Morphology Commons^™

Number Marking In Western Armenian: A Non-Argument For Outwardly-Sensitive Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy, Bert Vaux, Neil Myler, Karlos Arregi

Bert Vaux

The Western Armenian possessive plural data originally reported in Vaux (1998, 2003) have been asserted by Wolf 2011 to involve outwardly-sensitive phonologically conditioned allomorphy, a phenomenon widely argued to be unattested (Carstairs-McCarthy 1987; Paster 2006) and predicted to be impossible by the tenets of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993; Bobaljik 2000). We show that the full complexity of the Western Armenian system is better captured in an account that makes no reference to outwardly-sensitive phonological conditioning of this sort. The analysis is based on standard DM mechanisms of morpheme copying, displacement, and spellout (Harris and Halle 2005, Arregi and …

Historical Sociolinguistic Approaches To Derivational Morphology: A Study Of Speaker Gender And Nominal Suffixes In Early Modern English, Chris C. Palmer

Chris C. Palmer

Sociolinguistic variables, such as gender, help nuance historical claims about language change by identifying which subsets of speakers either lead or lag in the use of different linguistic variants. But at present, scholars of historical sociolinguistics have focused primarily on syntax and inflectional morphology, often leaving derivational morphology unexplored. To fill this gap in part, this paper presents a case study of men’s and women’s use of five different nominal suffixes- ‑ness, ‑ity, -age, -ment, and –cion- within the fifteenth and sixteenth century portions of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. This study finds that men led women in the …

Borrowed Derivational Morphology In Late Middle English: A Study Of The Records Of The London Grocers And Goldsmiths

Chris C. Palmer