From cschutze at UCLA.EDU Mon Mar 1 03:04:53 2004 From: cschutze at UCLA.EDU (Carson Schutze) Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 19:04:53 -0800 Subject: New thread: seeking work on German(ic) nominal inflection In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Now that the list has wakened from hibernation . . . We have a student who wants to work on inflection within the German DP (relevantly related systems would also be of interest), in particular the strong/weak/mixed interactions of marking number/gender/case on determiners vs. adjectives etc. Aside from work by Schlenker and Kester, is there insightful, especially recent, stuff she should be looking at? Thanks, Carson From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Mon Mar 1 06:26:51 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 06:26:51 +0000 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <1078087406.a26893a6bf940@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: Heidi, You wrote: > In fact, the phrase/word 'competition' that these kind of periphrastic > paradigmatic effects show is in fact one of the strongest arguments, in > my mind, in favor of a postsyntactic morphology, and against the > independent existence of 'paradigms' (independent of the set of > terminal nodes made available by the syntax, that is). The phrase/word > distinction has no pretheoretical status in such a theory, and so we > expect to see such effects everywhere, as in fact we do. Indeed, the > Impoverishment story can certainly predict syncretic effects that hold > simultaneously across word-sized and phrase-sized realizations of given > feature sets/terminal nodes. > > But this kind of effect doesn't have any bearing on whether > Impoverishment is the right way to capture *all* metasyncretism > effects, I don't think... ? > > Did someone at the paradigms workshop before the LSA talk about this > kind of metasyncretism problem? > > :) hh > > First, one problem still with the Impoverishment idea, however this could be my lack of understanding of the notion, is that in the phrasal paradigm cells there is usually semantic drift, in the direction of changing the meaning of the phrasal cells so that their meaning is (i) not merely compositional and (ii) matching the expected meaning of that cell of the paradigm, as though the paradigm itself were imposing meaning. How does DM handle paradigm-influenced meaning, without paradigms? On the workshop, which I had a chance to present at but was unable to do so because of my cheap airline tickets not allowing me to change dates, I *think* that the overall thrust was largely on the phonology-morphology facts. The Word conference in Leipzig next month, judging by the abstracts and titles, will deal with some of these issues too. All the best. -- Dan ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 15:56:58 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 08:56:58 -0700 Subject: morphosyntactic feature geometries In-Reply-To: <8BC8529D-6A45-11D8-A168-000A959B3EAC@chass.utoronto.ca> Message-ID: Hi Alana, >This is that in at least one dialect of Inuktitut which is known >to have a dual, I have a story from a monolingual speaker where the >topic of the story is a couple (isolated), and they are consistently >referred to by the plural. This IS intriguing! It certainly does suggest that the plural can be used for sets of two. Any idea why the speaker used the plural rather than the dual? Makes me wonder if the dual is really used to contrast with the plural -- then once it's been established that they're an isolated couple, there'd be no need for the dual. Anyway, it suggests that the plural isn't [-Minimal]... unless the interpretation of "Minimal" is highly context-dependent. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 16:30:14 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 09:30:14 -0700 Subject: morphosyntactic feature geometries In-Reply-To: <1078024959.a6bd4f0d9f865@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: Thanks, Heidi! This helps a lot. >But I *also* thought that they were competing to realize a fully-specified >geometry under a node provided by the syntax... >As for negative feature values, in 1994 I was dead agin' 'em; was >thinking about the geometry in Avery & Rice terms. I *think* that betsy >and I were also thinking that default interpretations arose at >semantics, but that negative values in the syntax weren't possible. OK, I've given this some more thought, and I think there may indeed be a way to get disjunctive interpretations without negative feature values. Suppose that all languages have a [Speaker, Addressee] category syntactically, though only some have an [Addressee] feature morphologically. If so, we can safely make the simplifying assumption that the [Speaker] (only) syntactic category *always* means "first person exclusive" (i.e. the meaning of the syntactic node is rigid, not determined relative to other syntactic nodes). If there's no specific [Speaker, Addressee] vocab item, a [Speaker] item -- e.g. English "we" -- can be inserted EITHER into a [Speaker] node, OR into a [Speaker, Addressee] node. Does that make sense? >Finally, as for the specific problem of the semantic entailments of >number, I highly recommend a short paper of Elizabeth Cowper's (think >it's available on her website) about plural and dual. Thanks very much for the reference! I'd been meaning to read that paper... >W/r to the subgraph/subtree contrast mentioned by Rolf, if Arabic 't-' >does realize just 2, it could do so by being specified for the H&R >subtree headed by Hearer (since Arabic has the incl/excl distinction, >Hearer is active there). Hearer doesn't dominate number, so there's no >entailment relationship between 2 and number. Just to clarify: a subtree is a constituent, and a subgraph is...? A component of the tree connected by branches? So for H&R, [Participant, Addressee] would be a subtree, [Participant, Addressee, Individuation, Group] would be a subgraph, and [Participant, Addressee, Class, Animate] would be neither? Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 17:06:09 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 10:06:09 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms Message-ID: Hi Heidi, >While it's true that Impoverishment *can* do the job of creating >metasyncretism in the right way, it's actually not really too great to >have to do *all* syncretism that way. I think it's reasonable to assume that both exist. It seems to me that the learner would need different types of evidence to postulate Impoverishment than to postulate syncretism based on underspecified Vocab items. For Impoverishment, they'd need cross-"paradigmatic" evidence -- evidence that goes beyond one set of competing Vocab items. It's sometimes possible to show that a feature that isn't morphologically realized in one position hasn't been Impoverished, because it triggers agreement in another position. On the other hand, metasyncretism effects sound like a good case for Impoverishment. The prediction would be that contrasts neutralized metasyncretically would NOT trigger agreement elsewhere... can't recall if JDB discusses that in his paper or not. If a systematic contrast is totally absent from a language, then the learner can postulate a corresponding impoverishment (underspecification) of the morphosyntactic feature geometry -- or perhaps even an elimination of the feature from the Lexicon, though I'm still struggling with what this would mean at the semantic interface. Actually, I've probably said this backwards. Presumably kids need positive evidence to *activate* morphosyntactic features, not negative evidence to *neutralize* them. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Mon Mar 1 17:13:09 2004 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 12:13:09 -0500 Subject: Dual v. Plural, Syncretism references In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi all. My recollection is that Alana's description is consistent with what I have seen elsewhere: a variety of assertions about languages with dual as a morphological category, its use is not always obligatory and that to greater or lesser degrees the plural can be used to refer to a group of two. The reference I would check first is Greville Corbett's book Number from CUP, which has an extremely thorough description of what kinds of number systems are attested. I had planned to check this before posting, but my copy is lent out. The Surrey Morphology Group has produced quite a lot of accessible research bearing on a number of the recent postings. Check out: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/ Their work on Syncretism is important for previous discussions, and there is a user-friendly searchable database of Syncretism on-line at the above website. The following paper in particular makes the case that some of the "diagonal" syncretisms (say, neuter plural nominative = masculine singular genitive) we try to explain in Indo-European occur only in Indo-European, a result that questions just how much syncretism should fall out of the system rather than being listed as homophony / language particular historical accidents. Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown & Grenville Corbett. 2001. 'Case syncretism in and out of Indo-European', in Parasession of Chicago Linguistics Society. -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 17:28:28 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 10:28:28 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <6D3546F0-6B49-11D8-BEA9-000393CE35FE@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Hi Dan, >in the phrasal >paradigm cells there is usually semantic drift, in the direction of >changing the meaning of the phrasal cells so that their meaning is (i) >not merely compositional and (ii) matching the expected meaning of that >cell of the paradigm, as though the paradigm itself were imposing >meaning. How does DM handle paradigm-influenced meaning, without >paradigms? The phrasal/nonphrasal competitions I've come across in the DM literature don't make reference to semantic drift. Some examples include 'more' vs. '-er' comparatives and 'make+V' vs. affix-derived causative Vs. A new case of Vocab competition could in principle arise as a result of semantic drift. I don't think there's anything in DM that predicts any kind of causal relation there, but I don't think anyone's tried to come up with such a theory -- perhaps you can. But there are also blocking effects that don't involve Vocab competition. Rolf Noyer has talked about different kinds of blocking effects within the DM framework. I'm not sure if this is written up -- I have it on a handout from a talk he gave some years ago at MIT. Worth pursuing if you want to explore this idea in a DM framework. -Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 17:41:08 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 10:41:08 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >cross-"paradigmatic" evidence -- evidence that goes beyond one set >of competing Vocab items Apologies... rereading this, I'm not sure it means anything within DM, where there are no paradigms or possibly even "sets" per se. What evidence the learner would need to postulate Impoverishment is not obvious (to me, anyway). In practice, *linguists* usually postulate Impoverishment only if the syncretism (or metasyncretism) in question can't be captured either by underspecified Vocab items or by underspecified morphosyntactic feature geometries. Maybe that's sensible for learners too -- Impoverish only when necessary. Not sure exactly how this would work in practice. Over to you, Heidi... -Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Mon Mar 1 18:02:53 2004 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 13:02:53 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Martha's remakrs re: acquisition, see Noyer's diss/book, extending ideas of Andrea Calabrase's - learning as the suppression of feature-cooccurrence restrictions (filters) = positive evidence for the acquisition of (contrastive) features. A clarification: Meta-syncretisms (as I used the term) do not mean that a contrast is systematically absent from the language. I (and I think Williams, implicitly) use the idea only for cases of syncretism in which the relevant contrasts are indeendently attested in the language. For example, Russian Class I nouns (and adjectives and pronouns) ["masculine" and "neuter", except those that decline as Class II -a] never show a distinct accusative form; it is always syncretic with nominative (inanimate) or genitive (animate). But the contrast certainly exists in the language: can't understand the syntax without the acc-nom contrast, and elsewhere in the morphology (class II singular nouns). The vocab-insertion based impoverishment appears to be missing a generalization (though the set of inflections is finite, hence this is a tricky notion). Thus, I'm not sure I understand Martha's prediction. If impoverishment applies before "agreement", the prediction arises, but if impoverishment arises after "agreement" then the prediction does not arise. Imagine a language like Russian, but where the meta-syncretism does not extend to adjectives: ACC=NOM/GEN for some class of nouns, but the distinction is still marked on the agreeing adjectives (this arises, in principle, in Russian for nouns that decline as "masculines" but may take a feminine adjective when refering to a woman: e.g., % xoros-aja vrac 'good-fem doctor', corresponding ACC should be: xoros-uju vrac-a: the adjective is non-syncretic accusative - because it's feminine - but the noun, being masculine animate, is syncretic with the genitive). Is there any reason to think that impoverishment (or one's favourite corresponding device) necessarily applies before agreement (or even that it can)? -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 18:24:38 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 11:24:38 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms Message-ID: Hi Jonathan, >Is there any reason to think that impoverishment (or one's favourite >corresponding device) necessarily applies before agreement (or even >that it can)? Oh good, I thought this would get a rise out of you! In the original Halle & Marantz story, Agr is inserted post-syntactically. If so, Impoverishment *could* occur before agreement (in the sense of detailed feature-copying, not in the sense of abstract syntactic agreement). If Impoverishment *must* occur before feature-copying (or *must* affect copied features as well as the originals), then the theory is stronger -- more potential evidence for Impoverishment. I don't know if there's evidence against the stronger theory. Do you? Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Mon Mar 1 18:31:06 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 18:31:06 +0000 Subject: Dual v. Plural, Syncretism references In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Grev's group is indeed doing some very valuable work. One of the distinctions that emerge from studies of agreement, not necessarily from the Surrey Group, though, is that pragmatic agreement and syntactic agreement are not the same. So, for example, "The sheriff has gone wild. She just shot the deputy." The gender on "she" is pragmatically determined. Similar things happen with number, e.g. "If anyone wants a job, they should apply", where 'they' is pragmatically singular and morphosyntactically plural (it is also a loan word, so perhaps that is related to its weird usages). In any case, such examples and the contrast in agreement types mean that the use of plural to refer to dual in texts is not necessarily relevant to formal feature matching. One has to first sort out the agreement types in a given language, their uses, discourse structure, and, even, the culture of reference. -- Dan On Monday, Mar 1, 2004, at 17:13 Europe/London, Jonathan David Bobaljik wrote: > > Hi all. > > My recollection is that Alana's description is consistent with what I > have seen elsewhere: a variety of assertions about languages with dual > as a morphological category, its use is not always obligatory and that > to greater or lesser degrees the plural can be used to refer to a > group of two. The reference I would check first is Greville Corbett's > book Number from CUP, which has an extremely thorough description of > what kinds of number systems are attested. I had planned to check this > before posting, but my copy is lent out. > > The Surrey Morphology Group has produced quite a lot of accessible > research bearing on a number of the recent postings. Check out: > http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/  Their work on Syncretism is > important for previous discussions, and there is a user-friendly > searchable database of Syncretism on-line at the above website. The > following paper in particular makes the case that some of the > "diagonal" syncretisms (say, neuter plural nominative = masculine > singular genitive) we try to explain in Indo-European occur only in > Indo-European, a result that questions just how much syncretism should > fall out of the system rather than being listed as homophony / > language particular historical accidents. > > Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown & Grenville Corbett. 2001. 'Case > syncretism in and out of Indo-European', in Parasession of Chicago > Linguistics Society. > > -Jonathan ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 2920 bytes Desc: not available URL: From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Mon Mar 1 20:01:20 2004 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 15:01:20 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > >Oh good, I thought this would get a rise out of you! In the original >Halle & Marantz story, Agr is inserted post-syntactically. If so, >Impoverishment *could* occur before agreement (in the sense of >detailed feature-copying, not in the sense of abstract syntactic >agreement). If Impoverishment *must* occur before feature-copying >(or *must* affect copied features as well as the originals), then the >theory is stronger -- more potential evidence for Impoverishment. I >don't know if there's evidence against the stronger theory. Do you? > >Cheers, >Martha One of the standard arguments for unification-based approaches to underspecification in theoretical treatments of agreement (see Chapter 2 of Pollard & Sag, later: Kathol; Wechsler & Zlatic's book, etc) is that systematically non-expressed features enter into agreement relations. As Steve Wechsler puts it in a recent paper on this: "agreement systems can evince distinctions that are not reflected in the morphological paradigms themselves." The example Pollard & Sag start with is 1,2 person pronouns, which are unspecified for gender in many I-E languages, but trigger gender agreement: I could say: Je suis intelligent. Martha could say: Je suis intelligente. There appears to be a markedness generalization, say a filter of the Noyer kind: *[person, gender] = gender distinctions restricted to the third person. This filter constrains possible vocabulary items in these languages, both pronouns and agreement morphemes (no word class marks both person and gender). But--on the assumption that agreement is copying/matching--the controller must be fully specified for features. The subject must be [1 sg f] when Martha is speaking, this is matched on the targets, even though no single vocabulary item can spell out all of the features. This is, perhaps, evidence that agreement is not sensitive to the effects of Noyer-filters. If Noyer filters are instantiated via impoverishment (gender --> Ø / person; certainly not the only way to do this), then impoverishment happens after agreement. I suspect this is general. One standard type of argument for underspecification is that features are not morphologically signalled on (some class of) controllers, but enter into agreement nevertheless. (What I have suggested above is of course not the only way of looking at this data. Pollard & Sag are ambivalent about these examples, using them to motivate unification rather than copying/matching on the one hand (which has the same effect as agreement before impoverishment; hence the same examples are used by Stump to argue for realization = underspecified vocabulary items partially spelling out a fully-specified syntax), but as a hybrid system of grammatical and pragmatic agreement later in the chapter.) Is this more or less what you were looking for? -Jonathan > >mcginnis at ucalgary.ca -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 20:51:15 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 13:51:15 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >One standard type of argument for underspecification is that >features are not morphologically signalled on (some class of) >controllers, but enter into agreement nevertheless. Agreed. But this general point doesn't necessarily bear on impoverishment, if, with Heidi (and Halle & Marantz), we assume that syncretism also arises through underspecification of Vocab items. Vocab underspecification would definitely NOT affect what features are available for agreement. >There appears to be a markedness generalization, say a filter of the >Noyer kind: *[person, gender] = gender distinctions restricted to >the third person. This filter constrains possible vocabulary items >in these languages, both pronouns and agreement morphemes (no word >class marks both person and gender). But--on the assumption that >agreement is copying/matching--the controller must be fully >specified for features. The subject must be [1 sg f] when Martha is >speaking, this is matched on the targets, even though no single >vocabulary item can spell out all of the features. OK... I see the point. The absence of gender marking in 1/2 person is a "metasyncretism" in that it arises in sg/pl pronouns and in finite verb agreement, as well as cross-linguistically. So it's probably not the result of underspecified Vocab items being inserted into specified syntactic nodes -- it's probably the result of Impoverishment. On the other hand, 1/2 pronouns trigger gender agreement on adjectives and participles. So it seems features *can* be Impoverished after triggering agreement (unless the agreement arises from some other source, as you noted). >Is this more or less what you were looking for? Yes, I think it is. Well, never a dull moment! Thanks. So now we return to Heidi's question: is there any reason to maintain BOTH Vocab underspecification (i.e. Vocab items having a subset of the features of the nodes they're inserted into) AND Impoverishment? The possibility of triggering agreement might have been a way to distinguish them, but if it isn't, then how can they be distinguished? There is a distinction in principle: if impoverishment is an operation (or a filter), it has to apply in specific environments, while underspecified vocabulary items tend to appear in heterogeneous environments ("elsewhere" environments). This might rule out an impoverishment analysis in some cases (I need to think about this more before I attempt any examples). If Vocab underspecification is possible in principle, minimalist aesthetics might tempt us to prefer it where possible -- because it involves minimizing the features of a Vocab item, rather than adding a potentially highly specific Impoverishment rule. What do you think? -Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Mon Mar 1 20:47:44 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 15:47:44 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: My (relatively uninformed) view has been that morphological features differ in some respects from syntactic features and that there is a nontrivial (but not particularly complicated) mapping from syntactic structure to morpheme (morpheme = bundle of morphological features) structure. Structural case, for example, gets assigned by that mapping (to my way of thinking). It has also seemed to me that impoverishment is naturally viewed as an aspect of the syntactic structure -> morpheme structure mapping. Under this view, impoverishment happens before the lexicon comes into play in filling in the nodes of the morpheme structure. Are there any knock-down arguments against this view? - John Frampton -- Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions. (Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his opening statement to the tribunal) From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Mar 1 22:14:37 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 15:14:37 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi all! Jonathan writes -- Meta-syncretisms (as I used the term) do not mean that a contrast is systematically absent from the language. I (and I think Williams, implicitly) use the idea only for cases of syncretism in which the relevant contrasts are indeendently attested in the language. This is the way I was understanding it, too. The following paper in particular makes the case that some of the "diagonal" syncretisms (say, neuter plural nominative = masculine singular genitive) we try to explain in Indo-European occur only in Indo-European, a result that questions just how much syncretism should fall out of the system rather than being listed as homophony / language particular historical accidents. But are the kind of meta-syncretism facts that you & Williams discuss facts only about indo-european lgs like latin & russian, or does the meta-syncretism effect show up in other lgs too? I expect those surrey people know; I'll have to take a look. I think the point is particularly well-made by the impoverishment analysis of the various English verbal inflection paradigms that you present early in the Syncretism w/o Paradigms paper. It's of course very easy to do each of those syncretic patterns entirely with undespecified vocab items, as you note. And, as Martha says, on grounds of minimalist aesthetics, that might be the nicer way to go if possible. But in order to capture the *meta*syncretism effect across those paradigms (e.g. the 'to be' paradigm and the regular paradigm, which involve different vocab items), noted by Williams, you had to go to the Impoverishment story even for those English facts ? vocab underspecification just doesn't cut it. *Within a single paradigm*, that is, vocab underspecification is a fine way to go. But when the same syncretisms show up again in another paradigm of the lg that is spelled out with different vocab items, it'd be a remarkable coincidence if it just so happened that the undespecification of the vocab items conditioned by features relevant to paradigm A created the same syncretic effects as the underspecification of the vocab items that are conditioned by features relevant to paradigm B. The point, which I think you prove admirably well, is that the only way to get that effect is with Impoverishment of terminal nodes (post-syntax, pre vocab insertion, as John Frampton notes). So the question really is, how robust are metasyncretic effects? If they're just accidents of a single language family, great. But if they're a very widespread phenom, such that we are moved to propose Impoverishment analyses in a wide range of cases of syncretism, not so great (though if that's what you gotta do, that's what you gotta do, of course -- I still would think a postsyntactic morphology would be the way to go for independent reasons). from a learnability perspective, I imagine there'd have to be a simultaneous process of building up the feature structure relevant to a language from the contrasts visible in the morphology (e.g. a 3-way person, 2-way number, 3-way gender split in English based on the pronominal system), and also positing Impoverishment rules to account for syncretisms they hear in other places where they would *expect* to get distinct forms. So, e.g., the english acquirer knows that there's 18 different possible feature combinations available, based on the feature they've had to posit to distinguish the pronouns from one another. Plus the english acquirer knows there's verbal agreement with those features (based on, say, the different forms of 'to have'). Each time the learner hears a verb form that's identical with a form they have remembered hearing with a featurally distinct subject, they say, aha! that's a place where I have to invent an Impoverishment rule. Then, the syncretisms they observe in, e.g. the 'to have' paradigm will be predictive of syncretisms they expect to hear in other paradigms (though if they're not, as in the 'to be' paradigm, that's no problem either, they just go back and annotate their initial Impoverishment rule with 'not for "to be"', or 'only for verbs of class X'). The overall effect will be a tendency to metasyncretism, without requiring a Basic Paradigm in Williams' sense. But of course, there's no place in that kind of system for underspecification of vocab items to play a role; it would all be taken care of