siegel 1974 and Aronoff 1976) is to allow -able to belong to two strata at the same time (so-called dual membership). Indeed, Aronoff notices that some adjectives in -able show phonological characteristics of stratum 1. In the forms in (14), -able has forced the base to undergo truncation. (14) a. b. c. d.

demonstr-able mut-able navig-able appreci-able

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The second option is to extend a proposal by Halle and Mohanan (1985) and Mohanan (1986), which allows loops between the strata, in such a way that after a stratum 2 operation it is possible to go back to stratum 1. It has been noticed, though, that these solutions have a considerable problem: by allowing loops or dual membership, the proposal is unable to predict which sequences are impossible. The same loop used to derive navigat-abil-ity should be available to derive unattested forms such as *care-less-ity, but a complete grammatical description of English should explain why this second form is impossible. Dual membership has a similar problem, because some affixes can be shown to have it while others do not, and additionally it has the drawback that treating -ity as stratum 2 in a word like navigatability does not give an account of the fact that even in this case it triggers a phonological change in the base. Faced with these empirical problems, many authors have given up the standard view on strata and have proposed that processes do not belong to any particular level (Giegerich 1999, Arad 2005). The empirical differences are explained by these authors as differences in the nature of the base with which an affix combines. No affix belongs properly to any stratum. When the affix combines with a base with root properties, the result has the properties of stratum 1 affixation. In contrast, when the same affix attaches to a base with the properties of a word or stem, the result looks like a stratum 2 construct. In navigate > navigable, the base of -able, navig-, is a root in the sense that it cannot form a word by itself and needs to combine with -ate to become a verb; thus, navigable has stratum 1 properties. In navigate > navigatable, the base of -able is a well-formed English verb, hence the stratum 2 properties. 8.2.2 MORPHOLOGY IS INDEPENDENT FROM PHONOLOGY: THE SEPARATION HYPOTHESIS In other theories, the morphological information is kept as separate as possible from the phonological representation of morphemes. According to the Separation Hypothesis (Ackema and Don 1992, Beard 1995) two independent levels have to be differentiated when analyzing morphemes: their morphosyntactic role – the grammatical and semantic changes that they trigger in the base - and their phonological representation. An operation can affect one level without having consequences for the other level. The English past tense morpheme is materialized in a number of ways: as /d/ (15a), as zero (15b) or as a vocalic change in the root (15c), among others. (15) a. live - lived b. cut - cut c. sing - sang For IA theories, this example illustrates the dual nature of what we call a ‘morpheme’. If we consider the grammatical and semantic side, we do not want to say that we have three or more different morphemes for past tense; the past tense forms in (15) all behave in the same way as far as syntax and semantics are concerned. However, if we consider the phonological materialization of the property of being past tense, we

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must say that there are at least three different ‘morphemes’ carrying that particular semantic and grammatical information. This apparent contradiction is resolved by introducing the Separation Hypothesis. The main intuition is that there are two sides to what we call a ‘morpheme’: a syntactic and semantic side, in which the morpheme is a set of abstract grammatical features, and a phonological side, in which the morpheme is spelled out or materialized by some concrete formative. In the examples in (15), we have only one abstract morpheme which gets a number of different materializations, depending on idiosyncrasies which require, for specific bases, that special forms be used. Thus, a complete representation of any morpheme requires information on at least two levels: a description of the grammatical features that the morpheme carries when it is combined with a base, and a description of the shape or shapes it adopts when it is spelled out (16): (16) The past tense morpheme in English Morphosyntactic features [Past Tense]

Phonological spell-out Vocalic change in the root Ø /d/

The list of different materializations of the abstract morpheme can come accompanied by the set of contexts where each form is used; the less frequent and non-productive materializations normally require a listing of the set of forms which contain the special variant (in the case of the English past tense, when there is no phonological change and when the change involves altering a vowel of the root). Productive ways of spelling out a morpheme (in the past tense case, /d/ and its phonologically conditioned allomorphs) do not require that the context be specified. Instead, the ‘elsewhere’ form is generally used, meaning that in contexts that have not been explicitly specified in the lexical entry, that form is used by default. The main idea is that the phonological materialization of a morpheme is logically independent of the morphosyntactic features that it carries, in such a way that one expects to find mismatches between the two sets of information (mismatches such as those presented in §2.3.2). This idea has been advocated by several authors in different forms, among them Ackema and Don (1992), Halle and Marantz (1993) and Beard (1995). A consequence of this Separation Hypothesis is that the fact that a morphological process is spelled out as a continuous segment, by discontinuous units (as in transfixes) or by zero, does not tell us anything about the process itself, the grammatical changes that it triggers in the base, or even the internal structure of the word. One needs to find grammatical and semantic arguments to determine these aspects of a morphological operation, and the surface shape that the word adopts as a result of this operation only provides us with direct information about its phonology. The separation hypothesis, in its strongest form, has another interesting consequence. The proposal that the phonological materialization of an operation is completely independent from its semantic and grammatical effect implies that it is

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possible for morphology to have processes that have an effect on only one of the sides without changing the information on the other. The Separation Hypothesis treats zero exponence as the result of an operation that adds grammatical and semantic information, but without a phonological representation, or has a phonological representation only in some few specific cases. For instance, this would be the case of the spell-out of the plural grammatical features in a word like fish: (17) Morphosyntactic representation [Plural]

Phonological representation Ø

The reverse may also happen; that is, we can find phonological exponents which do not correspond to any set of morphosyntactic features. In these situations, a particular phonological change in the base appears without any effect on the grammatical or semantic behaviour of the word. There is a particular class of interfixes that do not seem to be associated with any semantic or grammatical role in Spanish. Consider the diminutive noun in (18a). It is derived from the adjective in (18b), which lets us identify the shape of the base. One of the extra segments in (18a), -ito, can be identified as the phonological representation of the abstract morpheme that corresponds to the diminutive semantics (18c). However, once we have identified the shape of the base and the shape of the formant associated with the extra diminutive semantics, we still have a segment unaccounted for: -ec-. The grammatical and semantic behaviour of (18a) is identical to that of (18c), which shows that -ec- does not reflect any additional grammatical or semantic features; in this sense, its contribution is vacuous. Rather, its presence seems due to a phonological constraint: when it is present, there is an extra syllable in the word, which allows the base to keep stress (or more precisely, it preserves a rhythmic stress pattern every two syllables, represented as ‘‘’ in 18a) in the diphthong -ue- exactly in the same place where the non-derived form had a primary stress (18b). (18) a. buen-ec-ito (/buè.ne.θí.to/) good-infix-dim., ‘goody two-shoes’ b. buen-o (/bué.no/) good-des c. gord-ito (/goɾ.dí.to/) fat-dim., ‘fatty’ The idea is that some segments are introduced in words, even though they do not correspond to morphosyntactic or semantic features, because their presence helps preserve some principle which is favoured by phonology; in this case, the presence of -echelps to keep stress in the same position in the derived and in the non-derived form. 8.2.3 MORPHOLOGY PRECEDES PHONOLOGY: THE LATE INSERTION HYPOTHESIS An extension of the Separation Hypothesis is the idea that the two sets of information (morphological and phonological) are not just independent from each other, but also

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ordered: morphology precedes phonology. Only morphology feeds phonology, never the other way round. The idea here is that the information about the morphosyntactic and the phonological properties of the morpheme are introduced at different stages, with the latter coming only after the former has already been defined. In other words, according to this hypothesis, morphemes are spelled out after the internal structure of the word has been completed. DM is one of the theories that argues for this idea, which is called the Late Insertion Hypothesis. The main idea of the analysis is that there is a component that combines the abstract morphemes inside a structure attending only to their grammatical and semantic properties, and only later, when the word has been completed in this component, is the structure transferred to the phonological component (PF), where phonological information is added to the structure in order to spell it out. Therefore, as far as the structure is concerned, morphemes carry different types of information, but never phonological information, which is added to the representation in a subsequent step. (19a) gives us the representation of a word like reader as far as its internal structure is concerned; depending on whether the approach is Lexicalist or not, this structure is morphological or purely syntactic. In contrast, (19b) gives us the same word as it would be represented at a later stage, in PF; here the matrixes of features have been fleshed out and paired with phonological information. (19) a.

N

N [N, agent] b.

V [V, transitive]

N

V /r :d-/

N / /

In addition to the presence of phonological information, we see that there have been other changes between the structural and the phonological representation of the word: namely, the order between morphemes has been changed. In the structural representation, the nominalizer is the head of the structure. If we assume that English generally has the head to the left, as would be suggested by the fact that inside a VP the verb precedes its complement (eat tomatoes, not *tomatoes eat), then the relation in (19a) has to be inverted in (19b), when the phonological representation is added, because -er is a suffix. Of course, different assumptions would make this inversion unnecessary. For theories with late insertion, the morphosyntactic structure might ignore the question of whether a morpheme is a suffix, a prefix, an infix or a discontinuous morpheme; this fact becomes relevant when the structure has to be pronounced, and as such is only added as part of the phonological information (cf. §8.4 for more information about how to account for morpheme order).

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The most relevant point of the Late Insertion Hypothesis is that it allows for a number of operations to happen in a morphological component that is located between the component containing the structural representation of a word and the component containing its phonological representation. Let us briefly review what these operations are in DM. 8.2.4 POST- SYNTACTIC MORPHOLOGICAL OPERATIONS IN DISTRIBUTED MORPHOLOGY

M:

cat

s ←→

(20) m:

←→

The specifically morphological processes in DM are a set of operations on the structural representation of the word once it is sent to the phonological branch of the grammar. These operations happen after the structure has been defined, but before specific phonological information is introduced into it. These operations have been used to account for cases where the traditional notion of morpheme is challenged because there is no one-to-one mapping between the morphosyntactic features of the morpheme and its phonological representation (§2.3.2.). In a theory with this kind of operation, the mismatches are explained because, after the structure of the word is built, some processes that impose a nondirect mapping between this structure and phonology have taken place. Here we will consider those mismatches again from this different perspective. In this short exposition we will represent the morphophonological properties of the morpheme as ‘m(orpheme)’ and the morphosyntactic properties as ‘M(ORPHEME)’. (20) is a case where there is a one-to-one correspondence between these two levels of representation: regular plural formation in English.

