Transcript Li6 Phonology and Morphology

Li6 Phonology and
Morphology
Morphological features
Today’s topics
compositional vs holistic morphology
 evidence for morphemes being
composed of (semantic and
grammatical) features
 some uses of morphological features

Holistic or compositional?

Semantics



Holistic (Bock and Levelt 1994)
Componential (Dell 1986)
Morphology

Whole-word representations (Butterworth ‘92, Bybee ‘95)
• Why?
• Reductionist/null hypothesis

Morphological composition (Taft & Forster 1975, Levelt
1989)
• Why?
• general tenet that the brain avoids redundant information storage
• Account for productivity
Semantic features
Problems

Fuzzy categories

we tend to think of concepts expressed by words
and phrases as clear-cut, but…
• what does ‘rich’ mean? ‘tall’? ‘blue’?…
• core/periphery

Operators
some, every, and, or, etc.
 some = SOME, where for any sets X, Y:
SOME (X) (Y) iff X  Y  Ø

 = ‘is a proper subset of’;  = ‘the intersection of’
/kæt/
Gradient Category
Representations
Discrete Category
Representations
Semantic features
Problems: core vs periphery
ostriches
hummingbirds
pigeons
robins
magpies
hawks
storks
penguins
it’s actually easy to model this sort of structure using features
Evidence for semantic
features

Capture generalizations about natural classes (humans, etc.),
subsets


What do the following have in common? girl woman witch governess
dominatrix
Classifiers

Thai uses khon to count [+human] items
• khru lâ j khon ‘teacher three person’ = ‘three teachers’
• ma sí tua ‘dog four body’ = ‘four dogs’


Overt marking needed for morphosyntactic agreement (gender,
number...)
Subcategorization:



admire : ?my cat admires me; *my plants admire me
requires [+human] or [+animate] subject
assassinate: requires [+human, +important, (?)+political] object
Inversion effects

(exact) opposites

good:bad…
 errors (TBD)
Morphological inversion rules


Afro-Asiatic gender polarity (Meinhof 1912)
• Arabic 3-10 take opposite gender of their noun
• θala:θatu bani:na ‘3 (f) sons (m)’
• θala:θu bana:tu ‘3 (m) daughters (f)’
• Somali (non-internal) plurals (Zwicky and Pullum ’83, Lecarme 2002)
• def art: masc /-ka/; fem /-ta/
• agr: Soomáali-ga ‘the Somali’ (m) : Soomaalí-da ‘the Somalis’

Spanish theme vowel polarity (Fitzpatrick, Nevins, and Vaux 2004)
• The theme vowel in the present subjunctive is the “opposite” of that found in
the present indicative
Evidence for
morphological features
speech errors
Speech errors

morphological errors



have to went for had to go
have teachen for have taught
semantic substitution errors

insertion or blending of related or opposite words
• bridge of the neck (nose); a tennis athler
• he has to pay her rent (alimony); I really like to – hate to get up in the
morning

tend to preserve grammatical category
• a laboratory in our own computer

tend to preserve grammatical gender if the target utterance requires the
production of a gender-marked element (Vigliocco, Vinson, Indefrey,
Levelt, & Hellwig 2004)
• seems to support gender as a feature, especially if forms of different
phonological form but identical gender pattern together
Verb errors and features

Ashenfelter and Eberhard 200x

Observation
• words sharing semantic features compete for insertion when
encoded in the same local context (Breedin, Saffran, and
Schwartz 1998)

Hypothesis
• In perseverative and anticipatory speech errors, replacement of
simpler form (e.g. GO) by more complex form (JOG) should be
more common

Results
• Hypothesis supported
Evidence for
morphological features
lexical access effects
Lexical access and features

“When one wants to name the
picture of an object, the
structural description of the
picture is used to activate a
conceptual representation
(typically, a bundle of
semantic features).”
(Bachoud-Lévi and Dupoux
2003:163)
Model from Bachoud-Lévi and
Dupoux 2003:181, based on
Levelt et al 1999
The Internal Lexicon
Conceptual Level
Grammatical Level
Word-form Level
Partial access in TOT
states and aphasia

Certain types of grammatical information are retrievable
independent of lexeme; suggests that these items are
stored as independent features in the lexical entry

Burke et al 1991
• Alternate words retrieved in TOTs are of the same grammatical
class, number, and verb tense as the target word

Caramazza and Miozzo 1997
• gender retrievable without access of lexeme in TOTs
• Similar effect for gender found with some aphasics (Caramazza)
• Cf. grammatical gender of distractor affecting production of German
phrases composes of article + picture name—longer latency with
gender mismatch (Schriefers and Teruel 2000)

Bachoud-Lévi and Dupoux 2003
• Numerals, days, and months spared vs matched controls
• Cf also category-specific deficits (animals, vegetables, tools)
N vs V in aphasia

