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Morphology Commons™

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Comparative and Historical Linguistics

Selected Works

Morphology

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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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