[Noun] [Plural]

Null morphemes The first kind of mismatch between the two sides of the morpheme is a process that adds information in the M level but induces no change in the m level. This mismatch is interpreted as a null morpheme in IA theories. An example of it would be the plural number of the English noun sheep. sheep ←→

(21) m:

M:

[Noun] [Plural]

In theories where there are post-syntactic operations, like DM, this mismatch can be resolved by a post-syntactic operation. When the features introduced at the M level are not reflected at the m level, this can be accounted for if the features have been erased. For instance, in Spanish the accusative pronouns differentiate gender:

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la is used for feminine and lo for masculine. However, the dative pronouns do not make gender distinctions: le is used for both masculine and feminine. This can be accounted for if the features that mark gender at the M level are erased before they can be represented by exponents in the dative form. This operation which eliminates features from the representation of the word is known as impoverishment. Empty morpheme The opposite situation, where a morphophonological segment lacks a corresponding set of grammatical properties associated with it, would correspond to the representation in (22), which represents the Spanish verbal form cant-a ‘sing’, formed by a verb and its theme vowel. cant-

-a-

←→

(22) m:

M:

[Verb]

DM has another post-syntactic operation to account for the mismatch. There are language-specific rules that introduce extra morphophonological positions, not corresponding to any set of syntactically relevant features. These extra positions are known as dissociated morphemes (Oltra 1999). The idea is that, given a structure like the one in (23a), a specific morphological operation that takes place prior to vocabulary insertion introduces a morpheme that was not present in the syntactic structure, the theme vowel (23b). (23) a.

vP

v b.

v v

kant

v Ø

ThV a

Cumulative exponence Cumulative (or overlapping) exponence, where a single unit in the morphophonological level stands for two or more units in the morphosyntactic level, is represented in (24). In Spanish, the preterite form of the verb has, in the second singular form, a single segment that corresponds simultaneously to past and second person singular agreement.

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accounting for allomorphs

←

[Verb]

[Past]

ste →

→

←

M:

← →

(24) The-ste form in Spanish m: canta

165

[2nd sg.]

DM captures this mismatch by proposing a post-syntactic rule that has two or more heads in the structural representation of the word as its input and unifies them into a single morphological position. This operation is known as fusion, and requires the two heads that are to be fused to be adjacent to each other (Bobaljik 1994). Extended exponence The converse mismatch is known as extended exponence, where two segments stand for the same set of grammatical features (25).

[Verb]

→

←

→ ←

→

M:

t

←

(25) German participle m: ge lach

[Participle]

The mismatch is explained, in DM terms, with yet another post-syntactic operation; this time, it is one that takes a single head in the structural representation of the word and maps it into two or more morphological positions. This operation is known as fission (cf. Noyer 1992). 8.3 ACCOUNTING FOR ALLOMORPHS: LOCALISM AND GLOBALISM Allomorphy (§1.4) is the second main phenomenon which has to do with the relationship between morphology and phonology. From this perspective, allomorphy is relevant because it allows us to consider which aspects of the context are relevant for introducing one variant of a morpheme or another. The different allomorphs of a morpheme are the different phonological variants which can spell out one and the same set of morphosyntactic features. Allomorphs are sensitive to the context; phonological allomorphs (such as -ez and -eza in Spanish, studied in §1.4.1) are sensitive to the phonological properties of their context, while morphological allomorphs (for instance, -able and -abil- in English) are sensitive to the adjacent morphemes inside the word. There is currently a debate (see especially Embick 2010) with respect to how this context has to be defined. There are two takes on the issue. On one side, Localist theories claim that an allomorph is sensitive only to the units which are immediately

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166 Table 8.2

morphology’s relation to phonology and semantics Comparison between jearra and veahkehea

Verbal form

Verb jearra ‘ask’

Verb veahkehea ‘help’

1st dual 2nd dual 2nd plural

je:r.re-Ø jear.ra.-beah.ti jear.ra-beh.tet

veah.ke.he:-t.ne veah.ke.hea-hp.pi veah.ke.he-h.pet

adjacent to it; on the other side, Globalist theories argue that the choice between one allomorph and the other is determined considering the information contained in the whole word. The case of the alternation between -able and -abil- is an instance where the context considered by the allomorph is local and it is not necessary to make reference to the word as a whole to explain the alternation: quite simply, when the suffix -ity is immediately adjacent to this adjectivizer, the morpheme is spelled out as -abil- (accept-able > accept-abil-ity). However, in other cases the data suggest that, in order to determine the allomorph used, the word as a whole has to be considered, not just the morphemes surrounding the form that undergoes allomorphy. One such case where it has been claimed that the determination of the allomorph is global is allomorph selection in the verbal inflection of Sami (Hargus 1993). The relevant allomorphs are presented together with the set of features that they spell out: (26) Agreement 1st dual: -Ø or -tne Agreement 2nd dual: -beahtti or -hppi Agreement 2nd plural: -behtet or -hpet Passive voice: -juvvo or -vvo The distribution of these allomorphs is phonologically conditioned: the allomorph is selected depending on the number of syllables of the base, so that the resulting word has an even number of syllables. Compare the verb jearra ‘ask’, with an even number of syllables, with the verb veahkehea ‘help’, with an odd number (Table 8.2). The resulting form always has an even number of syllables. The allomorph is not sensitive to the number of syllables of the immediate constituent it attaches to, but to the number of syllables of the word as a whole. Notice the contrast in (27): the same form -beahtti is attached to the verb in the passive form, despite the fact that in one case the adjacent morpheme has two syllables (-juvvo, 27a) and in the other case, one (-vvo, 27b). (27) a. je:rro-juvvo-beahti ask-passive-2nd dual, ‘The two of you are asked’ b. veahkehu-vvo-beahti help-passive-2nd dual, ‘The two of you are helped’ Theories where the choice of an allomorph is global are generally theories where phonological constraints have to be satisfied by the surface form of a word. In the

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phonological theory known as Optimality Theory (in the form presented in Prince and Smolensky 1993), phonological operations are not applied sequentially to different stages of the derivation, as was the case, for instance, in Lexical Strata Theory, where phonology and morphology are divided in ordered levels. In this version of Optimality Theory, different phonological operations apply simultaneously to the same surface form, without levels of application of different rules at different stages in an abstract representation. This case has illustrated allomorphy sensitivity to phonological properties of the word. Remember also that part of the support for the existence of templates (§2.4.3) was the fact that in some situations an allomorph is chosen because of the presence of another morpheme not immediately adjacent to it. These cases also illustrate situations where the context to which allomorphs are sensitive goes beyond their immediate local one. Inward and outward sensitivity in allomorphy: Asymmetries When allomorphy is triggered by the local context, there is a useful distinction that has been made (Carstairs 1987) between inward and outward sensitivity. Inward sensitivity takes place when the allomorph is determined by some property of the element it attaches to. For instance, in Spanish, the negative prefix that (typically) combines with adjectives is spelled out as in- or i- depending on a (phonological) property of the base: i- before liquid consonants like l- and r-; in- otherwise. (28) a. in-sensible in-sensitive b. i-lógico i-logical Outward sensitivity is the opposite situation: the allomorph is triggered by an element which attaches to it, not by an element it attaches to. The alternation between -able and -abil- illustrates this case: it is triggered not by the properties of the base the morpheme combines with, but by the properties of a morpheme that attaches to a word with -able (namely -ity). It has been claimed (see Bobaljik 2000) that these two kinds of sensitivity are not identical. Inward sensitivity is sensitive both to the phonological and to the morphological properties of the base; in contrast, outward sensitivity is only sensitive to the morphological properties of the context, and not to its phonological characteristics. Thus, the claim is that there are no cases of phonologically conditioned outward sensitive allomorphy. This is an empirical issue, and testing it requires detailed work on a wide variety of languages. 8.4 THE LINEARIZATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE: MORPHEME ORDER It is currently believed that the problem of how units are ordered in a linear chain is mainly a phonological issue: structures – representations like those we

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studied in Chapter 3 - are hierarchical representations of items, but in order to pronounce them, it is necessary to order each one of their constituents. Therefore, we discuss the problem of how morpheme order is determined in our discussion of phonology. The question of how morphemes are ordered, however, has not been answered in the same way by all authors. Here, we will review the most influential current proposals about how morpheme order is explained. 8.4.1 SYNTACTIC ACCOUNTS A first group of theories argue that the order of morphemes reflects the order in which syntactic operations have taken place in the word. The arrangement of morphemes inside a word reflects the structure that underlies a particular word: operations that take place first are materialized by morphemes that are closer to the root; later operations are reflected in morphemes external to those (Baker 1985, 1988, Brody 2000, Rice 2000, Julien 2002). A way to test this theory is to show that the order in which morphemes appear inside a word reflects the order of the syntactic heads corresponding to these morphemes. Myers (1990) argues for this specific situation in the domain of verbal inflection in Shona. In his analysis, the order between the prefixes in (29) directly reflects their hierarchy in the syntactic structure. (29) -a -past

-í -habitual

-end -go

Leaving some technical details aside (Julien 2002: 192–201), the order between these prefixes is coherent with some independent proposals about how syntactic projections are ordered in the syntax. It is standard (see Cinque 1999 for evidence of this kind of ordering) to propose that aspectual projections are higher than verbs, and tense projections higher than both. See (30), where AspP means aspect phrase, and TP means tense phrase. TP

(30) T -a

AspP Asp -í

VP go

This coincidence between the ordering of morphemes and the way in which projections are assumed to be ordered in syntax has been used as an argument in favour of a syntactic analysis of morphological structures, especially in the domain of inflection.