Rapp and Caramazza 2002

double dissociation of grammatical category vs
modality in single aphasic
• greater difficulty speaking nouns vs verbs
• greater difficulty writing verbs vs nouns

supports the representation of grammatical
category distinctions at post-semantic levels of
representation and processing
Evidence for
morphological features
priming effects
Semantic priming
Meyer & Schvaneveldt 1971
First
Word
bread
bread
bread
bread
castle
castle
Second
Word
butter
cheese
mouse
castle
gate
path
Reaction
Time
855
msec
867
970
1030
871
950
Reaction-time pattern suggested semantic organization of mental lexicon
Historical changes
semantic change
morphologisation
syncretism
Morphologisation in ASL
Frishberg, Nancy. 1975. Arbitrariness
and iconicity: historical change in
American Sign Language. Language
51.3:696-719.
Modeling semantic change

Loss/addition of semantic feature(s)




Parallel to regularization in morphology
Murder, swarthy
murder : ‘kill’ > ‘murder’
Features added to the lexical entry for
murder :




[+human victim]
[+unlawful]
[+intentional]
[+violent]
Analogical leveling


Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde III.1009-1012
My goode, myn, not I for-why ne how
That Jalousye, allas! that wikked wivere,
Thus causeless is cropen in-to yow;
The harm of which I wolde fayn delivere!
[ne ‘not’, wivere ‘wyvern, viper’]
Chaucer, The Romaunt of the Rose 247-251
Envye.
And by that image, nygh y-nough,
Was peynt Envye, that never lough,
Nor never wel in herte ferde
But-if she outher saugh or herde
Som greet mischaunce, or greet disese.
[peynt ‘painted’, herte ‘heart’, ferde ‘seemed’]
Analogical leveling
plural: eyen
kine
 past:
clomb
crope
lough
yold
holpen








eyes
cows
climbed
crept
laughed
yielded
helped
What is analogy?

Traditional view:

dog : dogs ::
eye : X
Our view of this type of analogy
a. [plural]
 /-n/
/
class 1
/-rən/ /
class 2
/-Ø/ /
class 3
/-z/
/
elsewhere
b. stage I
{eye, noun, class 1}
stage II
{eye, noun}
 Here analogy = loss of exceptional marking.

Syncretism
The Latin declensions
from Halle and
Vaux 1998
Nom
Acc
Gen
Dat
Loc
Instr
Abl
Erg
oblique
-
-
+
+
+
+
+
-
structural
+
+
+
+
-
-
-
+
superior
+
-
-
+
-
+
+
+
free
+
-
+
+
-
-
+
-
1 (f)
2 (m, n)
3 (mfn)
4 (m, n)
5 (f)
Nom
-a
-u-s/m
-s, -Ø
-u-s
-e-s
Acc
-a-m
-u-m
-e-m
-u-m
-e-m
Gen
-a-e
-i
-i-s
-u-s
-e-i
Dat
-a-e
-o
-i
-u-i
-e-i
Abl
-a
-o
-e
-u
-e
Nom
-a-e
-i/-a
m. –es
m. -u-s
-e-s
Acc
-a-s
-o-s
n. -a
n. -u-a
Gen
-a-r-um
-o-r-um
-um
-u-um
-e-rum
Dat/Abl
-i-s
-i-s
-i-bu-s
-i-bu-s
-e-bu-s
The Latin declensions
Nom
Acc
Gen
Dat
Loc
Instr
Abl
Erg
oblique
-
-
+
+
+
+
+
-
structural
+
+
+
+
-
-
-
+
superior
+
-
-
+
-
+
+
+
free
+
-
+
+
-
-
+
-
Some uses of
morphological features
Gender agr with mixed pls

hierarchy of gender agreement with mixed plurals
in Sanskrit (e.g. {Rama and Sita} went to the
store):
m + n  masculine
 m + f  masculine
 n + f  neuter

Underspecification and
competition in DM
(McGinnis 1996)
Impoverishment
strong
[-neuter]
[+neuter]
[-plural]
^
-t
[+plural]
weak
[-plural]

Sauerland 1995 on Norwegian




-e
[+plural]
adjectival endings differ in strong vs weak syntactic positions (see
(10))
in the strong set, -e appears to be the default
by hypothesis, it’s not accidental that -e is default in the strong
context, and also appears everywhere in the weak context
DM analysis:
/t/  [ _ , -pl, +neut] / Adj + _
/^/  [ _ , -pl, -neut] / Adj + _
[“^” = Ø?]
/e/  elsewhere / Adj + _
Impoverishment rule: [±neuter]  Ø / weak context
This rule blocks –t and -^ from being inserted, since each has a gender
specification
• Therefore the default is inserted in all such cases
•
•
•
•
•
Harley and Ritter 2002

McGinnis 2005


“languages without a dual category conflate the dual with the plural.
Likewise…languages without an inclusive category conflate the inclusive with first
person.”
H&R 2002 (from McG 2005)

“the morphosyntactic features of a given language are subject to MINIMAL
CONSTRASTIVE UNDERSPECIFICATION: only contrastive features appear in the
underlying representation, while non-contrastive features are filled in by default rules
(H&R 498; see also Rice and Avery 1995, Brown 1997). H&R propose that a
language lacking a dual category has only [Grp] in the underlying representation,
while [Min] is filled in by a default rule when [Grp] is absent (H&R:489). Thus the
underlying representation of the system in (6a) is as in (8): the singular category has
no number features, while the dual/plural category has only the feature [Grp].”
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