by Impoverishment. hmm! yrs thoughtfully, hh From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Mar 2 00:02:18 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 17:02:18 -0700 Subject: morphosyntactic feature geometries In-Reply-To: Message-ID: hey martha! OK, I've given this some more thought, and I think there may indeed be a way to get disjunctive interpretations without negative feature values. Suppose that all languages have a [Speaker, Addressee] category syntactically, though only some have an [Addressee] feature morphologically. If so, we can safely make the simplifying assumption that the [Speaker] (only) syntactic category *always* means "first person exclusive" (i.e. the meaning of the syntactic node is rigid, not determined relative to other syntactic nodes). If there's no specific [Speaker, Addressee] vocab item, a [Speaker] item -- e.g. English "we" -- can be inserted EITHER into a [Speaker] node, OR into a [Speaker, Addressee] node. Does that make sense? Well, it certainly could work, but it does carry the somewhat curious consequence that a language's syntax has a full geometry of features even when there is no morphological evidence present in the language showing that they're there. Betsy and I were thinking more of an incremental acquisition approach, where the tree was elaborated as the morphological contrasts were observed, on the basis of positive evidence. Consequently no English speaker would ever get beyond just having the [Speaker] feature -- they'd never (syntactically) activate the [Addressee] feature. So any meaning compatible with a [+Speaker] interpretation would have to be represented with the same [Adressee]-free geometry in English, whether the intended interp was inclusive or exclusive, which I guess would result in semantic underspecification. I now forget what your original point about the problem with that was... sorry! But you're right that if the whole tree is used in the syntax of all languages, given by UG, then this would give you the full semantic specification while still allowing for morphololgical underspec. >W/r to the subgraph/subtree contrast mentioned by Rolf, if Arabic 't-' >does realize just 2, it could do so by being specified for the H&R >subtree headed by Hearer (since Arabic has the incl/excl distinction, >Hearer is active there). Hearer doesn't dominate number, so there's no >entailment relationship between 2 and number. ... So for H&R, [Participant, Addressee] would be a subtree, [Participant, Addressee, Individuation, Group] would be a subgraph, and [Participant, Addressee, Class, Animate] would be neither? Actually, I think Rolf was thinking that any subtree with Participant in it would necessarily need to have Individuation in it too, so you couldn't have 't-' realizing 2 without also realizing number, so he was distinguishing between subtree (which i think on Rolf's terminology would have to include a root) and a subgraph (which is closer to the syntactic notion of subtree, I think). (Rolf, is that sort of like what you were getting at?) Anyway, I think I was trying to suggest that if you fission off the 'subgraph' headed by Individuation, then you could realize '2' as a subtree including root without predicting that number should still be there as well. the [participant, addressee, class, animate] collection of features could not exist without an [individuation] node, though, so absolutely that would be an impossible collection as either a subtree or subgraph. :) hh Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Mar 2 03:50:46 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 20:50:46 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: hey jdb et al -- (below are some remarks of jonathan's that were meant to go to the list, so don't be surprised if you haven't seen them before) -- You wrote: Hi Heidi: >But are the kind of meta-syncretism facts that you & Williams discuss >facts only about indo-european lgs like latin & russian, or does the >meta-syncretism effect show up in other lgs too? Meta-syncretisms as an effect are not constrained to I-E. But some of the hairier patterns that motivate extremely intricate analyses, and feature decompositions, are, apparently. The $64K question is where to draw the lines between accidental and deep patterns. Sorry, I didn't mean to give the idea that I (or the BBC paper) was suggesting relegating syncretism all to (synchronically) accidental homohpony. no, no, I knew you weren't suggesting that; I just was interested in whether the bigger phenomenon could possibly also be a historical kind of fact. Does anyone know of acquisition studies of any kind about syncretism and features? My (very limited) understanding is that children overgeneralize regular to irregular, but that it is claimed that they do not overgeneralize agreement morphemes in the manner that underspecification would suggest. For example, they supposedly do not overgeneralize 3sg forms to other parts of the paradigm (I guess the tests exclude speech varieties where "I's the b[o]y what catches the fish..." is acceptable), ditto for case. My naive impression is that most of this is based on production data, though, and a limited range of languages, where for some (English, French) zero morphology might confuse the issue. Comments? i don't know the literature on this, though it would surely be interesting and surely there must be data on this from e.g. the German or Dutch CHILDES kids? speaking of i'se the b'y dialects (like Nfld. Engl., spoken where I'se from), it has always seemed to me that the spreading of -s throughout the paradigm is symptomatic of the unmarkedness of 3sg in English... but of course it really doesn't look in standard English like 3sg is unmarked. However, without negative values, the feature geometric approach of mine and betsy's really *can't* have a marked 3 person sg form -- any VI that realizes a bare RE. or an RE with just an Indiv node dependent (for sg.) would be eligible for insertion in geometries for every person. (Of course, if we allow negative values, which maybe we have to anyway, there is no problem). Without negative values, I see two ways out of this: English geometries other than 3sg are subject to a radical Impoverishment rule reducing them to a bare RE node (Bonet-style retreat-to-the-unmarked Impoverishment) (this is for a marked treatment of -s) -s is unmarked; there is one or more zero-morphs realizing the other present tense agreement features. (this would be an unmarked treatment of -s) of course the latter would predict the i'se the b'y dialects well, but it doesn't predict the 2nd person/pl elsewhere-looking forms in the 'to be' paradigm (confirmed by the 'aren't I' inversion. anyone remotely sympathetic to the latter? :) hh -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ From cschutze at UCLA.EDU Wed Mar 3 01:11:45 2004 From: cschutze at UCLA.EDU (Carson Schutze) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 17:11:45 -0800 Subject: another semi-unrelated query: predicative vs. attribute adjectival inflection In-Reply-To: <1078199446.a598e3f89764e@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: Hello again, Can anyone point me to references other than Bernstein and Kester on explaining the difference between inflection on attributive adjectives and lack thereof on predicative ones, in languages that have this difference (e.g. German), and what makes these languages different from those in which both kinds of adjectives are inflected (e.g. Italian)? Also, am I right in guessing that there aren't any languages that show the opposite pattern from German? Thanks. -- Prof. Carson T. Schutze Department of Linguistics, UCLA Email: cschutze at ucla.edu Box 951543, Los Angeles CA 90095-1543 U.S.A. Office: Campbell Hall 2224B Deliveries/Courier: 3125 Campbell Hall Campus Mail Code: 154302 Web: www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/cschutze Phone: (310)995-9887 Fax: (310)206-8595 From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Wed Mar 3 20:37:54 2004 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 09:37:54 +1300 Subject: New thread: seeking work on German(ic) nominal inflection In-Reply-To: Message-ID: See Linguist List 14.825 (March 20, 2003). I listed there a lot of references on this issue that people had supplied in response to a query from me. I was interested because it seemed to me that the various factors influencing how determiners, adjectives and nouns are inflected in German could be seen as violable ranked constraints -- though language-specific ones, rather like Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel's 'system-defining structural principles'. I haven't got any further with this in the last year, due to other work, but hope to get back on to it soon. Good luck to Carson's student! Andrew >Now that the list has wakened from hibernation . . . > >We have a student who wants to work on inflection within the German DP >(relevantly related systems would also be of interest), in particular the >strong/weak/mixed interactions of marking number/gender/case on determiners >vs. adjectives etc. Aside from work by Schlenker and Kester, is there >insightful, especially recent, stuff she should be looking at? > >Thanks, > Carson -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Professor, Department of Linguistics, School of Classics and Linguistics. University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108 fax +64-3-364 2969 e-mail andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Wed Mar 3 21:05:42 2004 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 10:05:42 +1300 Subject: another semi-unrelated query: predicative vs. attribute adjectival inflection In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi there Hungarian shows the opposite pattern, I'm pretty sure. That is, attributive adjectives show no case or number inflection but predicative ones do inflect for number (case not being relevant there). Andrew >Hello again, > >Can anyone point me to references other than Bernstein and Kester on >explaining the difference between inflection on attributive adjectives and >lack thereof on predicative ones, in languages that have this difference >(e.g. German), and what makes these languages different from those in which >both kinds of adjectives are inflected (e.g. Italian)? Also, am I right in >guessing that there aren't any languages that show the opposite pattern from >German? Thanks. > >-- > >Prof. Carson T. Schutze Department of Linguistics, UCLA >Email: cschutze at ucla.edu Box 951543, Los Angeles CA 90095-1543 U.S.A. > >Office: Campbell Hall 2224B Deliveries/Courier: 3125 Campbell Hall >Campus Mail Code: 154302 Web: www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/cschutze >Phone: (310)995-9887 Fax: (310)206-8595 -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Professor, Department of Linguistics, School of Classics and Linguistics. University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108 fax +64-3-364 2969 e-mail andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Mar 10 11:09:53 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 11:09:53 +0000 Subject: paradigms Message-ID: Folks, I am still bothered by a lack of understanding on my part as to how DM would handle non-compositional meaning in periphrastic morphology, when that meaning corresponds exactly to what would be expected for individual paradigm cells. That is, the basic idea is that the meanings of the phrases are not composed bottom-up, but that their literal meanings are overridden to meet the 'needs' of the paradigm. I won't bother to include examples here, because this issue won't interest everyone. But one robust case is documented in the first half of the Liminal Categories paper on my website. Prima facie, this type of phenomenon would seem to offer strong support for a word and paradigm type of morphology, against a syntactic-tree approach. But I wouldn't want to say this without hearing from readers of this list, who have repaired my understanding on previous occasions. Dan --------------------------------------------- Daniel L. Everett Postgraduate Programme Director Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Department of Linguistics and English Language University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL UK Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Phone: 44-161-275-3158 http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de/ From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Wed Mar 10 19:30:25 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 12:30:25 -0700 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <74B0A12E-7283-11D8-8489-000A95A689DC@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dan, >I am still bothered by a lack of understanding on my part as to how DM >would handle non-compositional meaning in periphrastic morphology, when >that meaning corresponds exactly to what would be expected for >individual paradigm cells. That is, the basic idea is that the >meanings of the phrases are not composed bottom-up, but that their >literal meanings are overridden to meet the 'needs' of the paradigm. Two possibilities come to mind: (1) the periphrastic alternative has the same underlying syntactic structure as the synthetic alternative, but is realized morphologically differently (cf. comparative more vs. -er), and the non-compositionality is only apparent, arising because of underspecification or even homophony; (2) the periphrastic alternative has a different underlying syntactic structure from the synthetic alternative, and this structure is co-opted to fill a perceived "gap" in the synthetic system. I don't know enough about the facts you're talking about to hazard a guess as to which of these two alternatives is more plausible; you could explore both options and see what you find. >Prima facie, this type of phenomenon would seem to offer strong support >for a word and paradigm type of morphology, against a syntactic-tree >approach. Since paraphrases aren't words, why would a word-and-paradigm model be particularly suited to accounting for such a phenomenon? I'm skeptical about the traditional claim that non-compositional meaning indicates that a phrase has been reanalyzed as a word, since there's evidence that idioms retain syntactically (though not Encyclopedically) determined aspects of compositional meaning. Such a phenomenon *might* be taken to suggest that morphology is not purely interpretive, but influences the syntax in some way. So