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There is another possible ordering of the morphemes which is compatible with the assumption that syntax determines morpheme order. Imagine that for some reason the verbal head in (30) moves to the aspectual head to form a complex head with the linear order V-Asp. Assume that this kind of movement can repeat a number of times (e.g. the complex head V-Asp now moves to the head T, to form the complex head V-Asp-T, and so on) with the condition that no head can be skipped by that movement. At the end, we have attained a result in which we have reversed the order of morphemes that we had in (29): verb–aspect–tense–agreement. Morphemes that materialize features that are closer to the verb in the tree in (30) still appear closer to the root, but now the order is inverted. This mirror order, where the morphemes reflect the inverse linear ordering of the syntactic operations that affected the base, is illustrated by Chichewa (Baker 1985). The two relevant affixes here are -er- and -edw-. The first is an applicative (appl.) morpheme, associated with a syntactic operation that turns the indirect object into a direct object (see the gloss in 31b). The affix -edw- is a passive morpheme, corresponding to the operation that turns the direct object of an active sentence into a subject (31c). Now, notice the ungrammaticality of (31e) as opposed to (31d). (31) a. Mbidzi zi-na-perek-a mpiringidzo kwa mtsikana. zebras agr.-past-hand-Asp crowbar to girl ‘The zebras handed the crowbar to the girl.’ b. Mbidzi zi-na-perek-er-a mtiskana mpiringidzo. zebras agr.-past-hand-appl.-Asp girl crowbar ‘The zebras handed the girl the crowbar.’ c. Mpiringidzo u-na-perek-edw-a kwa mtsikana (ndi mbidzi). crowbar agr.-past-hand-passive-Asp to girl by zebras ‘The crowbar was handed to the girl by the zebras.’ d. Mtsikana a-na-perek-er-edw-a mpiringidzo ndi mbidzi. girl agr,-past-hand-appl,-passive-Asp crowbar by zebras ‘The girl was handed the crowbar by zebras.’ e. *Mtsikana a-na-perek-edw-er-a mpiringidzo ndi mbidzi The contrast between (31d) and (31e) shows that the passive morpheme cannot be closer to the verb perek than the applicative. Baker’s explanation is the following: the order of morphemes mirrors the order of syntactic operations. The order verb–applicative–passive in (31d) means that the verb first turned the indirect object ‘the girl’ into a direct object, and then turned this direct object into a subject. The order in (31e), however, means that in a first operation, the direct object was turned into the subject and that then the indirect object ‘the girl’ was turned into a direct object. This gives an ungrammatical result, because the applicative transformation needs another direct object to be present in the structure, and by the time it is applied, the direct object has turned into the subject. Moreover, the subject in (31e) could never be ‘the girl’, because when the passive transformation applies, this argument is the indirect object. The important point of the proposal is that the ungrammaticality of the morpheme

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order in (31e) is not due to a purely morphological principle, but derives from the unavailability of particular syntactic operations in certain contexts: syntax explains the order of morphemes. Notice that in the purely syntactic account of affix ordering that we have seen, whether an affix materializes as a prefix or as a suffix depends on whether the base forms a complex head with it or not. In the Shona case, no complex head is formed and the affix spells out as a prefix; in Chichewa, it is assumed that movement has taken place to allow the formation of complex heads. This reorders the heads, so that the same kind of affixes now spell out as suffixes. Counterexamples Counterexamples to the Mirror Principle involve cases where the order of morphemes inside a word is different from the order in which operations are assumed to have taken place in the syntax. We have already seen cases that suggest these kinds of mismatches exist, among them parasynthesis (§3.3.5), double base (§3.3.4), bracketing paradoxes (§3.3.3) and other situations where we find a higher or lower number of affixes than the number of syntactic heads we believe a language has (§2.3.2). Cases where affixes are ordered in a syntactically unpredictable way have been noticed by Beard (1995) and Hyman (2003), among others. The latter author, in his study of the verbal morphology of Bantu, notices that the order of affixes with respect to the verbal stem is pervasively the one in (32). (32) stem – causative – applicative – reciprocal – passive This order tends to be respected, even when the semantic and grammatical behaviour of the verb shows that the order of affixes in (32) cannot account for this behaviour. In a sentence such as ‘The hare made the lion dance for the hyena’, the meaning makes us expect that syntax first builds an applicative verb (‘dance for someone’, with ‘someone’ behaving like a direct rather than an indirect object), and to this complex form, it adds the causative to produce the form ‘make someone dance for someone’. Given this meaning, we expect the syntactic structure to be the one in (33), with the causative operation happening after the applicative one. This can be captured by the morpheme order in (32), but only if we assume that the applicative and the causative morpheme have not formed a complex head; if that was the case, we would expect the reverse order, applicative - causative. CausativeP

(33) Causative

ApplicativeP Applicative

V

Yet, given the assumption that Bantu does not form complex heads, the ordering between the reciprocal and the passive morpheme in (32) should reflect the structure in (34):

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ReciprocalP

(34) Reciprocal

Passive Passive

V

We know independently, however, that (34) is impossible in syntax: reciprocals (cf. John and Mary hate each other) can only be built on top of transitive predicates (notice that *John and Mary arrived each other is ungrammatical) – and for independent reasons which we will not discuss, the reciprocal cannot be in subject position (*Each other was liked by them). Passive sentences are intransitive predicates, because they lack a proper direct object. It is therefore impossible to build a reciprocal on top of a passive even when it does not appear in subject position (*John was murdered each other by Paul); therefore, the ordering between passive and reciprocal has to be inverted in the structure, against what the morpheme order reflects. 8.4.2 SEMANTIC ACCOUNTS Other proposals argue that the motivation for morpheme order is mainly semantic. The most influential proposal in this line is Bybee’s (1985) relevance hierarchy. The hierarchy states that those affixes whose meaning is more relevant for the semantics of the base are spelled out as close as possible to that base. Consider (35): (35) The relevance hierarchy in verbs MOOD < TENSE < ASPECT < VOICE (< verb) Voice morphemes (passive voice, for example) tend to occur closer to the verb stem because they trigger a change in the argument structure of that verb which implies suppressing an agent; this has a clear effect on the way the verb is interpreted. The possibility of being passive is dependent on core properties of the verb, like its argument structure or its meaning; verbs that denote states, and not actions, like ‘to have a fever’, generally reject the passive. These tight interactions between the meaning of the affix and the meaning of the base are reflected in the order of morphemes. The more peripheral affixes tend to express notions that are more relevant for the sentence than for the meaning of the verb. Whether a verb can appear in realis or irrealis mood depends on the type of proposition the verb occurs in (i.e. whether the sentence is a wish, a desire, a certain statement, a guess and so on) and not on whether the verb denotes an action or a state, or whether it has a subject and a direct object. 8.4.3 PURELY MORPHOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS Some authors have proposed that the order of morphemes has to be stipulated in morphology: whether a morpheme precedes another morpheme or not cannot be derived from the syntactic or semantic behaviour of the processes spelled out by the affixes, but has to be specified in the lexicon as part of the idiosyncratic information

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associated with each unit. The case of morphological templates, discussed in §2.4.3, is one example of how the order of affixes can be posited as an independent morphological property. Remember also that Lexical Strata Theory makes predictions about the ordering of affixes: affixes in stratum 1 have to be closer to the root than those in stratum 2. To the extent that strata are morphological concepts that organize morphemes into levels, this is also a morphological proposal. The name given in this framework to the theory that accounts for the ordering of morphemes is the Affix Ordering Generalization (AOG; Selkirk 1982). Notice, however, that the AOG explains the ordering between affixes belonging to different strata, but cannot account for the ordering between the processes and affixes inside the same stratum. Another way of determining the affix ordering from a purely morphological perspective is to use the selectional restrictions of each affix. These idiosyncratic properties could force a particular affix to combine only with bases which have very specific properties. If these properties are provided by another affix, the selectional properties would guarantee that the first affix will have to be external to the second. Plag (1996) makes a specific proposal in this direction. 8.4.4 PHONOLOGICAL ACCOUNTS In this account, an affix occupies a particular position with respect to the base because of some particular phonological property that the word needs to satisfy; typically, conditions related to the position of stress or to the preferred shape of syllables in that language. Bermúdez-Otero (2007a, 2007b) argues that the position occupied by the diminutive affix in Spanish has to do with the position of stress inside the word. The generalization that he makes is that a diminutive affix such as -it- needs to have a non-stressed vowel to its right. This property explains its distribution. Consider the examples in (36): (36) a. nariz (/naríθ/) nose b. papel (/papél/) paper c. casa (/kása/) house d. Víctor (/bíktor/) Victor e. azúcar (/aθúkar/) sugar

vs. vs. vs. vs. vs.

naric-it-a nose-dim.-des. papel-it-o paper-dim.-des. cas-it-a house-dim.-des. Vict-it-or Vict-dim.-or azuqu-it-ar sug-dim.-ar

In bases whose last syllable bears stress, -it- behaves as a suffix and requires the addition of a desinence, which, as we have seen (§8.1), is necessarily unstressed in Spanish. This accounts for (37a, b). In contrast, if the last syllable of the base is nonstressed, -it- behaves as an infix which is placed to the left of the desinence (37c). The behaviour of -it- as an infix becomes apparent with paroxytone words which do not

