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Inheritance Hierarchies And Historical Reconstruction: Towards A History Of Slavonic Colour Terms, Andrew R. Hippisley, Gerald Gazdar

Linguistics Faculty Publications

The last decade has witnessed an interest in inheritance hierarchies for the representation of linguistic knowledge. An obvious application is to historical reconstruction of a language family, but this is largely unexplored territory. We demonstrate the merits of such an approach with a default inheritance treatment of the colour terms of Slavonic: Slavonic because it is uncontroversially a genetic unit, and colour terms both because of their universality and because of the tight constraints on a language's colour term inventory (Berlin & Kay 1969, and subsequent work). In section I we discuss the colour terms of Slavonic and introduce Berlin …

Declarative Derivation: A Network Morphology Account Of Russian Word Formation With Reference To Nouns Denoting 'Person'., Andrew R. Hippisley

Linguistics Faculty Publications

Studies on derivational morphology often assume a procedural view, emphasizing the journey from morphologically simple to morphologically complex word. We present a declarative approach with the focus on the relationship between two morphologically connected words. This more static approach enables us to better locate the generalizations present in a derivational system. We test this approach on a specific body of data, namely the formation of nouns denoting ‘person’ in Russian.

After introducing Network Morphology, the declarative framework within which we base our account, and the Russian data we will be investigating, we provide as theoretical background to our proposed analysis …