Morphology Commons^™

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

Chris C. Palmer

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 …

Retroflex Variation And Methodological Issues: A Reply To Simonsen, Moen, And Cowen (2008), Janne Bondi Johannessen, Bert Vaux

Bert Vaux

We argue that the differences in the articulation of Norwegian retroflex consonants described by Simonsen, Moen, and Cowen (2008) as individual variation may instead be due to factors such as individual and dialectal background, rather than variation across a single variety. Our main argument is based on existing dialect literature and speech corpus data, which show that the phonemes involved in the retroflexion process are not present in the same linguistic contexts in all dialects. SMC’s experimental stimuli and conditions include linguistic contexts which do not necessarily induce retroflexion naturally, and therefore cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate …

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 …

The Armenian Dialect Of Khodorjur, Bert Vaux

Bert Vaux

No abstract provided.

Phonetics In Phonology: Evidence From Scottish Gaelic Preaspiration, Ian D. Clayton

Ian D. Clayton

Through factorial typology, Optimality Theory is able to predict a range of theoretically possible grammars. However, factorial typology is sometimes too powerful a tool: there may be a systematic mismatch between the range of grammars predicted and those actually attested. Many scholars have offered solutions to this overgeneration problem; for instance, Wilson’s targeted constraints (2001), and Steriade’s P-map (2001) aim to constrain the predictive power of OT by invoking cognitive factors. However, other scholars (e.g. Ohala 2005, Barnes 2002, Myers 2002) assert that typological gaps may be accounted for through the diachronic operation of phonetic factors; it is therefore redundant …

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

On The Perceptual Robustness Of Preaspirated Stops [Poster], Ian D. Clayton

Ian D. Clayton

Some phonological patterns are rare crosslinguistically, others commonplace. Rare patterns must be (a) seldom innovated or (b) diachronically unstable. For instance, preaspirated stops occur in < 1% of languages, while postaspirated stops occur in almost 29% (Maddieson 1984). Prevailing explanations have considered only (b), attributing preaspiration’s scarcity to a presumed but unverified perceptual inferiority to postaspiration. Preaspirated stops are hard to hear, it is claimed, thus diachronically unstable (Silverman 2003, Bladon 1986). This study concludes from both experimental and typological evidence that preaspirated stops are better characterized as infrequently innovated but diachronically stable, consistent with Greenberg’s (1978) State-Process model.

The Appendix, Bert Vaux, Andrew Wolfe

Bert Vaux

We bring together a wide range of linguistic evidence and arguments that have been adduced in support of extrasyllabicity, and synthesize a representational theory that accounts for the subset of these that should be accounted for. We will see that some of the more famous phenomena cited as evidence for the appendix are not actually probative, but on the basis of ample other evidence we will suggest that phonological segments can attach to prosodic nodes higher than the syllable, and that the specific locus of attachment can vary both between and within languages.

Analytic Or Channel Bias: Explaining Variation In Scottish Gaelic Preaspiration, Ian D. Clayton

Ian D. Clayton

Through factorial typology, Optimality Theory predicts a range of theoretically possible grammars. However, factorial typology can result in overgeneration, e.g. by predicting unattested epenthetic repairs to *NC̥ (Pater 1999). To solve this overgeneration problem, extensions to OT have been proposed, such as targeted constraints (Wilson 2001) and the P-map (Steriade 2002). However, others scholars assert that such typological gaps result diachronically from phonetic factors; thus, attributing them to UG is redundant (Ohala 2005, Barnes 2002, Myers 2002). This paper supports the second view, drawing evidence from asymmetries in the typology of Scottish Gaelic (SG) preaspirated voiceless stops. First, the paper …

Phonetics In Phonology: Evidence From Scottish Gaelic Preaspiration [Poster], Ian D. Clayton

Ian D. Clayton

No abstract provided.

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

Chris C. Palmer

An Instrumental Investigation Of Scottish Gaelic Preaspiration, Ian D. Clayton

Ian D. Clayton

No abstract provided.

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

Chad L Thompson Ph.D.

No abstract provided.

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

Chad L Thompson Ph.D.

No abstract provided.