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end in a desinence, because in these cases it is placed inside the root, leaving to its right the last vowel of the word (37d, e). 8.4.5 PARSING- BASED ACCOUNTS Hay (2000, 2002; see also Hay and Plag 2004) has related the relative ordering of affixes to general psychological principles, associated with the parsing of morphological information inside a word. What determines the relative order of chains of affixes is how difficult it is to parse out each one of these affixes; that is, whether a speaker finds it easy to understand the word as a combination of distinct morphemes or tends to view it as an underived form stored as a word in the lexicon. Affixes that tend to be integrated with the base in a stored form are internal to those that are easily parsed as independent units. This proposal is known as complexity-based ordering. The difficulty with which an affix can be isolated from its base is related to its productivity: if an affix is very productive, speakers are conscious that it can combine with many different bases and therefore tend to perceive the words thus created as complex; on the other hand, if the productivity of a suffix is low and there are not many bases to which it can attach, speakers are more likely to perceive these words as non-decomposable units already stored in the lexicon, and thus will be unable to identify an underlying structure within. An affix such as -less illustrates the first group, as its productivity is high in contemporary English; in consequence, speakers are likely to perceive words such as sugar-less, sand-less or penni-less as morphologically complex. The affix -th, on the other hand, has a low productivity and the words that contain it are more difficult to be perceived as morphologically complex, as in width or depth. Complexity-based ordering predicts that the affixes which are perceived as introducing more structure to the word are required to be external to those that are perceived as not introducing that amount of structure. In consequence, the word dep-th-less is possible, while the word *limit-less-th is not, although the category requirement of the affix -th (which takes adjectives as input) is met. 8.5 THE MEANING OF WORDS AND AFFIXES There are two questions which stand out in the research on the relation between morphology and semantics: in what way the meaning of morphological units is decomposable and how the theory copes with unpredictable meanings of complex words. In this section we will address this first issue while the second will be addressed in §8.6. Authors such as Fodor and Lepore (e.g. Fodor and Lepore 1998) have argued that the formal atomicity of words – remember the Generalized Lexicalist Hypothesis (§7.2) – is matched by a semantic atomicity that makes it impossible to decompose the meaning of a word into smaller bits. On the other hand, from different perspectives, authors such as Hale and Keyser, Jackendoff, Lieber and Pustejovsky have argued that lexical meaning is the result of combining smaller primitives into different kinds of structures. The debate is then between those who believe that

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words cannot be decomposed into smaller meaning units and those who believe that decompositionality is possible. 8.5.1 THE MEANING OF UNITS IS DECOMPOSABLE Since the early 1990s, there have been two influential theories about the decompositionality of meaning. The first theory decomposes the meaning into a structure similar to those formed in syntax and restricted by the same structural principles reviewed in Chapter 3, while the second decomposes it only at the conceptual level. The first is Hale and Keyser’s (1993, 2002) proposal of lexical syntax. This proposal argues that each grammatical category corresponds to a particular structural configuration which accounts for its internal meaning. (37) represents the structure of a locative verb, that is, a verb which denotes an event of placing an entity into a space. V

(37) V ‘put’

N ‘something’

P P P ‘on’

N ‘shelf ’

The structure of (37) corresponds to the way Hale and Keyser represent the verb shelve in the lexicon. As can be seen, each one of the nodes can be paired to a semantic notion, in such a way that combination of each bit of meaning in the structure builds the meaning of the verb: ‘to put something on a shelf ’. This first way of decomposing the semantics of a word makes the word correspond to distinct (abstract) units in a structure. The hierarchical structure builds that meaning in the same way as the meaning of phrases results from the syntactic structure that words form. The second theory in which the meaning of words and morphemes is decomposable, but without a structural representation, is that of Pustejovsky (1995). Pustejovsky understands the meaning of a word as both its denotation and the inferences that the denotation allows – that is, the deductions that a speaker can make based on the meaning of a word combined with the knowledge he or she has about the world. For instance, a speaker who hears John finished the novel understands the meaning of the words involved if she knows that novel denotes an object which can be read and needs to have been written, and if she can infer from this sentence that John finished (writing) the novel or John finished (reading) the novel, depending on her knowledge of John’s activities and occupation in the real world. These two inferences are possible because the lexical entry of the noun novel contains conceptual information that states that this object is produced as a result of a particular action (‘writing’) and can be used for a function (‘reading’). Pustejovsky calls these bits of the denotation of a word qualia structure; inferences take place when these qualia are associated with other units inside a sentence or a word. There are four classes of qualia.

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a) The formal quale provides the bits of denotation that single out a particular word from others in a particular domain. For example, the formal quale of the word banana differentiates its denotation from other fruits by stating specific colours, shapes and sizes, all of them specified in that quale. The suffix -ish in the word yellow-ish operates over this quale: someone or something that has properties similar to yellow. b) The agentive quale denotes that there is something that creates or produces the entity denoted by the word through some action. A noun like cake would specify in its agentive quale that the object is created by the action of baking. Not all words contain an agentive quale; this depends on whether the concept denoted forcefully needs to be caused by some previous activity, and thus words such as rain, red, die or know normally lack this specification in the lexicon. c) The telic quale denotes the function of a concept; it is present in nouns which denote instruments for performing actions, such as hammer, oven, umbrella or novel. d) The constitutive quale denotes the parts that compose the entity denoted by a word; the noun garden has a constitutive quale which denotes the flowers, bushes and trees that are part of its denotation. Collective nouns such as army or choir, which denote groups of entities, also contain this quale. Words establish meaning relations by making reference to specific qualia. In the interpretation of John finished the novel as ‘John finished reading the novel’, the telic quale of novel is picked up by the verb to finish, and the activity associated with it is used to build the inference; in the interpretation ‘John finished writing the novel’, it is the agentive quale that is taken. It is possible for a sentence to be semantically illformed precisely because the words lack the relevant quale needed to establish the connection, as in ??Mary began the rock (Pustejovsky 1995: 41); the noun rock is not defined in the lexicon by a particular origin or function, so the verb to begin cannot establish a meaningful relationship with it; hence the oddity of the sentence, which could be saved in very specific contexts. As opposed to lexical syntax, the qualia structure of a word does not have correspondences with the structure of that word; strictu sensu, it would be possible to have qualia structure even in theories that do not accept that words have an internal structure in which morphemes are arranged in a particular configuration. 8.5.2 SEMANTIC ATOMICITY Not all authors believe that words – even when they seem to be morphologically complex – can be semantically decomposed. Fodor and Lepore (1998) have argued that words are atoms both in their formal properties and in their semantics, and that their meaning cannot be split into smaller, more basic units. Even if we can gloss bachelor as a ‘not married man’, its meaning is simply ‘bachelor’, and cannot be decomposed into ‘not’, ‘married’ and ‘man’. Similarly, the meaning of civilization is ‘civilization’, not whatever civil means, plus the meanings of -is(e) and -ation. These authors give several arguments against the decompositionality of meaning.

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The first one is known as the argument of analicity. If the meaning of a word is constructed by adding different semantic bits, each of these bits is necessary to understand the meaning of the word. That is, if bachelor can be reduced to ‘not married man’, a speaker cannot know the meaning of bachelor if he ignores what any of these three primitive means. Fodor and Lepore argue that, given analicity, the meaning of two should include the meaning of prime number, as it is necessarily true that two is a prime number. However, many speakers know what two means without having ever heard of prime numbers. If round meant ‘not square’, or vice versa, we would expect it to be impossible to know the meaning of one without knowing the meaning of the other, which again runs against our intuitions. Another argument is modification: if the meaning of a word is the combination of smaller bits, it should be possible to modify each of these pieces separately. If the meaning of to kill is ‘to cause to die’, we would expect that we could have a modifier that only affects ‘cause’ and another that only affects ‘die’ in a sentence with that verb. This is not true: *Mary killed her cat on Tuesday on Thursday is ungrammatical, despite the possibility that Mary poisoned the cat on Tuesday (hence, ‘on Tuesday’ modifies ‘cause’) but the poison only had its deadly effect two days later (hence, ‘on Thursday’ modifies ‘die’). Notice that in On Thursday, Mary caused her cat to die on Friday this separate modification is possible. This is surprising if kill means literally ‘cause to die’; why would the meaning of the two sentences be different if the elements combined are identical? The reader has certainly realized by now that this argument of non-modification has also been used to argue that compounds and syntactic phrases are not equivalent to each other (§7.2.1). Fodor and Lepore also argue that it is extremely problematic to build a coherent notion of semantic well-formedness or impossible word by trying to state that some semantic bits cannot combine together. The theories of Pustejovsky and of Hale and Keyser are examples where meaning is obtained by combining smaller units, and where it is claimed that some combinations are impossible. Pustejovsky proposes that Mary began the rock is impossible because the relevant qualia are missing, and Hale and Keyser argue that in no language is it possible to have a verb to cow which means ‘a cow has something’, due to restrictions about how structures can be built: in order to become a verb, the noun cow has to function as the object of the resulting verb, not as its subject. Fodor and Lepore argue that these impossibilities, to the extent that they are true, have not been shown to derive from any kind of underlying semantic structure. In a context where Mary is an artist painting a landscape, Mary began the rock may mean that Mary started painting the rock in the landscape. This suggests for them that the oddity of Pustejovsky’s sentence is due to the difficulty of conceiving an action performed with a rock in the absence of relevant context. With respect to the absence of a verb to cow meaning ‘a cow has something’, the authors argue that Hale and Keyser only show that the word could not be derived in a (syntactic) structure, but they cannot explain why there is no primitive verb (which we could pronounce, for instance, to ploffy) with precisely that meaning. Their point is that these gaps cannot be explained by showing that the structure does not allow it, because the meaning could have been conceptualized in a single root.