far I've been unconvinced by specific claims of this kind. -Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Mar 10 19:36:37 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 19:36:37 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Martha, Thanks. Neither of these alternatives you propose is relevant to the facts at hand. But since the facts are not on the list, there is no point, I suppose in belaboring the point. Stump and Ackerman have a paper, in addition to mine on my website, on this stuff. The paradigm conclusion seems fairly unavoidable, though, as these things go. Best, Dan On Wednesday, Mar 10, 2004, at 19:30 Europe/London, Martha McGinnis wrote: > Dan, > >> I am still bothered by a lack of understanding on my part as to how DM >> would handle non-compositional meaning in periphrastic morphology, >> when >> that meaning corresponds exactly to what would be expected for >> individual paradigm cells. That is, the basic idea is that the >> meanings of the phrases are not composed bottom-up, but that their >> literal meanings are overridden to meet the 'needs' of the paradigm. > > Two possibilities come to mind: (1) the periphrastic alternative has > the same underlying syntactic structure as the synthetic alternative, > but is realized morphologically differently (cf. comparative more vs. > -er), and the non-compositionality is only apparent, arising because > of underspecification or even homophony; (2) the periphrastic > alternative has a different underlying syntactic structure from the > synthetic alternative, and this structure is co-opted to fill a > perceived "gap" in the synthetic system. I don't know enough about > the facts you're talking about to hazard a guess as to which of these > two alternatives is more plausible; you could explore both options > and see what you find. > >> Prima facie, this type of phenomenon would seem to offer strong >> support >> for a word and paradigm type of morphology, against a syntactic-tree >> approach. > > Since paraphrases aren't words, why would a word-and-paradigm model > be particularly suited to accounting for such a phenomenon? I'm > skeptical about the traditional claim that non-compositional meaning > indicates that a phrase has been reanalyzed as a word, since there's > evidence that idioms retain syntactically (though not > Encyclopedically) determined aspects of compositional meaning. > > Such a phenomenon *might* be taken to suggest that morphology is not > purely interpretive, but influences the syntax in some way. So far > I've been unconvinced by specific claims of this kind. > > -Martha > -- > mcginnis at ucalgary.ca > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Wed Mar 10 19:36:04 2004 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 14:36:04 -0500 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <74B0A12E-7283-11D8-8489-000A95A689DC@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Hi Dan, Since my name came up in an earlier posting on this, I'll make a couple of remarks, though I'm limited by (i) other pressing obligations this week, (ii) an imperfect undertanding (on my part) as to what the questions are, and (iii) a hazy recollection of the paper you mention, with no time to look it up (see (i)). If the discussion continues, I'll try to jump in again later. Question 1: (Apparent) non-compositional meaning is discussed in DM work on, e.g., idioms. Is there anything here that is specific to paradigms? In particular, is there any reason to suspect that existing approaches to (apparent) non-compositionality won't extend to cover the cases that are apparently "in paradgims"? My recollection was that one of the cases you discussed had a structure [A B] for something filling the role of a pronominal of some sort, while A's use elsewhere was as a determiner. Is this qualitatively different from (other) idioms, which may contain determiners without the (full) determiner sematnics... "on the run", etc.? Question 2: Relatedly, I am not sure I understand what is meant by: >meaning corresponds exactly to what would be expected for >individual paradigm cells. See the brief discussion of paradigms in Dave Embick's LI paper on Latin, where he responds directly to the "periphrastic cells" approach to Latin analytic passives in Börjars, Vincent & Chapman. One point Embick makes is that paradigms are a convenient device for "looking up" the output that corresponds to some set of input, defined, say in terms of admissible feature combinations and a base lexeme, but surely these are the observations we seek to have a theory of, not the theory itself. If the observation is that the feature combination [leave, F1, F2] yields a word, while [leave, F1, F3] yields a phrase, simply listing these as such in a list somewhere seems (to me) to add little to our understanding. For F1 = past, F3 = neg, we get left versus did not leave in English. Compare this with a language that has negative and positive forms of the verb, and one would be tempted to say that 'did not leave' is non-compositional (do does not have its regular meaning) and has a meaning corresponding exactly to the neg, past paradigm 'cell'. But rather than simply listing the periphrastic form in a cell, these observations formed the starting point for a syntactic analysis which seeks to explain the distribution of the forms, why the latter is (observationally) periphrastic, and why the particular pieces that are used have the forms they do. From this perspective, the argument "for paradigms" from meaning looks mis-constituted. Since you asked earlier, in the Syncretism w/o Paradigms paper mentioned by Heidi and others, I engaged Edwin Williams's theory of paradigm structure (rather than the periphrastic arguments) because it was one of the few 'paradigm theories' that I've seen (see also Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy's work, and in phonology, work by John McCarthy and Michael Kenstowicz; this list is not exhaustive) where paradigms are more than a listing of input-output correspondences, and the actual structure of the paradigm plays some non-trivial role. I happen not to be convinced by these theories, for reasons I've put forward elsewhere, but I'm less convinced (perhaps out of igorance) that the arguments from periphrasis actually require paradigms in a deeper sense than that (perhaps unfairly) sketched above. Open to pointers to the arguments out there... Best, -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Wed Mar 10 20:48:38 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 13:48:38 -0700 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <3F49D840-72CA-11D8-BC5E-000393CE35FE@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: >Neither of these alternatives you propose is relevant to the >facts at hand. I must have been unclear. The two alternatives were meant to be exhaustive: either the underlying syntactic structure of the synthetic and periphrastic forms is the same, or it's different. Different consequences follow from the two possibilities. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Mar 10 20:46:37 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 20:46:37 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jonathan, It probably isn't going to be productive to discuss this on the list. The facts are too detailed. But you can rest assured that the points about what theories are for aren't really necessary at this level of discussion. Saying that you want to derive the facts rather than say that they are merely memorized adds no new information to anyone's processor, at least not anyone reading such a list. Wrt paradigms, there are similar arguments to be made for phonemic charts, i.e. that they actually derive facts, not merely list them. In fact, I would go farther and say that one cannot even understand simple verb formation in some languages without a careful understanding of the culture involved as well, as Andrew Pawley, inter alia, has pointed out. But that would be gratuitous, since it would require several full-blown articles to develop the idea and consequences. But this is all better left to the journals and papers. I therefore withdraw my query. Cheers, Dan ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1308 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Mar 10 20:56:07 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 20:56:07 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Well, the alternatives are not exhaustive. But, once again, I asked a question that obviously is not appropriate for the give and take of a list. The answers and questions take a larger context (primarily empirical) than a list can accommodate well. Thanks for the courtesy of offering answers, though. They did at least give me some more insight into DM. Best, Dan On Wednesday, Mar 10, 2004, at 20:48 Europe/London, Martha McGinnis wrote: >> Neither of these alternatives you propose is relevant to the >> facts at hand. > > I must have been unclear. The two alternatives were meant to be > exhaustive: either the underlying syntactic structure of the > synthetic and periphrastic forms is the same, or it's different. > Different consequences follow from the two possibilities. > > Cheers, > Martha > -- > mcginnis at ucalgary.ca > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Wed Mar 10 21:22:52 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 14:22:52 -0700 Subject: paradigms Message-ID: >But you can rest assured that the points about what theories are for >aren't really necessary at this level of discussion. Saying that you >want to derive the facts rather than say that they are merely >memorized adds no new information to anyone's processor, at least >not anyone reading such a list. Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't think Jonathan was making a metatheoretical statement. I understood him to be making a falsifiable empirical claim: that paradigms may be a useful descriptive tool, but they have no theoretical status. The example of do-support nicely illustrates how a paradigmatic description of a synthetic / analytic alternation doesn't tell us anything about the source of the alternation -- i.e. whether the two structures are syntactically identical or not. There's still no firm consensus on whether do-support is a morphological or syntactic alternation. Some have argued that it's purely morphological (for example, see Jonathan's work on adjacency), while others have argued that do-support adds a verbal head (e.g. see Embick & Noyer's LI paper). DM doesn't force one view or the other: both are possible, and only empirical arguments can decide the matter. If those empirical arguments are telling us something meaningful, then a paradigmatic analysis is inadequate. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Mar 10 21:32:12 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 21:32:12 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wednesday, Mar 10, 2004, at 21:22 Europe/London, Martha McGinnis wrote: >> But you can rest assured that the points about what theories are for >> aren't really necessary at this level of discussion. Saying that you >> want to derive the facts rather than say that they are merely >> memorized adds no new information to anyone's processor, at least >> not anyone reading such a list. > > Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't think Jonathan was making a > metatheoretical statement. I understood him to be making a > falsifiable empirical claim: that paradigms may be a useful > descriptive tool, but they have no theoretical status. > But they do have theoretical status. Just not in DM. Dan From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Thu Mar 11 02:16:57 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 19:16:57 -0700 Subject: paradigms Message-ID: >>Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't think Jonathan was making a >>metatheoretical statement. I understood him to be making a >>falsifiable empirical claim: that paradigms may be a useful >>descriptive tool, but they have no theoretical status. > >But they do have theoretical status. Just not in DM. Again, I didn't mean this metatheoretically. I understood J to be proposing that paradigms aren't part of the human linguistic system, i.e. that they have no status in a *correct* theory, whether that's DM or some other theory. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Mar 11 07:17:44 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 07:17:44 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Martha, Tsk, Tsk. Of course I understood this. But if you are telling anyone what the components of the 'correct' theory are, that just *is* a metatheoretical statement. Good luck, Dan On Thursday, Mar 11, 2004, at 02:16 Europe/London, Martha McGinnis wrote: >>> Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't think Jonathan was making a >>> metatheoretical statement. I understood him to be making a >>> falsifiable empirical claim: that paradigms may be a useful >>> descriptive tool, but they have no theoretical status. >> >> But they do have theoretical status. Just not in DM. > > Again, I didn't mean this metatheoretically. I understood J to be > proposing that paradigms aren't part of the human linguistic system, > i.e. that they have no status in a *correct* theory, whether that's > DM or some other theory. > > Cheers, > Martha > -- > mcginnis at ucalgary.ca > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From ejp10 at PSU.EDU Thu Mar 11 13:16:03 2004 From: ejp10 at PSU.EDU (Elizabeth J. Pyatt) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 08:16:03 -0500 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <74B0A12E-7283-11D8-8489-000A95A689DC@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dan: I'm interested in your question, but am not familiar with the data. Would it be possible to provide a few examples? The discussion seems out of context to me without an example. If nothing else an example would provide me insight on why you feel this issue is too complex for a Listserv. With regards Elizabeth >I won't bother to include examples here, because this issue won't >interest everyone. But one robust case is documented in the first half >of the Liminal Categories paper on my website. > >Prima facie, this type of phenomenon would seem to offer strong support >for a word and paradigm type of morphology, against a syntactic-tree >approach. But I wouldn't want to say this without hearing from readers >of this list, who have repaired my understanding on previous occasions. > >Dan > -- Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D. http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10 From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Mar 11 20:11:24 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 20:11:24 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Elizabeth, The reason it is too difficult to discuss on the listserv is that there are no facts without consensus and the establishment of facts as supporting this or that requires detailed discussion. It is, to use a Noam analogy, like trying to talk about anything meaningful on TV between commercials. Unless everyone agrees with you, your points take too much time to develop because they go against the grain. And this is not the list to discuss general morphology. But I did send you the draft I mentioned earlier. You can at least look at the facts if you have the time or inclination. A recent paper by Greg Stump and Farrell Ackerman (to appear in a volume edited by Louisa Sadler and Andrew Spencer) makes the point quite forcefully. But of course in many theories of morphology, the paradigm is causally implicated in many analyses. To say that a statement to the effect that "the correct theory won't use paradigms" is not metatheoretical is quite strange. A statement about facts is theoretical (one might say 'empirical' but I don't believe that that word does a lot of work). A statement about theories is metatheoretical. Saying that the 'correct theory' has no paradigms is somewhat reminiscent of Paul Postal's 'The best theory' article, in which a particular approach of the early 70s was argued to be in principle the best. Best to watch your wallet and cover your beer with your other hand when that kind of talk starts. -- Dan ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Thu Mar 11 20:30:02 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 13:30:02 -0700 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <459CD359-7398-11D8-AFA9-000393CE35FE@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dan, I appreciate your efforts to be provocative, but you're seriously misrepresenting the discussion of paradigms. DM doesn't deserve the criticism you're levelling at it. Defining a priori what the correct theory looks like may be metatheory. More importantly, it's bad science. But DM *doesn't* place a priori limits on the form of the correct theory. It's just a framework of testable hypotheses. Proposing a testable hypothesis isn't metatheory, it's just "theory", i.e. normal science. Anyway, I don't have any more time to devote to this discussion, so I'm afraid that's my last word on the subject. -M. -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From barner at FAS.HARVARD.EDU Thu Mar 11 20:27:36 2004 From: barner at FAS.HARVARD.EDU (David Barner) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 15:27:36 -0500 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <459CD359-7398-11D8-AFA9-000393CE35FE@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: How about one or two examples just for the heck of it? If we don't agree we'll be forced to read the papers to find out why! Dave Barner On 3/11/04 3:11 PM, "Daniel L. Everett" wrote: > Elizabeth, > > The reason it is too difficult to discuss on the listserv is that there > are no facts without consensus and the establishment of facts as > supporting this or that requires detailed discussion. It is, to use a > Noam analogy, like trying to talk about anything meaningful on TV > between commercials. Unless everyone agrees with you, your points take > too much time to develop because they go against the grain. And this is > not the list to discuss general morphology. > > But I did send you the draft I mentioned earlier. You can at least look > at the facts if you have the time or inclination. > > A recent paper by Greg Stump and Farrell Ackerman (to appear in a > volume edited by Louisa Sadler and Andrew Spencer) makes the point > quite forcefully. But of course in many theories of morphology, the > paradigm is causally implicated in many analyses. > > To say that a statement to the effect that "the correct theory won't > use paradigms" is not metatheoretical is quite strange. A statement > about facts is theoretical (one might say 'empirical' but I don't > believe that that word does a lot of work). A statement about theories > is metatheoretical. > > Saying that the 'correct theory' has no paradigms is somewhat > reminiscent of Paul Postal's 'The best theory' article, in which a > particular approach of the early 70s was argued to be in principle the > best. Best to watch your wallet and cover your beer with your other > hand when that kind of talk starts. > > -- Dan > > > > > > ------------------------------------------ > > Daniel L. Everett > Professor of Phonetics & Phonology > Postgraduate Programme Director > Department of Linguistics > The University of Manchester > Oxford Road > Manchester, UK M13 9PL > http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de > Fax: 44-161-275-3187 > Office: 44-161-275-3158 From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Mar 11 21:04:07 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 21:04:07 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: For the record, I have (i) not tried to be provocative (though apparently I was); (ii) not leveled any criticisms at DM. Just Martha's view of what counts as metatheory. It may very well be that paradigms should be rejected. Nothing I have said was a criticism of DM. Just the confines of the particular universe of discourse. And the problem is of my own making. That is what was meant by my 'provocative' letter. I raised an issue. There were several reasonable replies. However, I realized that the things I found unsatisfactory about the replies were not things I could deal with with an example sentence or word or two. This is not the fault of DM or any theory. So, to reiterate I did not criticize DM per se. Thanks to Jonathan, Heidi, Martha and all for comments. -- Dan On Thursday, Mar 11, 2004, at 20:30 Europe/London, Martha McGinnis wrote: > Dan, I appreciate your efforts to be provocative, but you're > seriously misrepresenting the discussion of paradigms. > > DM doesn't deserve the criticism you're levelling at it. Defining a > priori what the correct theory looks like may be metatheory. More > importantly, it's bad science. But DM *doesn't* place a priori > limits on the form of the correct theory. It's just a framework of > testable hypotheses. Proposing a testable hypothesis isn't > metatheory, it's just "theory", i.e. normal science. > > Anyway, I don't have any more time to devote to this discussion, so > I'm afraid that's my last word on the subject. > > -M. > -- > mcginnis at ucalgary.ca > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Thu Mar 11 23:38:45 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 16:38:45 -0700 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <459CD359-7398-11D8-AFA9-000393CE35FE@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: A word from your moderator... >this is not the list to discuss general morphology. I just wanted to clarify that discussions of morphology in general are in fact very welcome on the DM-list. List members, please feel free to post on any topic relating to morphology! Intriguing data are welcome too. What are you working on these days? Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Thu Mar 11 23:53:42 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 16:53:42 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <20040301153108.4605.JFRAMPTO@lynx.dac.neu.edu> Message-ID: Hi John, >It has also seemed to me that impoverishment is naturally viewed as an >aspect of the syntactic structure -> morpheme structure mapping. >Under this view, impoverishment happens before the lexicon comes >into play in filling in the nodes of the morpheme structure. > >Are there any knock-down arguments against this view? I don't think so, but there are arguments that things are a bit more complicated. Jonathan Bobaljik and Andrew Nevins have both argued in recent work that impoverishment can be 'interleaved' with vocabulary insertion into syntactic nodes. That is, a syntactic feature can condition the insertion of one vocabulary item, then be deleted before another vocabulary item is inserted. This hypothesis makes interesting predictions about the order of vocabulary insertion. For example, if vocabulary insertion proceeds from the inside out (i.e. root outwards), the prediction is that items that reflect the pre-impoverishment feature complex will be closer to the root than items that reflect the post-impoverishment feature complex. Jonathan's paper is called "The ins and outs of contextual allomorphy", and the relevant work of Andrew's that I saw was a conference handout discussing (among other things) person agreement in Mam (perhaps WECOL 2002? -- he can give you more useful information). Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Fri Mar 12 01:48:16 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 18:48:16 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <1078179277.eb2b38488df00@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: Hi Heidi, Hmmmm indeed. >Each time the learner hears a verb form that's identical with a form they >have remembered hearing with a featurally distinct subject, they say, >aha! that's a place where I have to invent an Impoverishment rule. >Then, the syncretisms they observe in, e.g. the 'to have' paradigm will >be predictive of syncretisms they expect to hear in other paradigms >(though if they're not, as in the 'to be' paradigm, that's no problem >either, they just go back and annotate their initial Impoverishment >rule with 'not for "to be"', or 'only for verbs of class X'). Just to clarify -- I don't have JDB's paper (obviously I need to get it) -- but is the point that none of the English past tense Vocabulary items make person distinctions, except "is/was/were"? If so, then the issue would be whether this is a deep generalization about English past tense (hence, Impoverishment) or a coincidence (hence, underspecification of Vocab items). There's something unnerving to me about the Impoverishment analysis you sketched above. I've always felt that Impoverishment rules should be posited only for 'special cases', i.e. when syntactic representations and Vocab underspecification can't account for the facts at hand. Using it for cases of metasyncretism seems to lose the distinction between 'general cases' of syncretism (which are also consistent with Vocab underspecification) and these 'special cases', e.g. a case from Piedmontese described by Bonet, where the 1pl reflexive clitic looks like the default 3rd person reflexive, instead of like the 1sg reflexive. I also think of Impoverishment as a rule that targets a limited, well-defined case -- so (speaking broadly) if there's an exception to a morphological generalization, the exception, not the generalization, should be due to Impoverishment. But the English case you described goes the other way: Impoverishment gives us the general case (no person agreement in past tense) and then we need to prevent it from applying in the more specific case (e.g. by saying "except for 'be'"). Another view would be that "be" constitutes evidence that we actually *don't* Impoverish person in the past tense, so the only possible analysis of the absence of person distinctions elsewhere is Vocabulary-based (i.e., coincidence). I'm not sure how to decide between these two views. How would the learner decide? The Impoverishment analysis seems to require the learner's grammar to notice a (semi-systematic) absence of distinctions, and posit a corresponding rule; while the Vocab analysis requires the learner's grammar to notice the presence of morphological distinctions, and posit corresponding Vocabulary items. The latter view makes more sense to me -- let's see if I can say why. Suppose UG gives us a multidimensional syntactic/semantic "space" for making morphosyntactic distinctions, but the features we actually posit for Vocabulary items are activated by positive evidence in the form of contrasts. Under this view, our initial hypotheses about Vocabulary items would be maximally underspecified, and specifications would be added as necessary. For example, we might originally posit that "her" is the only 3sg.f pronoun, but when we realize that "she" also exists, we would invoke a case feature: "she" is 3sg.f.nom. If nothing else happens, then 3sg.f genitive and accusative will remain identical. Why would we take the additional step of impoverishing genitive case in 3sg.f? It seems to me that this would require some motivation -- i.e., evidence that the existing grammar is incorrect. The Impoverishment analysis maintains that the motivation is paradigmatic: *elsewhere* English has a gen/acc distinction, so we expect one for 3sg.fem, and if there isn't one, we need to impoverish it away. But if there are no sub-paradigms, i.e. just one huge paradigmatic space for all morphosyntactic distinctions, then shouldn't we also have to notice that there are no tense, mood, mass/count, positive/negative, proximal/distal, ETC distinctions in 3sg.fem pronouns? If so, we'd need to posit a huge number of Impoverishment rules to get the fact that there are just 2 forms of the 3sg.fem pronoun (or 3, including "hers"). I can't think of any coherent empirical arguments against this, but I do find it highly implausible. The problem may well be lack of imagination, though. Any help is most welcome! Best, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From anevins at MIT.EDU Fri Mar 12 01:54:29 2004 From: anevins at MIT.EDU (Andrew Nevins) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 20:54:29 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hello, and thanks Martha -- the paper (handout!) was from LASSO, is "When 'we' dis-agrees in Circumfixes" and can be downloaded from http://web.mit.edu/anevins/www/lasso.pdf Basically it seems to be to be the null hypothesis that impoverishment happens AT a TERMINAL precisely when THAT TERMINAL is being WORKED on. It seems like a bizarre state of affairs to do impoverishment globally on the whole tree BEFORE doing ANY VI. I tried to take advantage of this in a case of "derivational opacity" w.r.t. spellout: instead of adopting discontinuous bleeding as a principle, or having constraints against redundant spellout of the same feature twice, it seems that