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Morphology Commons™

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Comparative and Historical Linguistics

Selected Works

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Morphology

Measuring Productivity Diachronically: Nominal Suffixes In English Letters, 1400–1600, Chris Palmer Feb 2015

Measuring Productivity Diachronically: Nominal Suffixes In English Letters, 1400–1600, Chris Palmer

Chris C. Palmer

Much scholarship on morphological productivity has focused on measures such as hapax legomena, single occurrences of derivatives in large corpora, to compare and contrast the varying productivities of English affixes. But the small size of historical corpora has often limited the usefulness of such measures in diachronic analysis. Examining letters from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, this article advances a multifaceted approach to assessing historical changes in nominal suffixation in English. It adapts methodologies from work on morphological productivity in contemporary language – in particular, measures of base and derivative ratios from Hay …

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Number Marking In Western Armenian: A Non-Argument For Outwardly-Sensitive Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy, Bert Vaux, Neil Myler, Karlos Arregi Jan 2013

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 …

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Historical Sociolinguistic Approaches To Derivational Morphology: A Study Of Speaker Gender And Nominal Suffixes In Early Modern English, Chris C. Palmer Dec 2012

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 …

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Base And Suffix Paradigms: Qualitative Evidence Of Emergent Borrowed Suffixes In Multiple Late Middle And Early Modern English Registers, Chris C. Palmer Dec 2010

Base And Suffix Paradigms: Qualitative Evidence Of Emergent Borrowed Suffixes In Multiple Late Middle And Early Modern English Registers, Chris C. Palmer

Chris C. Palmer

Even though many studies of historical morphology have described trends and changes in
the productivity of borrowed suffixes in English, such as -able, -age, -ance, -ity, -cion,
-ment and -ous, few studies have been able to illustrate how borrowed suffixes initially
came to be perceived by speakers as independent, productive units. This study aims to
identify and analyze two types of textual evidence – so-called base paradigms and suffix
paradigms – to demonstrate how and when English writers and readers might have
perceived the endings of borrowings as analyzable, detachable suffixes. Textual examples
are selected from a variety of …

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Borrowed Derivational Morphology In Late Middle English: A Study Of The Records Of The London Grocers And Goldsmiths Dec 2007

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

Chris C. Palmer

This study compares the use of native nominal affixes (-ness, -ship, -hood) with borrowed, potential affixes (-cion, -ance, -ity, -age, -ment) throughout the English portions of the multilingual (French, Latin, English) records of the London Goldsmiths and Grocers of the early fifteenth century. Attempting to locate evidence of the naturalization of these forms--the process by which these endings become derivational morphemes in the general English lexicon--the paper develops the notion of local productivity. This measure combines both quantitative and qualitative data to show that, even in smaller corpora, historical linguists can find evidence of the morphological status of different potential …

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The History And Function Of The Yi-/Bi Alternation In Athapaskan, Chad Thompson Dec 1995

The History And Function Of The Yi-/Bi Alternation In Athapaskan, Chad Thompson

Chad L Thompson Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

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The Nadene Middle Voice: An Impersonal Source Of The D-Element, Chad Thompson Dec 1995

The Nadene Middle Voice: An Impersonal Source Of The D-Element, Chad Thompson

Chad L Thompson Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

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