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8.5.3 DO AFFIXES HAVE A MEANING OF THEIR OWN? Some theories are less interested in the meaning of units and more in what semantic changes a morphological process triggers and how to represent them. Lieber (2004) is a recent example of this. Her proposal is that affixes, by themselves, do not have a fully specified meaning; until they combine with other units inside a word, they do not have a full semantic interpretation. It is generally assumed that a morphological process adds a particular piece of meaning to the base, in order to form a complex form with more complex semantics. Lieber’s main idea, in contrast, is that morphemes do not properly add a specific piece of meaning to the complex word, but rather introduce underspecified semantic relations between the base and some other notion. Consider, for example, the analysis of the English suffix -er in Booij and Lieber (2004). A traditional theory of the meaning of morphemes would propose that the affix -er is associated with a specific piece of meaning, [agent] (remember §5.2.1). Instead, these authors’ proposal is that the semantic relation established between the base and the affix is not defined until they combine together. The relation sometimes emerges as an agent (murder-er, where the suffix introduces a relation between the verbal action and an individual that executes it), but in other cases is non-agentive: the same suffix can express origin (London-er) or quantity (tenn-er), or define an individual by its relation to the concept expressed by the base (two-decker, nine-grader, six-pounder, fourteener, etc.). Through the proposal that affixes do not add specific meanings, Lieber is able to address two frequently noticed problems in the characterization of the meaning of affixes (already mentioned in §5.6). She identifies the first one as the polysemy problem, which refers to the fact that the same affix may be associated with different meanings, like the suffix -ize in (38); in (38a) -ize seems to mean ‘cause to become X’, X being the base, while in (38b) the meaning seems to be ‘cause to go into X’ and in (38c), ‘perform X’. (38) a. random-ize b. container-ize c. anthropolog-ize As in the previous example, these meaning differences are unexpected if the suffix adds a single specific semantic notion to the base. Another problem that Lieber’s proposal addresses is the existence of multiple affixes to express the same notion in the same language. For example, agent nouns can be made in English with -er, but also with -ant (accountant); causative verbs can be made with -ize, but also with -ify (classify). If each affix has a specific meaning, this situation amounts to synonymy, as different units would have the same meaning. However, synonymy is problematic, to the extent that it is not expected that a speaker learn different units to express exactly the same notions. In Lieber’s theory the problem disappears, as the units are not associated with any particular piece of meaning. Lieber’s proposal that morphological processes have a relational meaning has

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antecedents in morphological studies, among them (as she mentions herself) Marchand (1969) and, to some extent, Jakobson (1956). Recently, Janda (2011) has proposed an implementation of this view which relates the ideas to the notion of metonymy: the relationships that morphological processes establish between the inputs and the outputs are based on contiguity relations such as action–agent (break – breaker), action–product (establish – establishment) or characteristic– entity (sweet – sweets). 8.6 COMPOSITIONALITY AND SEMANTIC UNPREDICTABILITY Throughout this book we have seen many cases of words whose meaning cannot be predicted by the meaning of the units that constitute them. This is known as lexicalization, or semantic unpredictability. For example, a blackboard is not a board which is black in colour; not any black board counts as a blackboard, nor must a blackboard be black. Anyone trying to learn this word would not be able to rely on his or her knowledge of the separate meaning of black and board, and would need to learn the meaning of the word separately. Also relevant here is the case of the noun recital, which cannot always be used to refer to the events which can be referred to by using the verb recite; even though we can say He recited the Greek alphabet, the recital of the Greek alphabet does not convey the same meaning. It is also possible to use it to refer to events where the verb recite does not describe the action: a piano recital. Examples can be multiplied: blackmail, wheelchair, proposition, and so on. As can be seen, semantic unpredictability is a frequent process in compounds and derived words. However, some combinations of morphemes are more likely to adopt unpredictable meanings than others. Morphological processes that change the phonology of the base in idiosyncratic ways – those that Lexical Strata Theory classifies as stratum 1 – are more likely to give rise to non-transparent meanings than those that do not modify the phonology of the base. In the same sense that a combination of morphemes, when it is very cohesive, can change the phonology of each unit combined, it can also change its semantics. Contrast the two Spanish adjectives in (39), both related to the word leche ‘milk’ (39) a. lech-oso ‘milky’ b. láct-eo ‘dairy’ In (39a), the meaning of the base leche is preserved in the whole word: this adjective can only mean to contain real milk or to have enough properties in common with milk for the object really to look like milk (white, liquid, etc.). Correspondingly, the phonological properties of the base are very similar to those of the word leche. In (39b), on the other hand, the base is phonologically very different from the form leche and, correspondingly, the meaning is only remotely connected to that of milk. Products which are lácteos are somehow related to milk (they are the result of treating milk in different ways), but they do not contain actual milk (when we cut cheese, we do not expect milk to flow from it) and they do not look like milk (cheese is not

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necessarily white as milk, not expected to be a liquid, etc.). It is generally the case that phonological idiosyncrasies come accompanied by semantic unpredictability. 8.6.1 THE UNPREDICTABILITY OF MEANING The question of whether a word has a non-transparent meaning or not depends in part on the knowledge of the word that a speaker has, because even in cases where there is demotivation of meaning, very frequently it is possible to trace some relation between the intended meaning of the word and the meaning of its units. Consider, for example, the word somebody, which most speakers would consider non-transparent. It is not accidental that the meaning of the word, referring to human beings, is not very far from the meaning of the morpheme body, contained in it, as prototypically when we think about bodies we think of animate entities, and among them, humans are the clearest examples. In this word, thus, the literal meaning of the units cannot explain how speakers interpret the word, but a simple extension of these meanings based on their prototypical interpretation comes close to it. This kind of extension of meaning, by associating one concept with another, is called metonymy, and is relevant to many cases of lexicalized words. For instance, among these cases we have compounds which have a component that denotes a concept that can be related by association to the meaning of the word. Compounds like skinhead or paleface denote human beings, not heads and faces, but the head and the face are the most salient body parts of humans. Another situation where idiosyncratic meanings can still be connected in some way with the meaning of the units involved is when metaphorical uses are at play. A metaphor is an implicit comparison between two entities, such that one stands for another, which it resembles. For example, a crybaby is not a baby, but denotes a person whose character can be compared to that of a baby that cries frequently. A swordfish is not literally a fish with a sword, but a fish whose shape contains a part which looks like a sword. Metaphors play an important role in the theories of the lexicon connected to the framework known as cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The main tenet of the framework is that not only the lexicon but also other components of language get their meaning by association with more basic concepts. Among the typical metaphors used by the lexicon, the use of spatial notions to convey time and emotions plays a significant role. This is, according to this theory, due to the fact that space is deeply grounded in the human mind and can be exploited to frame more abstract notions, such as time and psychological states. For instance, the verb to fly refers to a movement through space, but can be extended metaphorically in some expressions to convey movement through time, such as Time flies; the particle down refers to a particular location, but it can be used to refer to sadness – as in to be down – because normally people lie down when they are tired, are ill or have injuries. Notice that all these cases have to be differentiated from the situation where the complex word is not entirely compositional because it only denotes one of several meanings allowed by its base. In these situations, the word is specialized to denote one particular notion, but we cannot talk about lexicalization. In Spanish, the verb esperar can be translated both as ‘hope’ and as ‘wait’. The derived noun espera-nza, however, is related only to the former meaning.

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Sometimes the specialization of meaning is visible in the use of different affixes. The Spanish verb recoger ‘to collect’ has several different meanings, among them a psychological one – usually expressed in the reflexive form, recoger-se ‘to collect oneself, to be quiet’ – and a physical one, ‘to gather things together’. The deverbal noun recogi-miento specializes in the first meaning, while the noun recogi-da specializes in the second meaning. 8.6.2 DIVIDING STRUCTURES AND CONCEPTS: TWO TYPES OF MEANING One way of reducing the impact of semantic exocentricity in morphology is to establish differences between two classes of meanings, one dependent on the structural properties of the word – on the combinations of units and the way in which they compose a structure – and another which does not have any direct reflex in the structure and is, in itself, purely idiosyncratic. This division can preserve the internal structure of a word even when the concept denoted is not identical to any of the units that it contains. Several authors, among them Lieber (2004), Borer (2005a, 2005b) and those working in DM (Harley and Noyer 1998), have proposed this kind of division. From one side, structural semantics – the skeleton, in Lieber’s theory – is the part of the meaning of an expression which can be derived from the structure that underlies it. From the other side, conceptual semantics – also known as encyclopaedic semantics in DM, or the body in Lieber’s theory – is the idiosyncratic part of meaning that cannot be derived from the properties of the structure and is perforce listed somewhere. If we go back to the structure in (37), according to this theory, the meaning of shelve can be decomposed into two parts. On one side are the aspects of meaning that derive from the structure in (37), the way in which the units combine and which one is the head of the structure. From here it follows that the word denotes an action, because the head is a verb, and that this action involves two participants: those related to each other by the abstract preposition. This is the structural semantics of the verb. The encyclopaedic semantics is that associated with each of the units inside the structure: the fact that one of the participants is what we normally call shelf and the fact that the relation between the two participants is the one normally expressed by the preposition ‘on’. As can be seen, the encyclopaedic semantics gives ‘flesh’ to the skeleton built by the structure; the conceptual semantics depends on the concept expressed by each particular lexical item inside the structure. In Late Insertion Theories (§8.2.3) this information is associated with the morphophonological exponents that spell out morphosyntactic features, and not with the morphosyntactic features themselves. In deciding which bits of meaning belong to the structural semantics and which are due to encyclopaedic semantics, several parameters are generally followed. As structural semantics is a reflection of the structure, it is expected to have effects in the grammatical properties of the construction. For this reason, the difference between the words cat and dog is assumed to be encyclopaedic, as the grammatical behaviour of the two words is not different: both are nouns, both can take plural, both may