one way to deal with circumfix-type systems where the suffix "realizes" a feature usually reserved for the prefix is to have contextual allomorphy for the suffix governed by the presence of F, (under the Bobaljikian/Carstairsian constraint of upwards-only featural allomorphy), followed by deletion of F. Basically just like the Tiberian Hebrew epenthesis-before-a-glottal-stop, followed by deletion-of-the-glottal-stop: the conditioner for rule 1 gets zapped before the surface. Of course, there are declarative alternatives to that case, and to the morph. case, but I think it's worth exploring. I am sorry I haven't had more time to pipe up myself! One of these days we will get the online DM-archive working with enough papers that, just like the OT-sters, Late-Insertionists can be guaranteed of finding a paper in a reliable place. All the nest AIN From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Fri Mar 12 02:06:52 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 21:06:52 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Thanks Martha, > >It has also seemed to me that impoverishment is naturally viewed as an > >aspect of the syntactic structure -> morpheme structure mapping. > >Under this view, impoverishment happens before the lexicon comes > >into play in filling in the nodes of the morpheme structure. > > > >Are there any knock-down arguments against this view? > > I don't think so, but there are arguments that things are a bit more > complicated. Jonathan Bobaljik and Andrew Nevins have both argued in > recent work that impoverishment can be 'interleaved' with vocabulary > insertion into syntactic nodes. That is, a syntactic feature can > condition the insertion of one vocabulary item, then be deleted > before another vocabulary item is inserted. This seems to me to be a strong counterargument, not just a complication. I'll look at the papers you mentioned. - John From anevins at MIT.EDU Fri Mar 12 02:21:39 2004 From: anevins at MIT.EDU (Andrew Nevins) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 21:21:39 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >There's something unnerving to me about the Impoverishment analysis >you sketched above. I've always felt that Impoverishment rules >should be posited only for 'special cases', i.e. when syntactic >representations and Vocab underspecification can't account for the >facts at hand. Using it for cases of metasyncretism seems to lose >the distinction between 'general cases' of syncretism (which are also >consistent with Vocab underspecification) and these 'special cases', >e.g. a case from Piedmontese described by Bonet, where the 1pl >reflexive clitic looks like the default 3rd person reflexive, instead >of like the 1sg reflexive. I think I disagree. Take the systematic absence of gender distinctions in the plural in Russian. On the VI view, it is an accident that every Case+Plural affix happens to be underspecified for Gender. On the impoverishment view, the generalization that Gender is completely absent in the Plural is captured, irrespective of the features realized by individual VIs. I guess I am going for the impoverishment in marked-environment view: Languages that make Gender distinctions in the singular but Zap them in the plural do so because the Plural is already a marked environment. Using the H&R feature geometry, where number of nodes directly reflects markedness, allows this to fall out in a natural way. AIN From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Fri Mar 12 02:23:22 2004 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:23:22 +1300 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi everyone Dan Everett certainly set something off! As I am one of the people who think that paradigms deserve a central place in the theory of inflectional morphology, let me try to respond to some of the points made. I agree that it's not sensible to have a preconceived opinion about whether any particular notion belongs in a good theory of morphology, including the notion 'paradigm'. A good theory, I take it, is one that (a) is economical, (b) is sufficiently powerful, i.e. is consistent with what does happen (pretty much: some inconsistencies may count as problems for future research rather than fatal counterevidence, though deciding which is which may be controversial), and (c) is not excessively powerful, i.e. is inconsistent with as much as possible of what doesn't happen. A theory such as DM that doesn't use the notion 'paradigm' is more economical than one that does, so to that extent it would be nice if DM were correct. But DM practitioners need to check whether their compliance with criterion (a) in this respect is compatible with satisfying criteria (b) and (c). I approach the paradigm issue from the following angle. It's puzzling that languages tolerate complex inflection class systems, with a variety of ways of expressing e.g. 'genitive plural' or '2nd person singular' that don't correlate neatly with any independent syntactic or semantic or even phonological factors. No creator of an artificial auxiliary language (such as Esperanto) has ever saddled it with an inflection class system, and if all languages lacked them (as many do), no linguists would puzzle their heads about why this was so. It could be (as has traditionally been thought) that inflection class systems are just one kind of messy residue that phonological change leaves in its wake, and what allows this residue to perpetuate itself down the generations is the human brain's phenomenal capacity to remember arbitrary linguistic facts. If that is correct, then we can be satisfied with a theory of morphology that essentially imposes no constraint on the array of inflectional resources that a language can have (the number of distinct '2nd person singular' suffixes, for example), nor on how these can be organised and distributed among inflection classes. So, if that is correct, there will be no problem about fulfilling criterion (c) in relation to inflection class behaviour: no theory could ever be too powerful. It seems to me that at least some DM practitioners reject the paradigm as a theoretical notion because they take precisely this view (usually implicitly rather than explicitly) of inflection class systems: 'paradigms' as arrays of forms are useful in pedagogical grammars, perhaps, but they are not linked to any constraint on what can or cannot happen in languages. So: are inflection class systems such a free-for-all, or not? That's where I part company with the DM view, and am somewhat disappointed by DMers' lack of interest in the question. It seems to me that, over the years, quite a body of evidence has accumulated that inflection class systems are not a free-for-all, and that the inflectional resources of a language are distributed (broadly speaking) 'economically', so as to yield a total of inflection classes that is at or near the minimum that is mathematically possible, given those resources. Dave Barner asks for some examples, so here is one (taken, slightly adapted, from Carstairs-McCarthy 1994). Standard German has a considerable array of inflectional resources for nouns, some of which is arbitrary in that the choice that any given noun makes from within the array is not predictable on the basis of gender (masculine, feminine or neuter) or anything else. Of the eight case-number cells for which German masculine nouns inflect, the two that are most lavishly endowed with inflectional resources are the genitive singular and the plural (syncretised for all cases except the dative): Gen Sg: -s, -en, -ens Plural: -e, -en, -er, -s (I ignore here some phonologically conditioned e/Ø alternations.) The inflectional resources of German are thus compatible with the existence of as many as 12 inflection classes, which is what we would observe if each noun's choice of Gen Sg suffix implied nothing about its choice of Plural suffix, and vice versa. At the other end of the scale, the minimum number of inflection classes is four, because all four Plural suffixes need work (so to speak). So what is the actual total of masculine inflection classes in German? The answer is six: I II III IV V VI Gen Sg -s -s -s -en -s -ens Plural -e -er -s -en -en -en What are we to make of this from the point of view of morphological theory? Conceivably, nothing. It could be just how various historical residues panned out. But one thing is noticeable about this distribution of inflectional resources: there is precisely one 'elsewhere' suffix for each of the two cells Gen Sg and Plural, i.e. precisely one suffix that appears in more than one inflection class, namely -s for Gen Sg, and -en for Plural. All the other suffixes are found in one inflection class only. That's far from inevitable: there are innumerable ways in which one could redistribute the German resources among six inflection classes such that that observation would not hold. Again, what are we to make of this? Again, perhaps nothing: it could be an accident. But it seems at least worth exploring the possibility that it is not an accident. We could explore, in other words, the possibility that, in any language, given an array of competing inflectional resources, each item must either (a) identify its inflection class or (b) be the sole 'elsewhere' item, used in those inflection classes that lack an exponent of their own for the cell in question. Well, explorations of that kind have begun, and the results seem promising (I give references at the end, in response to Dave Barner's request). For present purposes, though, what's important (it seems to me) is that conducting such explorations relies on according to the notion 'inflection class' a central place in morphological theory -- in other words, in making theoretical use of the notion 'paradigm', in one of its senses. If one still wishes to do without 'paradigm' as a theoretical notion, there are two choices: either (i) to produce reasons for thinking that the German state of affairs and similar states of affairs in other languages really are accidental (showing, perhaps, that there are many languages where the inflectional resources can't be parcelled out neatly into the two categories 'class-identifying' and 'elsewhere'), or (ii) to show that I am wrong in thinking that the notion 'paradigm' (in some sense) is needed in order to accommodate this observation in a morphological theory that satisfies criterion (c), i.e. a theory that is sufficiently restrictive. I know that Jonathan Bobaljik has said he has given his reasons for not liking the paradigm notion; nevertheless, I am not aware that anyone has yet done either of (i) or (ii). If I've missed something in the literature on this, please tell me! I've gone on long enough. I'll close by saying three things. First, I've given one kind of reason for the theoretical centrality of the paradigm. Other people, such as Greg Stump, Andy Spencer and Kersti Börjars, have argued for the paradigm on grounds that are substantially independent of mine, and I don't want to comment here on those other reasons. Secondly, I feel sheepish in that all the references I cite below are by me. It looks like naked self-promotion. But, by way of excuse, I seem to be about the only person conducting this particular line of inquiry. (The references from before 1994 assume a now superseded version of the 'paradigm economy' idea, but the data should still be of interest and perhaps even some of the discussion.) Thirdly -- yes, I did say earlier that it would be nice, in the interests of criterion (a) (economy), to dispense with the notion 'paradigm' if we can. But there is also criterion (c) to consider -- a criterion that no one forgets about when doing syntax, but which for some reason doesn't seem to be so generally borne in mind by people doing morphology. Carstairs, Andrew. 1983. Paradigm economy. Journal of Linguistics 19: 115-25. Carstairs, Andrew. 1984. Paradigm economy in the Latin third declension. Transactions of the Philological Society 117-37. Carstairs, Andrew. 1987. Allomorphy in Inflexion. London: Croom Helm. Carstairs, Andrew. 1988. Nonconcatenative inflection and paradigm economy. In: Theoretical Morphology: Approaches in Modern Linguistics, ed. by Michael Hammond and Michael Noonan, 71-7. San Diego: Academic Press. Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 1994. Inflection classes, gender and the Principle of Contrast. Language 70: 737-88. Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 1998. How lexical semantics constrains inflectional allomorphy. Yearbook of Morphology 1997, 1-24. Cameron-Faulkner, Thea and Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2000. Stem alternants as morphological signata: evidence from blur avoidance in Polish nouns. NLLT 18: 813-35 Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2001. Grammatically conditioned allomorphy, paradigmatic structure, and the Ancestry Constraint. Transactions of the Philological Society 99: 223-45. [Discusses Bobaljik 'The ins and outs of contextual allomorphy'.] Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2002. Directionality and locality in allomorphy: a response to Adger, Béjar and Harbour. Transactions of the Philological Society 101: 117-24. [A reply to a DM-based critique of C-McC 2001.] Any comments on all this? Apologies again for the length. Andrew -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Professor, Department of Linguistics, School of Classics and Linguistics. University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108 fax +64-3-364 2969 e-mail andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Fri Mar 12 02:25:01 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:25:01 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <1078199446.a598e3f89764e@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: To continue!: > Does anyone know of acquisition studies of any kind about syncretism > and features? My (very limited) understanding is that children > overgeneralize regular to irregular, but that it is claimed that they > do not overgeneralize agreement morphemes in the manner that > underspecification would suggest. A couple of references: Poeppel & Wexler's 1993 Language paper discusses this for German, and Colin Phillips has a MITWPL 26 paper that discusses it for German (based on Clahsen & Penke 1992) and Italian (based on Guasti 1992). Part of Colin's paper is included in a Lang Acq paper to appear -- not sure if these facts are in there, but both are on his website anyway. >English geometries other than 3sg are subject to a radical >Impoverishment rule reducing them to a bare RE node (Bonet-style >retreat-to-the-unmarked Impoverishment) > > (this is for a marked treatment of -s) > >-s is unmarked; there is one or more zero-morphs realizing the other >present tense agreement features. > > (this would be an unmarked treatment of -s) > >of course the latter would predict the i'se the b'y dialects well, but >it doesn't predict the 2nd person/pl elsewhere-looking forms in the 'to >be' paradigm (confirmed by the 'aren't I' inversion. > >anyone remotely sympathetic to the latter? Me. Also, I believe, John Frampton, who has a CLS 38 paper arguing (on metasyncretic grounds!) that 1sg is impoverished in Germanic generally, leading to the 1/3sg syncretism with 'be'. His analysis makes extensive use of negative feature values, but I think it could be recast along the lines you suggest -- in fact, I think Andrew Nevins may have done this in his 2003 LSA talk. OK, my brain is now picked clean. I need to go home. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From kleanthes at PUNKSINSCIENCE.ORG Fri Mar 12 06:50:24 2004 From: kleanthes at PUNKSINSCIENCE.ORG (Kleanthes Grohmann) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:50:24 +0200 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Take the systematic absence of gender > distinctions in the plural in Russian. This is from an outsider who simply reads all the messages on the list but doesn't really get half of them. (I'm neither a morphologist nor working particularly close within DM, but hope that one day the workload goes down and I get my head around it.) If anyone is interested (if this is at all relevant), Artemis Alexiadou and Gereon Müller have an intriguing paper on "Class Features as Probes" on their respective homepages (nominal "paradigms" in Greek, German and Russian), and Gereon has a couple of papers on a DM approach to nominal inflections in Russian. N-joi, K From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Fri Mar 12 18:42:42 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:42:42 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Andrew Nevins wrote: > Hello, and thanks Martha -- the paper (handout!) was from LASSO, > is "When 'we' dis-agrees in Circumfixes" and > can be downloaded from http://web.mit.edu/anevins/www/lasso.pdf > > Basically it seems to be to be the null hypothesis that > impoverishment happens AT a TERMINAL precisely when THAT > TERMINAL is being WORKED on. It seems like a bizarre > state of affairs to do impoverishment globally on the > whole tree BEFORE doing ANY VI. I admire Andrew's strong feelings about what would and would not be bizarre about the way the brain does linguistic computations. That aside, he misunderstood my own hunch about the way things work. My hunch is that spellout is not a direct translation of syntactic nodes (i.e. bundles of syntactic features) to phonology. There is an intermediate step in which syntactic nodes are mapped to morphological nodes (i.e. bundles of morphological features) -- this an aspect of linearization. The mapping may preserve many syntactic features, but the mapping can delete (i.e. fail to map) certain features (i.e. impoverishment) and can add other features (i.e. case features). I agree that it makes a certain amount of sense if impoverishment happens at the point that syntactic node is "being worked on", for me that would be the point that it is mapped into a bundle of morphological features and put into a linear structure. The main point is that vocabulary insertion does not interact directly with impoverishment. I have no particularly evidence for the correctness of my hunch, my inquiry was directed in seeing if there was significant counterevidence. I looked at the analysis of Algonquin in the handout mentioned above and am not convinced that it provides much evidence that my hunch is wrong. There may be other facts about Algonquin morphology that bear on the issue, but on the basis of what you have in the handout, it seems to me that the following works fine: 1) Group is deleted in the context of Author. 2) Author is deleted in the context of Addressee. -wa is the Group suffix; the Minimal suffix is null; and /-nan/ is the default Individuation suffix. The two impoverishments must be ordered --- whether for a reason of the kind Andrew discusses or for some other reason. It could be simply that pairs of rules of this form are automatically ordered in the only way that makes sense. I think that this could most likely be formalized without difficulty. - John Frampton From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Mar 12 20:33:18 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:33:18 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hey Martha -- You wrote: Hi Heidi, ... Just to clarify -- I don't have JDB's paper (obviously I need to get it) -- but is the point that none of the English past tense Vocabulary items make person distinctions, except "is/was/were"? If so, then the issue would be whether this is a deep generalization about English past tense (hence, Impoverishment) or a coincidence (hence, underspecification of Vocab items). Sort of, but the point isn't restricted to the past tense: it's that if you think about the syncretisms for English tense, they're all "add-ons" to the basic 'be' syncretisms, in terms of what gets syncretized, no matter what the vocab items are. And it's not just English: Williams shows the paradigm-persistence-effect for Latin, Jonathan exhibits it in Russian (which Andrew N refers to), and I suspect it's a frequent property of languages in general. It's not a total thing -- as jdb shows, there is no Instantiated Basic Paradigm requirement -- but it is significant. To capture it, you need syncretism to be created by Impoverishment, not just by vocab insertion + the Elsewhere principle. English is really not the ideal case, since there aren't so many paradigms involving different VIs, but Russian makes the point beautifully. There's something unnerving to me about the Impoverishment analysis you sketched above. I've always felt that Impoverishment rules should be posited only for 'special cases', i.e. when syntactic representations and Vocab underspecification can't account for the facts at hand. me too! i've always felt that way too, which is why I'm anxious about the metasyncretism observation. If we're doing Impoverishment everywhere, to get these syncretisms, then we don't need the Elsewhere principle AT ALL.... since every terminal node will end up with a set of features that match one and only one VI. and since the Elsewhere principle VI-insertion is one of the coolest things about DM, I'm feeling a bit disturbed, and wanting to look for other explanations for the metasyncretism effect. The questions you raise about the learning path for the pervasive-Impoverishment are I think very relevant & valid (and of course I don't know the answers). But since Andrew N. says that the pervasive-Impoverishment approach seems reasonable to him, then it could well be that there's good independent reasons to buy it -- which would be fine with me, too; it's kind of the story I was trying to tell in Hug a Tree. Though i'll miss the Elsewhere principle. I'm glad that the unmarkedness of English 3sg -s doesn't seem like too strange of a claim. But of course I still don't know why 'are' is otherwise all over the paradigm and also showing up in negative T-C inversion cases with 1st person subjects (though luckily 'were' doesn't do this. It must just be a weird kind of phonotactic-nightmare avoidance of amn't, somehow). Anyway, syncretically yrs, hh -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From anevins at MIT.EDU Fri Mar 12 20:42:14 2004 From: anevins at MIT.EDU (Andrew Nevins) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:42:14 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <20040312123218.582C.JFRAMPTO@lynx.dac.neu.edu> Message-ID: Hello All (esp. John): > >I admire Andrew's strong feelings about what would and would not >be bizarre about the way the brain does linguistic computations. >That aside, he misunderstood my own hunch about the way things >work. A clarification: My message was a response to Martha, and an elaboration on her reference to why I thought Impoverishment happened at a Node. It was not a response to John's hunch; I don't know what that was and I didn't read his original message. That said, the points you make are interesting, John. I will see if they work in their entirety and have to think about extrinsic ordering of Impoverishment rules a little longer. --AIN >I looked at the analysis of Algonquin in the handout mentioned >above and am not convinced that it provides much evidence that my >hunch is wrong. There may be other facts about Algonquin >morphology that bear on the issue, but on the basis of what you >have in the handout, it seems to me that the following works >fine: > > 1) Group is deleted in the context of Author. > 2) Author is deleted in the context of Addressee. > >-wa is the Group suffix; the Minimal suffix is null; and /-nan/ >is the default Individuation suffix. > >The two impoverishments must be ordered --- whether for a reason >of the kind Andrew discusses or for some other reason. It could From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Mar 12 20:46:06 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:46:06 -0700 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi Andrew CmC! (I think you summed up the criteria relevant to the paradigm debate very concisely, btw) Just a quick I'm-out-of-it question: You wrote: (The references from before 1994 assume a now superseded version of the 'paradigm economy' idea, but the data should still be of interest and perhaps even some of the discussion.) I only ever had a tenuous hold on the paradigm economy idea, and since I haven't been thinking about these things much for a very long time, I'm even more sketchy on it now. Did the original version of paradigm economy predict something like Williams' Instantiated Basic Paradigm requirement, such that there would be some maximally complex paradigm in a language, and the syncretisms of that paradigm are carried over to all the other simpler paradigms, plus some? Or did paradigm economy only make claims about the cross-classifications predicted by having a certain number of distinct affixes? I guess what I really want to know is whether there's some paper of yours that details the evolution of the paradigm economy idea, from its former to its new instantiation, with the reasons for the changes? i'll have to look at your replies to bobajik and adger, bejar & harbor -- didn't know they were out there! that would be a great collection of stuff to have archived online somewhere together -- :) hh From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Fri Mar 12 21:34:32 2004 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 10:34:32 +1300 Subject: paradigms Message-ID: Hi Heidi You said: You wrote: Did the original version of paradigm economy predict something like Williams' Instantiated Basic Paradigm requirement, such that there would be some maximally complex paradigm in a language, and the syncretisms of that paradigm are carried over to all the other simpler paradigms, plus some? Or did paradigm economy only make claims about the cross-classifications predicted by having a certain number of distinct affixes? Only the latter. What it said was that you can't have more paradigms (= inflection classes) for a given wordclass than there are competing inflectional exponents for whichever inflectional cell (or combination of feature values) is most generously endowed with exponents. So, in my German example, the prediction would be that there should be no more than four inflection classes, because there are four exponents available for the most generously endowed cell, i.e. the Plural. Too strong a claim, as you can see. I did indeed have things to say about syncretism (a whole chapter on it in my 1987), but that was distinct from paradigm economy. As for Williams's IBP idea -- it would be nice if it were true, but there is too much counterevidence, I think: the syncretisms in a given wordclass in a given language don't always nest neatly like Russian dolls. There's a huge range of data on syncretism now available on line at the Surrey Syncretism Database run by the Surrey Morphology Group (Grev Corbett, Dunstan Brown and colleagues), and publications are emerging from there too. You asked: I guess what I really want to know is whether there's some paper of yours that details the evolution of the paradigm economy idea, from its former to its new instantiation, with the reasons for the changes? My Language 1994 article compares my newer idea (blur avoidance) with the original paradigm economy idea, and attempts to show that blur avoidance is better. It captures what's good about paradigm economy, it allows for counterexamples to strict PE such as German, and it is easy to see how a child could learn an inflection class system incorporating blur avoidance (whereas strict paradigm economy posed learnability problems). The last gasp of pure paradigm economy was in my chapter in Frans Plank (ed.) _Paradigms: The Economy of Inflection_ (Mouton, 1991). I proposed there baroque elaborations, involving 'primary' and 'secondary' reference forms and the like, to try to take care of prima facie counterevidence (as in German). That's all superseded. But I also develop there further my argument that affixal inflection behaves differently from nonaffixal, and it's only when two lexemes differ affixally that they count as being in different inflection classes from the point of view of blur avoidance (or paradigm economy). That, I think, is still correct. Thus I differ from Greg Stump, and perhaps agree with DM, in thinking that there is an important theoretical difference between affixation and nonconcatenative processes. It may indeed be that affixes are 'Vocabulary items', as per DM, whereas things such as umlaut and ablaut are not. You said: i'll have to look at your replies to bobajik and adger, bejar & harbor -- didn't know they were out there! that would be a great collection of stuff to have archived online somewhere together -- The Transactions of the Philological Society shouldn't be hard to get hold of in most places. If your library doesn't subscribe, it should! It must be the cheapest linguistic journal in the world -- only 10 UK pounds a year for two issues. I'd