Core Morphology

Current approaches (e.g. Wunderlich, 1994; Stump, 2001; Trommer, 2001) to morphology have developed an impressive inventory of rule and constraint types to capture crosslinguistic variation in the phonological expression of morphosyntactic features. In this course we explore the hypothesis that most of these devices can be reduced to a single operation which deletes morphosyntactic features and adds phonological material. Such a minimalist model of morphological spellout has been argued to be untenable in the literature for two reasons: First additional morphological mechanisms such as Rules of Referral (Stump, 2001) or feature insertion (Harbour, 2003) are claimed to be necessary to capture specific patterns of syncretism. Second, morphosyntactic features are claimed to trigger more complex manipulations of phonological material by Readjustment Rules (Halle & Marantz, 1993) or paradigmatic distinctness constraints (Alderete, 2001). With respect to both arguments we will discuss evidence that additional mechanisms beyond Core Morphology might be unnecessary and lead to empirically wrong predictions. While the course takes standard Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993) as a point of departure we will discuss several related frameworks (e.g. Minimalist Morphology; Wunderlich, 1994 and Paradigm Function Morphology; Stump, 2001) on the way.

Background Readings:

Anderson, S. R. (1992). A-Morphous Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wunderlich, D. and Fabri, R. (1994). Minimalist morphology: An approach to inflection. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 20:236-294.

Harley, H., and R. Noyer (1999): State-of-the-art article: Distributed Morphology, GLOT International.

Stump, G. T. (2001). Inflectional Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Distributed Morphology Website

Monday August 21

(Minimalist) Distributed Morphology

Languages: Georgian, German, English

This session contains an introduction to the classical version of Distributed Morphology (DM) in Halle & Marantz (1993) and the minimalist offspring of DM developed in Trommer (1999, 2003) which integrates the concept of 'Discontinuous Bleeding' from Noyer (1992). We will look in detail at DM analyses of Georgian, German, and English and see that most of the rule types assumed by Halle & Marantz can be reduced to the basic operation Vocabulary Insertion. Finally we compare the core assumptions of DM with those of other frameworks, especially Amorphous Morphology (Anderson, 1992) and Minimalist Morphology (Fabri & Wunderlich, 1994).

Slides

Rules of Exponence

Basics of Distributed Morphology

Halle & Marantz (1993)

Readings:

Halle, M. and Marantz, A. (1993). Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Hale, K. and Keyser, S. J., editors, The View from Building 20, pages 111-176. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Noyer, R. R. (1992). Features, Positions and Affixes in Autonomous Morphological Structure. PhD thesis, MIT. (chapter 1).

Trommer, J. (1999). Morphology consuming syntax' resources: Generation and parsing in a minimalist version of Distributed Morphology. In Proceedings of the ESSLI Workshop on Resource Logics and Minimalist Grammars.


Wednesday August 23

Feature Insertion and Class Features

Noyer (1998) and Harbour (2003) argue, based on data from Nimboran and Kiowa, that in addition to impoverishment, the standard mechanism in DM to derive syncretism, another morphological operation inserting (unmarked) features is necessary. In this session we will consider possibilities to avoid this conclusion under the assumption that morphosyntactic features are organized in geometric trees as in Harley and Ritter (2002). We will further discuss how this approach extends to syntactically uninterpretable ('class') features, and how feature insertion relates to Rules of Referral (Stump, 2001; Baerman, 2005).

Languages: Nimboran, Amharic

Slides

Feature Insertion: Nimboran

Readings:

Baerman, M. (2005). Directionality and (un)natural classes in syncretism. Language, 80(4):807-827.

Noyer, Rolf. 1998. Impoverishment Theory and Morphosyntactic Markedness, in S. Lapointe, D. Brentari and P. Farrell (eds.), Morphology and its Relation to Phonology and Syntax, CSLI, Palo Alto, pp. 264-285.

Harbour, D. (2003) The Kiowa case for feature insertion. NLLT 21: 543-578, 2003.

Trommer, J. (2003). Feature (non-)insertion in a minimalist approach to spellout. In Proceedings of CLS 39, pages 469-480. available under: .


Friday August 25

Portmanteau Affixes

Languages: Hungarian, Swahili, Nocte, Arizona Tewa

Under 'portmanteau' I understand here a morphological marker which 'fills' more than one morphological position. Such markers are extensively used in Minimalist Morphology (Fabri & Wunderlich, 1994), and explicitly defended in Stump (2001) and Trommer (2001). Here, I argue that there are no true portmanteaus, and that apparent portmanteaus are due to contextual allomorphy or to different factors. We will focus on an especially interesting class of markers which are ambiguous in the sense that they seem to act as portmanteaus in some contexts and as 'simple' markers in others. These markers, especially agreement markers in Hungarian and Nocte, are also highly relevant for the problem of apparent feature insertion.

Readings:

Stump, G. T. (2001). Inflectional Morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (chapter 5).

Trommer, J. (2003e). Hungarian has no portmanteau agreement. In Siptar and Pinon, C. editors, Approaches to Hungarian, volume 9, pages 283-302. Akademiai Kiado.


Monday August 28

Readjustment and Mutation

Readjustment is an operation proposed in Halle & Marantz (1993) to account for specific types of non-concatenative morphology such as ablaut in Germanic languages. In this session we examine on the basis of German verb ablaut whether this can be reduced to the same mechanisms as consonant mutation in languages such as Fula and more productive umlaut (Wiese, 1994). Going one step further we discuss whether there is any need for mutation-specific phonological mechanisms such as paradigmatic distinctivity (Alderete, 2001) or subsegmental faithfulness constraints (Wolf, 2005). Crucially, the morphological primitives developed in earlier sessions (especially discontinuous bleeding and class features) will we crucial for a proper understanding of morphophonological constraints.

Languages: Fula, German

Readings:

Embick, D. and M. Halle (2005). On the Status of Stems in Morphological Theory. In T. Geerts and H. Jacobs eds. Proceedings of Going Romance 2003, John Benjamins.

Wiese, R. (1994). Phonological vs. morphological rules: on German umlaut and ablaut. Journal of Linguistics, 32:113-135.

Wolf, M. (2005). An autosegmental theory of quirky mutations. In Proceedings of the 24th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, pages 370-378.


Wednesday August 30

Polarity Polarity phenomena, where a morphological category seems to be expressed by the change of a morphological or phonological property into 'its opposite', are one of the hardest challenges for a minimalist approach to morphology. In this session we will discuss evidence that many cases of apparent polarity are actually epiphenomena of more basic morphological or phonological processes.

Languages: Luo, Spanish, Somali, Mam

Slides

Plural Insertion is Constructed Plural

Amharic: Class Features

Readings:

Alderete, J. (2001). Dominance effects as transderivational anti-faithfulness. Phonology, 18:201-253.

Fitzpatrick, J., Nevins, A. I., and Vaux, B. (2004). Exchange rules and feature-value variables. Handout of a talk at Naphc 2004.

Lecarme, J. (2002). Gender ''polarity'': Theoretical aspects of Somali nominal morphology. In Boucher, P. and Plenat, M., editors, Many Morphologies, pages 109-141. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Nevins, A. I. (2003). Do person/number syncretisms refer to negative values? handout of a talk at the LSA meeting, Atlanta, January 2003.


Contact

Jochen Trommer
Institut für Linguistik
Universität Leipzig

jtrommer [æt] uni-leipzig.de

Jochen Trommer's Homepage