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occur in the same kind of contexts, and so on. In contrast, the difference between a verb such as die and one such as kill involves structural semantics (for authors who make the distinction), because their grammatical behaviour is different. Notice, for example, that die cannot be used as a transitive (*Mary died her cat), while kill can be (Mary killed her cat). Another difference between structural and encyclopaedic semantics is the fact that encyclopaedic meaning is idiosyncratic and may be different for two speakers of the same language. Speakers of one language may have differences in the encyclopaedic information associated with each lexical item, but they are not expected to have differences in the structural meaning, because their grammars should be basically identical. Two speakers may disagree on what they consider a proper cat, how they define the word problem or whether the colour of something is green or blue, but we do not expect a group of speakers of English to interpret the subject in Mary killed her cat as something other than the agent of the action, because this part of meaning is assumed to be derived from the structure. The pieces of meaning associated with encyclopaedic semantics can also be adapted to a particular communicative context, and change as a result of that. The effect is that some combinations of morphemes which are discarded because they result in a meaning which does not denote anything that exists in our world could actually be possible if the context gave them a meaning which was compatible with what we know about reality. A compound such as dream broadcasting would not be coined in our present society because it suggests a system which can communicate dreams. However, in a science fiction movie, or any other piece of narrative fiction, the rules of reality change, and this compound could be used. In contrast, the bits of meaning that depend on structural semantics are not expected to be affected by the communicative context. 8.6.3 HOW TO REPRESENT DEMOTIVATION There are several proposals about how to represent demotivation of meaning in the grammar, but they all involve in some way or another listing the special meaning in some place. The differences depend on what exactly is listed and where that list is placed. In Lexicalism a word with a special meaning is listed in the presyntactic lexicon together with the non-predictable bits of semantics, in the same way that irregular forms or their combination with particular allomorphs of a morpheme are listed. The same list exists in DM, only in this framework it is accessed after syntax and is placed in the LF interface (the encyclopaedia; cf. §7.1.2). The encyclopaedia contains the information which is not predictable from the structure and the operations that took place in that structure. This includes not only the meaning of each separate vocabulary item – such as read, work, cat, -less – but also complex units which have a demotivated meaning, including words like blackmail and phrasal idioms like to kick the bucket. There are restrictions on how big the structures with demotivated meaning can be. In particular, all the units that are listed as part of an idiom or a demotivated construction need to belong to the same domain or phase (remember Chapter §7).

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This captures the intuition that units which combine into a lexicalized word are somehow more tightly linked to each other, as Lexical Strata Theory predicts. In Construction Grammar, the units paired with meanings are constructions – that is, preassembled structures – not individual morphemes. These constructions are signs in the classic sense, or pairings of form and meaning. As the meaning is carried by the construction, and not by the units that are components of the construction, compositionality is not expected because the separate units themselves do not carry meaning. The meaning of the construction is listed, and thus it does not derive from the meaning of its components. For instance, consider the Spanish compounds formed by a verb and a noun and carrying agentive or instrumental meaning (40; cf. Booij 2010). (40) a. limpia-botas shine-shoes, ‘shoe polisher’ b. aparca-coches park-cars, ‘parking valet’ c. para-(a)guas stop-waters, ‘umbrella’ For CM these words constitute evidence that the meaning of words does not derive from the combination of single units, here a verb and a noun. The reason is that in this structure there is no unit corresponding to the meaning of ‘agent’ or ‘instrument’. It is not useful to list the compounds as exceptions and claim that these words are idiomatic, because this contribution of meaning is almost systematically obtained when Spanish makes a compound with a verb and a noun. In situations like this, when a morphological process is productive and its meaning is systematic but unpredictable from the combinations of units, construction grammar uses the term compositional idiom. The proposal is that the paradox is solved if the meaning of the construction is listed as a unit in the lexicon, as shown in (41). (41) [[V] N] ←→ ‘V-er of Ns’ In this sense, none of the morphemes involved in word formation would have meaning, as any morpheme has meaning only to the extent that it is part of a construction. The constructions they take part in, on the other hand, would carry the meaning of the word. Construction Grammar, thus, accepts that words have internal structure, but denies that the structure can be used to derive their meaning. EXERCISES 1. Select three cases of allomorphy in a language you are familiar with and determine (a) whether the allomorphy is local or needs to be accounted for globally; (b) if it is local, whether it has inward or outward sensitivity; and (c) whether the trigger is phonological or morphological. 2. In a language of your choice, describe the phonological properties of the mor-

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phemes used for verb inflection. Do you see any generalizations that allow you to say that this language’s phonology imposes some phonological properties in inflectional affixes? 3. Take a language where morphemes can be segmented and consider the verbal inflectional system. Explore the way in which morphemes are ordered in this system and determine (a) whether the ordering between morphemes is stable or changes in some cases; (b) whether this ordering corresponds to the way in which it has been claimed that syntactic heads are ordered in the language; (c) whether this ordering makes sense from a semantic perspective, with properties that affect verb semantics more directly being closer to the verb; and (d) whether there are some phonological generalizations to be made about the ordering, such as affixes that attract stress being closer to the root. 4. With the introduction of the Separation Hypothesis, some of the arguments given in Chapter 2 against the existence of morphemes no longer stand, while others do. Which arguments still stand? 5. It is frequently the case that affixes used in nominalizations and adjectivalizations (§5.2.1, §5.2.3) are polysemic. In a language of your choice, select some of these affixes and determine how many meanings they can have. Do these meanings depend on properties of the base or are they idiosyncratically distributed? FURTHER READING The reader interested in the presentation of lexical strata and the problems associated with this theory will find some recent studies on these topics in Gussman (1988), McMahon (1990), Booij (1994), Wiese (1996) and Giegerich (1999), the last of which offers a critical reassessment of the facts and proposes an alternative to lexical strata analyses. The Separation Hypothesis has been developed in, among others, Ackema and Don (1992), Don (1993) and Beard (1995). Recent analyses that develop late insertion include Bonet (1991), Halle (1997), Noyer (1997) – which the reader can also take as an illustration of how post-syntactic operations are performed in DM –Branigan and MacKenzie (2000), Embick (2000, 2006) and Emonds (2000). With respect to allomorphy, the distinction between allomoprhy with inward and with outward sensitivity is originally due to Carstairs (1987), and has been studied in some recent works, like Bobaljik (2000), Carstairs-McCarthy (2001, 2003), Adger, Béjar and Harbour (2003), Embick (2003, 2010; the latter argues that allomorphy is always local and never global) and Wolf (2008). Among the works that argue for a global computation for allomorph selection we can mention McCarthy and Prince (1993), Kager (1996), Mascaró (1996), Yip (1998), Lapointe (1999), Rubach (2003) and Bonet (2004). In addition to the works that we have mentioned in the relevant sections, the problems associated with the decomposition of words into semantic primitives are discussed in Rappaport Hovav and Levin (1988, 1998), Jackendoff (1990), Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1995, 2005), Pustejovsky (1995) and Lieber (2004); all these theories concentrate on the level called ‘lexical conceptual structure’, which is a semantic

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representation of the unit which is autonomous from its formal instantiation. With respect to theories, like that in Hale and Keyser (2002), which match the structural properties of the word with a semantic decomposition, see also Travis (2000) and Mateu (2002). With respect to theories where meaning is atomic, see also Fodor and Lepore’s (1998) critique of Pustejovsky (which has a reply in Pustejovsky 1998 and Harley 2004).

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ANSWERS TO THE EXERCISES

ANSWERS TO THE EXERCISES

CHAPTER 1 1. expect-s. The first morpheme is a lexeme (a verb) and the second is an inflectional affix marking person and number. runn-ing. The first morpheme is a lexeme (a verb) and the second is an affix. This affix can be seen as inflectional (marking aspect, as in John is running) or derivational (turning the verb into a noun, as in John’s running was fast). See §5.7 for more on these cases, ambiguous between derivation and inflection. read-er. The first morpheme is a lexeme (a verb) and the second a derivational affix turning the verb into an agent noun (someone who reads). book-read-ing. The last morpheme is a derivational affix which turns the verb read into a noun; notice that in this case -ing cannot be seen as inflection (*John is book reading). The resulting form reading combines with another lexeme (book) in order to make a compound. child-ish. The first morpheme is a lexeme (a noun) and the second is a derivational affix turning the noun into an adjective. small-ish. The first morpheme is a lexeme (an adjective) and the second is an affix which expresses the degree of the property denoted by the adjective. This affix is an appreciative morpheme (§5.7.1), which has characteristics of both inflection and derivation. As we see, the same morpheme can be derivational or inflectional depending on where it appears. im-perfect. The first morpheme is a derivational prefix (with a negative meaning) and the second is a lexeme (an adjective). un-explain-able. The first morpheme is an affix, a derivational prefix with a negative meaning; the second is a lexeme (a verb); and the third is an affix, a derivational suffix that derives an adjective from the verb. 4. The case in (c) illustrates phonological allomorphy: with bases starting with a vowel, the morpheme surfaces as an-, and when the base starts with a consonant, it emerges as a-. The case in (a) is not allomorphy in its traditional sense because the two forms cannot be related phonologically by any plausible rule: they are rather two morphemes with similar meaning and function, each of them combining with different roots. The case in (b) is what is traditionally classified as suppletion: they are forms of the same word, but in contemporary English neither is phonologically derivable from the other. 185

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3. The sequence in (a) is a word with respect to the phonological criterion (it constitutes a single unit of pronunciation, [ʤɒnz]), but is not stored in the lexicon because its meaning and form are predictable and its internal constituents clearly allow for syntactic operations (for instance, they can be expanded into whole phrases, as in [John’s mother]’s hat). The sequence in (b) is not a phonological word, but is stored in the lexicon due to its unpredictable meaning; its constituents allow for some independent morphological operations, like past tense formation (John went bananas), but not others (??How did John go? – Bananas), showing that the form is a syntactic atom. The sequence in (c) is a phonological word (its stress pattern is clearly different from the one assigned to a phrase composed of a verb and a noun, like eat meatballs), a syntactic atom (John is a pick pocket → *What is John a pick____?) and needs to be listed in the lexicon due to its unpredictable meaning, but it does not seem to have a head, as neither pocket nor pick is a likely candidate for explaining the properties of the word. (d) is a clear case of a morphological word according to this last criterion; it is also a phonological word, and it behaves as a syntactic atom. The behaviour of the prefix un- shows that this object cannot apply Delayed Resolution, as the prefix must necessarily negate its base and never an external element. However, it does not need to be listed in the lexicon, as its meaning is predictable. Finally, (e) is phonologically a word (its stress pattern is different from the phrase a black bird), a morphological word with its head to the right, a syntactic atom, and additionally must be listed in the lexicon, as a blackbird is not just any bird of black colour. The sequences in (a), (b) and (c) are not orthographic words, but (d) and (e) are. CHAPTER 3 1. Considering the three kinds of exocentricity that we have presented here, namely (a) semantic exocentricity, (b) categorial exocentricity and (c) morphological or formal exocentricity, these are the results. The word know-nothing is exocentric according to (a), because it does not mean the state of not knowing anything – it is a person who does not know anything – and (b), because it is a noun but neither of its constituents is a noun (one is a verb, the other a pronoun). It is also exocentric with respect to (c), as it can take plural – like most nouns – despite the fact that the word nothing does not allow it: several knownothings. In white-collar, the word is exocentric according to (a) – it means a particular class of job – and also with respect to (b) for most speakers, as for most speakers it cannot be used as a noun (??several white-collars); some speakers, however, allow the noun use of this word and in that case the word is not exocentric with respect to its grammatical category (collar is also a noun). In see-saw, there is clear exocentricity according to the criterion in (a) – it means a kind of board to play with, not an action – and (b) – it is a noun, but it is built with two verbs. It is also exocentric with respect to (c), as the word does not allow verbal morphology (the form saw is frozen inside the compound) whereas it does allow nominal (plural) morphology. Bacon ’n’ eggs is not exocentric according to (b) – it is a noun built with two nouns – but could

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be exocentric according to (a), unless the IS A rule is given up and the semantics is explained in the same way as it is accounted for in co-compounds – the word does not denote a kind of egg or a kind of bacon, but a kind of breakfast combining both things–. It is exocentric with respect to (c) to the extent that the plural form on eggs remains even if the word is used in a singular context (That table ordered one omelette and one bacon ’n’ eggs). 2. In order to be parasynthetic, the base must not be able to combine with only one of the two other morphemes alone. The following words from the list do not meet this condition: impoverishment (impoverish exists, and it is not even clear that this word should be segmented into a prefix plus a base), dishearten (hearten exists), aerodynamics (dynamics exists) and disembowelled (disembowel exists). Despite the fact that kind heart is a possible combination in English, it is a phrase and not a compound, so we cannot say that the base can combine with only one of the two morphemes alone; kind-hearted is, therefore, a case of parasynthesis. With respect to outstanding, in spite of the existence of standing, it could be argued that the word is not derived by adding the morpheme out to this complex word, because the meaning of outstanding is clearly related to the phrasal verb stand out. In order to capture the relation between outstanding and stand out, therefore, outstanding would also be considered parasynthetic. See §6.3.2 for the relation between compounds and phrasal verbs. 3. Here we give an answer which is neutral between a structural account and an a-morphous morphology approach. The word molecular biologist requires the following relations between words to account for the property that the suffix -ist attaches to a word and not to a whole phrase: biology > biologist > molecular biologist. However, this derivation suggests that its meaning would be a biologist who is molecular. To capture the right meaning (someone who studies molecular biology) the relation has to be biology > molecular biology > molecular biologist. With respect to supernatural, in order to account for the fact that the word supernature does not exist, the word is built following the sequence nature > natural > supernatural. However, as the meaning of the word is ‘the property of being beyond nature’ (that is, the property of things which cannot be explained by natural laws), and not ‘beyond the property of being natural’ (what would something beyond a property be?), the sequence that accounts for the meaning is nature > supernature > supernatural. As for unluckier, the fact that the morphological comparative cannot be built over bases of more than two syllables is captured if the sequence of operations is lucky > luckier > unluckier. This does not explain the meaning of the word, which is ‘having a higher degree of the property of being unlucky’, not ‘not having a higher degree of the property of being lucky’. To capture the meaning, then, the series has to be lucky > unlucky > unluckier. 4. The structure in (a) explains that the word personal exists, but not the word imperson. The structure also explains that the meaning of impersonal is ’not personal’. The structure in (b) is wrong because it predicts that the word imperson exists. The structure predicts the wrong meaning: the property of being related to something which is not a person. As for (c), it does not make any predictions about which possible combinations of morphemes are allowed in English or what the meaning of the word would be.

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answers to the exercises CHAPTER 4

3. The problem with this approach is that it does not capture the fact that the two forms are variants of the same verb, something that any morphological theory should be able to account for. Two homophonous words are words which happen to share – by accident – the same phonology, but which are not connected by any means in the rest of their grammatical properties. The two words can have different grammatical categories and different semantics, without it being possible to derive one from the other, but the second person plural and the first person plural of a verb are clearly connected in grammatical category and meaning. A different approach would be to treat are as a single form which is underspecified in person and number and as such can be used in a variety of contexts provided that it does not compete with more specified forms, like am or is. In this way, the form are would be, in a sense, polysemic – that is, a single form with several meanings – something that would capture the obvious relation between all the uses of are inside the paradigm. Unlike standard cases of polysemy, though, the word would have several grammatical uses instead of several different conceptual meanings. 4. This proposal has several problems. The first set of problems is methodological: as discussed in §2.3, zero morphemes are problematic to the extent that their existence cannot be proved directly and that there is no direct evidence for them in the acquisition of a language. But the particular proposal presented here would have additional problems. One of them is that there would be a series of zero affixes that contrast in their feature specification; however, this set of affixes would be identical in shape (homophonous, all of them being pronounced as zero), giving rise to the same problems that we saw in the previous exercise. Another problem would be to identify what the feature specification of the morpheme are would be in this approach: if the number and person features are spelled out by a zero affix, what would those remaining features be? Notice that answering that are is the root will only give you more trouble: then you will be forced to say that am and is are suppletive forms of the root, with the effect that then each of them will have to be accompanied by more zero morphemes for person and number. Not only will you have increased these affixes, but moreover now you will have to say that the suppletion is conditioned by different zero affixes, running into the same kind of trouble noticed by Nida (1948) for go ~ went, which we discussed in §2.3. CHAPTER 5 4. What the examples in (ii) show is that the -a that appears in the form (ib) cannot be a verbalizer. If it were, it would not be able to co-occur with an overt verbalizer, the equivalents of -ify and -ize in our examples, because these morphemes already define the word as a verb and another verbalizer would be unnecessary. For this reason, -a has to be considered a segment that marks a verbal base. Indeed, this segment is a theme vowel in Spanish. A possible alternative would be to say that the -a is different in the examples in (ib) and (ii): a verbalizer in (ib) and a theme vowel in (ii). This proposal would be stipulative, because the -a behaves in the same way in both cases:

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it attracts stress (descont[á]; personific[á]) and in both cases marks the verb as belonging to the same conjugation class – the one that takes -ba for the imperfective and -e to mark subjunctive. CHAPTER 6 1. In some of these words, the morpheme over- has a locative meaning identical to the canonical use of the preposition over. These words are overarch, overbed and overbuild. In some other cases, the morpheme has a degree meaning, denoting an excessive quantity or intensity in a particular property or action: overabound, overachieve and overbuy. The presence of this metaphorical meaning, and not the standard locative one, has been taken as evidence for the fact that in this second set of cases over- is not a free form, but has become an affix distinct from the preposition. Thus, according to this criterion the second set of words would be prefixed, while the first set would be compounds combining a preposition with a verb or noun. However, things are not so simple, as the ultimate analysis depends on whether losing its canonical meaning automatically implies that a word has become a morpheme. 4. There are some automatic advantages to proposing that the participle form in -ed has been built over the phrase one eye. Given that the adjective eyed does not exist, a derivation like eye > eyed > one eyed is not possible, and on top of this, this series of steps would not explain the meaning of the word, which is not one person who has eyes, but someone who has one eye. Allowing for the sequence eye > one eye > one eyed solves both problems at the same time without giving rise to ternary branching (as the derivation eye > one eyed would do). However, this proposal also has some serious disadvantages in the form of wrong empirical predictions. One is that, despite the fact that one eye is a syntactic phrase according to the tests presented in §6.3.1, as soon as it becomes part of the word one-eyed, it stops behaving as a syntactic phrase. If the participle is built over a syntactic phrase, it comes as a mystery that this syntactic phrase does not behave as such once it is inside the word and, for instance, does not allow coordination, movement or further modification. See Bisetto and Melloni (2008) for a recent analysis that solves these problems, following Ackema and Neeleman (2004).

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INDEX

abbreviation, 129 acronymy, 129, 131 adjectivalization, 93–4, 103, 183 Adverbial Phrase (AdvP), 134 Affix Ordering Generalization (AOG), 172 agent, 2, 10, 13, 16, 27, 38, 59, 67, 79, 86, 89–92, 94, 101–3, 105, 107–8, 118, 140, 141, 149, 153, 162, 171, 175, 177, 178, 181, 182, 185 agglutinative languages, 41, 42 agreement, 24, 26, 33, 39, 51, 66–75, 105, 106, 108, 112, 137, 145, 164, 166, 169 allomorphy, 15–16, 20, 25, 30, 40, 75, 76, 155, 165–7, 181–2, 185 differences with suppletion, 2, 17, 82 identification, 15 morphologically conditioned, 15 phonologically conditioned, 16, 166–7 ambiguity, 28, 47–8, 56 A-morphous Morphology, 54–7, 64, 187 analicity, 176 appreciative morphology, 105–6 argument, 86, 90, 97, 117, 114, 127, 135, 141, 169, 171 argument structure, 100–2, 148 Atomicity Thesis, 142, 173 attrition, 149–50 augmentative affix, 105 backformation, 32, 98 Binary Branching Hypothesis, 53–4, 62–3 blending, 130–1 blocking, 6–7, 117 boundary, 157–8 bracketing paradox, 60–1, 64, 170 case, 41, 42, 66, 67, 70, 71, 75, 79, 135, 137 category change, 89 causativization, 92, 101, 104, 140, 154, 170, 177

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cell, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82 circumfix, 11, 63 clipping, 127 collective affix, 87–8, 95 Complexity-Based Ordering, 173 compositionality, 44, 178–82 compound, 59, 111–12, 149 attributive, 115–16 co-compound, 119–20 coordinative, 114, 116, 125 endocentric, 113–14, 127 exocentric, 57–60, 113–14, 118, 127, 141, 186, 187 its phonological independence, 154 metonymical, 60 neoclassical, 113 parasynthetic, 118–19 phrasal, 121–2 root, 111 subordinative, 114–26 synthetic, 117 their relation to phrases, 118–20 conjugation class, 50, 77, 80, 87, 139, 142, 189 construction, 6, 38–9, 123–4, 182 Construction Morphology (CM), 6, 38, 43, 64, 123, 182 constructionism, 4, 5, 76, 102, 109, 133, 137–8, 140–1, 146 conversion, 93, 98–100, 108, 109, 126 coordination, 47, 111, 114–15, 120, 153, 189 natural coordination, 119 coreference, 47, 147 declension class, 77, 139, 142 degree achievement, 92 Delayed Resolution, 27–8, 186 demotivation, 51, 179–81 derivation, 13, 14, 20, 66, 67, 79, 86, 99, 105, 108, 109, 127, 117, 157

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index boundaries with inflection, 104–6 derivational rule, 55–6 its relation to compounding, 13 prefixation, 52, 87 suffixation, 52, 87, 89 desinence, 27, 73–5, 76, 77, 106, 108, 111, 152, 172, 173 Determiner Phrase (DetP), 134 dictionary, 7, 66, 68, 108, 133, 143 directionality, 98–100 Distributed Morphology (DM), 4, 6, 37, 43, 63, 76, 80, 82, 99, 138–43, 146, 151, 158, 162–5, 180–1 double base, 62 ellipsis, 120 encyclopaedia, 140–1, 180–1 Exceptional Case Marking, 135 exocentricity, 57–60, 64, 127, 180 exponence cumulative, 33, 41, 80, 164 extended, 33, 165 overlapping, 164 zero, 63, 161 fission, 63, 165 Functional Projection (FP), 99, 158 fusion, 165 fusional languages, 41–2 gap, 82, 87, 105, 176 gender, 24, 40, 50, 58, 60, 66–7, 70–5, 77, 79, 106, 112, 164 Generalized Lexicalist Hypothesis, 28, 47, 57, 121, 142, 150, 173 Generative Semantics, 134 gerund, 76, 81–2, 107 globalism, 165–7 grammaticalization, 148, 150 head, 3, 37, 38, 48, 49–53, 54, 57, 58, 90, 114–17, 126, 136, 139, 140, 149, 165, 168, 169, 170, 180, 183 as a parameter, 53 categorial, 58–9, 127 its definition, 27, 46, 49 its position, 27, 52, 53, 114, 118, 125, 131, 162, 186 morphological, 60 semantic, 59–60 hybrid category, 94, 106–8 hyperonym, 59, 119 hyponym, 59

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ideophone, 129 idiom, 26, 141, 181–2 compositional idiom, 39 impoverishment, 80–1, 84, 163–4 inchoative, 92, 101, 140 infinitive, 39, 76, 106–7, 148 infix, 10, 11, 20, 161, 162, 172 inflecting language, 41 inflection, 19–20, 66–70, 73, 75, 78–82, 84, 87, 94, 104–9, 111, 115, 129, 137, 148, 150, 154, 156–7, 166, 168, 183 boundaries with derivation, 104–6 contextual, 68 inherent, 68 initialism, 129 interfix, 11, 20, 161 irregularity, 83–4 isolability, 22, 24–5 isolating languages, 40 Item-and-Arrangement (IA), 29–35 Item-and-Process (IP), 29–36 Late Insertion, 161–3, 180 lexical alternation, 101–2 lexical entry, 87–8, 102, 160, 174 Lexical Strata, 155–9, 167, 172, 178, 182 Lexicalism, 4, 5, 133–7, 139, 141–3, 147, 150, 181 Strong Lexicalism, 137 Weak Lexicalism, 67, 137 lexicalization, 178–9 lexicon, 5–7, 18, 25, 26, 30, 56, 86–7, 99, 102, 106, 108, 122, 123, 124, 155, 171, 175, 179 as a generative component, 61, 67, 133–7, 151, 155, 174, 181 as a list of items, 37–8, 60–1, 137–9, 141, 143, 182 narrow lexicon, 138, 139 licensing environment, 140 linearization, 167–73 linking element (LE), 11, 112 listeme, 26, 143 localism, 165–7 location, 92–3, 102 Logical Form (LF), 133, 134, 138, 144, 181 mesoclisis, 150 metonymy, 178–9 Mirror Principle, 169–70 MorboComp, 53, 124–6 morph, 14–15, 42

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index

morpheme augmentative, 105 causative see causativization cranberry, 33–4, 55 diminutive, 10, 105–6, 161, 172 dissociated, 76, 164 null, 32, 37, 78, 84, 118, 163 pejorative, 105 restitution, 97 reversative, 46, 96 morphologization, 148, 149, 150 morphome, 76, 84 neoclassical unit, 9–10, 113 neuter, 74, 112 No Phrase Constraint, 143–4 nominalization, 87, 90–1, 103, 135, 183 number, 3, 33, 40, 41, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 106, 108, 112, 188 paradigm, 13, 16, 17, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 41, 42, 52, 75, 76–85, 94, 104, 105, 137, 138, 148 Parallel Morphology, 144 parameter, 19, 53, 151 parasynthesis, 54, 62–3, 88, 108, 170 participle, 33, 34, 35, 37, 44, 47, 58, 62, 76, 94, 107, 127, 165, 189 patient, 59, 91, 103, 104 phonoaesteme, 55 phonological constraint, 152–5, 161, 166 phonological form (PF), 133, 134, 138–9 PF branch, 133–4, 139, 140, 144, 162 place, 92–3 post-syntactic operations, 142, 163–5 prefix, 10, 11, 20, 28, 34, 39, 44, 45, 46, 48, 52, 56, 58, 61, 62, 63, 87, 88, 93, 95, 96, 97, 101, 108, 113, 119, 157, 162, 167, 168, 170, 184, 186, 187, 189 separable prefix, 123 Priscianic Word Formation, 34 productivity, 18–20, 66, 79, 87, 107, 109, 116, 121, 135, 140, 148, 173 projectionism, 102, 133, 136 qualia structure, 94, 174–5 Realizational Morphology, 30–1, 55 realizational rule, 79, 82 recurrency, 22, 24–5, 42 recursion, 116–17

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redundancy rule, 99 reduplication, 128–9, 131 referential adjective see relational adjective referral rule, 80, 81, 84 relational adjective, 94, 103 Relevance Hierarchy, 171 replacive morphology, 31 result object, 91 Right Hand Head Rule (RHHR), 52–3 root, 2, 8–10, 11, 14, 19, 29, 30, 34, 79, 82–3, 97, 111, 113, 130, 139, 140, 141, 153, 157, 159, 160, 168, 169, 172, 173, 176, 183, 185, 188 as opposed to stem, 36–7 in Distributed Morphology, 37–8, 99, 146, 158 Root-and-Pattern Morphology, 12 sandhi rule, 157 selectional restriction, 86, 100, 104, 172 semantic atomicity, 173, 175–6 semantic change, 95 semantics, 3, 15, 25, 35, 44, 49, 57–8, 59–60, 140–1, 144–5, 158–9, 161, 173–88 conceptual, 86, 174, 180–1, 188 encyclopaedic, 180–1 structural, 180–1 sensitivity inward, 167, 182 outward, 167, 182 separable verb, 123–4 Separation Hypothesis, 14, 79, 159–61, 183 singularia tantum, 81, 104 skeleton, 180 specialization, 179–80 stem, 9, 17, 36–7, 43, 59, 95, 106, 111–13, 118, 158, 159, 170, 171 storage, 6, 26, 99, 140 stress, 26, 31, 121, 124, 128, 130, 148, 152, 154, 156, 158, 161, 172, 183 subcategorization, 86–8 subparadigm, 75, 77 substractive morphology, 31–2, 98 suffix, 10, 14, 15, 16, 19, 29, 44–6, 48–9, 52, 61, 62–3, 87–9, 92, 94–5, 108, 119, 131, 149, 154, 156, 157–8, 166, 170, 177, 185, 187 superlative, 70, 154 suppletion, 16, 17, 69, 82–3, 185, 188 syncretism, 80–1, 84 syntactic domain, 141, 145–7, 149, 157–8

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index template morphological, 39–40, 171–2 phonological, 12 theme vowel, 11, 27, 39, 73, 75–7, 108, 111, 152, 164, 188 tmesis, 150 transfix, 11–12, 20, 153, 160 transposition, 90, 95 truncation, 57, 158 Unitary Base Hypothesis, 89

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verbalization, 92–3, 104 vocabulary, 138–41, 164 word, 25–9 as syntactic atom, 28–9, 173, 186 existent, 7–8, 61, 63 morphological, 27–8 phonological, 26–7 potential, 7–8 Word-and-Paradigm Morphology (WP), 30–1, 34, 35, 41, 78–9, 80–2 Word Structure Autonomy Condition, 142

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