be happy to have the stuff archived, though, provided that is consistent with the copyright requirements of TPhS and Blackwell (the publisher). Best Andrew From thaian1 at HCM.VNN.VN Fri Mar 19 16:47:37 2004 From: thaian1 at HCM.VNN.VN (Thai An) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 23:47:37 +0700 Subject: English conversion Message-ID: Dear All, I'm doing a research on English word formation focusing on conversion. Any of you happen to know articles (on WWW) about it? Thanks. Thai An Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Fri Mar 19 17:14:39 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 10:14:39 -0700 Subject: possible rule environments (from John Frampton) In-Reply-To: <468DDDC0BAEBD648821F71AF87A0284B0F8078@cantwe2.giga.canterbury.ac.nz> Message-ID: Dear all, In an attempt to understand the phenomenal vs. epiphenomenal paradigm brouhaha, I took a look the Ackerman and Stump paper "Paradigms and periphrastic expression: ..." that was recommended to us by Dan Everett. There seems to be (in Mari, a Uralic language) the equivalent (at least for the purposes of my question) of the following: I am not going. We are not going. You are not going. You are not going. He is not wending. They are not going. Note the choice of /wend/ in the 3sg. The point is that allomorphic selection of the lower root form appears to depend on the phi-features at the higher node. Has allomophy (or readjustment) which depends on the syntactic environment rather than the local intra-word environment been discussed in the DM literature? Thanks, John Frampton -- Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions. (Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his opening statement to the tribunal) -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Fri Mar 19 23:35:54 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 16:35:54 -0700 Subject: English conversion Message-ID: Dear Thai An, Conversion, also known as zero-derivation, raises a couple of interesting issues relating to DM. First, zero-affixation. DM takes the position that some Vocabulary items are phonologically null (zero). There's some discussion of this issue in Halle & Marantz's 1993 paper in _The View from Building 20_, though with respect to inflection, rather than derivation. Second, the nature of derivation. DM postulates that there is no generative lexicon: word-formation is a syntactic (and post-syntactic) process. You may be interested in Marantz's 1997 paper "No escape from syntax", in which he argues that lexical roots don't have syntactic categories such as N, V, A; instead, nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. are created by merging with functional heads in the syntax. There's been a lot of work following up on this proposal (try Googling "category-neutral roots syntax") . Good luck with your research. -Martha >Dear All, > >I'm doing a research on English word formation focusing on >conversion. Any of you happen to know articles (on WWW) about it? > >Thanks. > >Thai An >Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From anevins at MIT.EDU Sat Mar 20 00:29:26 2004 From: anevins at MIT.EDU (Andrew Nevins) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 19:29:26 -0500 Subject: possible rule environments (from John Frampton) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >The point is that allomorphic selection of the lower root form >appears to depend on the phi-features at the higher node. Has >allomophy (or readjustment) which depends on the syntactic >environment rather than the local intra-word environment been >discussed in the DM literature? > Yes, by Julie Legate on Irish pronoun/agreement complementarity. AIN From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Sat Mar 20 23:10:31 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 18:10:31 -0500 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation Message-ID: Dear all, I read the Ackerman and Stump paper that was mentioned here in the course of the paradigm discussion. Their criticisms of "syntactic approaches" to morphology are rather wide of the mark because they have some incorrect ideas about what theories like Distribute Morphology are all about. Nevertheless, the verb forms from Mari (a Uralic language) which they discuss do seem to pose a problem for DM, at least superficially. Not the (purported) problem that they focus on, but a problem nevertheless. In what is called the first-past tense, for example, negated verbs are much like "didn't forms" in English, with an auxiliary verb bearing inflection and negation and the verb root standing apart. The problem is that there are two forms of the root, one of which is used in the 3pl and the other elsewhere. The problem is to account for the dependence of root allomorphy (or readjustment, or suffixation, or whatever) on agreement, which is attached to a different word. I had some thoughts on the matter which I wrote up and posted at http://www.math.neu.edu/ling/friends/mari.pdf . Since some others of you may also have taken a look at the Ackerman and Stump paper, I thought there might be some interest. - John Frampton From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Sun Mar 21 19:32:43 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 12:32:43 -0700 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation In-Reply-To: <20040320180459.114C.JFRAMPTO@lynx.dac.neu.edu> Message-ID: ... hi all! I haven't read any of the relevant stuff by stump&ackerman, or you, John, but I'm having trouble perceiving the issue raised by the allomorphy/suppletion cases you're describing below. You wrote: In what is called the first-past tense, for example, negated verbs are much like "didn't forms" in English, with an auxiliary verb bearing inflection and negation and the verb root standing apart. The problem is that there are two forms of the root, one of which is used in the 3pl and the other elsewhere. The problem is to account for the dependence of root allomorphy (or readjustment, or suffixation, or whatever) on agreement, which is attached to a different word. I don't see why, within DM, it should matter whether a conditioning feature for allomorphy/suppletion/readjustment, etc., is within the same phonological word or not. What should matter is that the feature be sufficiently syntactically local for the relevant insertion or readjustment rule to 'see'. Allomorphy/suppletion/readjustment of a verb stem in the context of a subject agreement feature, doesn't seem too strange to me, whether the verb stem is actually affixed to the tense/agr head or not, and even if a negation head intervenes structurally. What such facts DO bear on, I think, is the issue of how big the locality domain that a VI can be sensitive to is. Is it just string- or tree-adjacent features/material? Is it any features anywhere in its extended projection (or phase)? Is it any features upwards in the tree but not downwards? Is it features of heads but not features of phrases? etc. (See, e.g., JDB's 2000 Itelmen allomorphy paper for the Maryland Morphology Mayfest). This is clearly an empirical issue, whose answer should be determined by looking cross-linguistically at facts like these -- but I don't see anything about the architecture of DM that will preclude a treatment of these facts. Indeed, since DM is an explicitly post-syntactic theory of morphology, I would think that we'd have a better shot at it than pre-syntactic theories, which might have a problem getting featural info from one item to affect an item in a different phonological word before the syntax has introduced the first item's featural info into the structure. But perhaps I'm missing something? Is there some part of the problem I'm not percieving? yrs suppletively, hh From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Mon Mar 22 20:08:37 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 15:08:37 -0500 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation In-Reply-To: <1079897563.6d47ba3ee2c64@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: > ... hi all! I haven't read any of the relevant stuff by stump&ackerman, > or you, John, but I'm having trouble perceiving the issue raised by the > allomorphy/suppletion cases you're describing below. > > You wrote: > > In what is called the first-past tense, for example, negated > verbs are much like "didn't forms" in English, with an auxiliary > verb bearing inflection and negation and the verb root standing > apart. The problem is that there are two forms of the root, one > of which is used in the 3pl and the other elsewhere. The problem > is to account for the dependence of root allomorphy (or > readjustment, or suffixation, or whatever) on agreement, which is > attached to a different word. > > I don't see why, within DM, it should matter whether a conditioning > feature for allomorphy/suppletion/readjustment, etc., is within the > same phonological word or not. What should matter is that the feature > be sufficiently syntactically local for the relevant insertion or > readjustment rule to 'see'. Allomorphy/suppletion/readjustment of a > verb stem in the context of a subject agreement feature, doesn't seem > too strange to me, whether the verb stem is actually affixed to the > tense/agr head or not, and even if a negation head intervenes > structurally. > What such facts DO bear on, I think, is the issue of how big the > locality domain that a VI can be sensitive to is. Is it just string- or > tree-adjacent features/material? Is it any features anywhere in its > extended projection (or phase)? Is it any features upwards in the tree > but not downwards? Is it features of heads but not features of phrases? > etc. (See, e.g., JDB's 2000 Itelmen allomorphy paper for the Maryland > Morphology Mayfest). This is clearly an empirical issue, whose answer > should be determined by looking cross-linguistically at facts like > these -- but I don't see anything about the architecture of DM that > will preclude a treatment of these facts. Indeed, since DM is an > explicitly post-syntactic theory of morphology, I would think that we'd > have a better shot at it than pre-syntactic theories, which might have > a problem getting featural info from one item to affect an item in a > different phonological word before the syntax has introduced the first > item's featural info into the structure. > > But perhaps I'm missing something? Is there some part of the problem I'm > not percieving? No, you are not missing anything. I took it as a given that we would like vocabulary items to have highly local context conditions on their use--- restricted to the syntactic word in which the features they realize appear. - John Frampton From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Mar 22 20:39:42 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 13:39:42 -0700 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation In-Reply-To: <20040322150053.65FB.JFRAMPTO@lynx.dac.neu.edu> Message-ID: hi john! No, you are not missing anything. I took it as a given that we would like vocabulary items to have highly local context conditions on their use--- restricted to the syntactic word in which the features they realize appear. Ah, I see. Obviously the more restricted the locality domain, the better -- but I don't think there's any deep assumption about the DM framework at stake. Maybe it'll turn out to be small, maybe big... One question: by 'restricted to the syntactic word' are you meaning something like 'restricted to sister X° terminal nodes (mother a single X°)' (like those created in the usualish idea of how head-movement works, and maybe also by Merger Under Adjacency)? Or is there another idea of 'syntactic word' that you're referring to? best, hh From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Mon Mar 22 20:43:18 2004 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 15:43:18 -0500 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation In-Reply-To: <20040322150053.65FB.JFRAMPTO@lynx.dac.neu.edu> Message-ID: At 15:08 -0500 3/22/04, John Frampton wrote: > >No, you are not missing anything. I took it as a given that we would >like vocabulary items to have highly local context conditions on their >use--- restricted to the syntactic word in which the features they >realize appear. > >- John Frampton My recollection of what I've read (read as an invitation for clarification or correction): Suppletive alternations in verb stems for characterstics of their arguments are attested in a number of languages, even in languages with no morphological agreement (paradigmatic or affixal) for the GF in question. In some cases, this is classificatory (a limited set of shapes: to give a round object ‚ to give a straight object), but in other cases suppletion is reported to be for person (and, impressionistically, more often) number of an argument. For example, Gilligan 1987 (USC diss) presents Waskia, which has subj-verb agreement only, except for 'give' which has suppletive forms for psn/# of the indirect object. (I'm writing from home and relying on the second hand report in Murasugi 1994). This looks like John's characterization of the Mari cases, and suggests that suppletion is not (morphological)-word-constrained. [What's a syntactic word?] A view I thought I had gleaned from the literature is that such suppletive agreement-like alternations (as opposed to simpe stem-selection alternations with related stems) are typically restricted to internal arguments. I thought I had seen this stated explicitly in Dixon's 1994 book on ergativity (as a restriction to S/O), but couldn't find this when I looked again quickly. This would square with Marantz's view of locality as the syntactic domain of an Agent being the domain of "special sound or special meaning". The Mari facts appear, as presented, to challenge even that locality condition, though, if they occur relative to surface subjects rather than agents. -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Mon Mar 22 21:28:10 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 16:28:10 -0500 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation In-Reply-To: <1079987982.cd62ad8167252@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: Martha wrote: > Ah, I see. Obviously the more restricted the locality domain, the better > -- but I don't think there's any deep assumption about the DM framework > at stake. Maybe it'll turn out to be small, maybe big... If you get far enough away, it is a not a deep assumption. Up close, it seems to be of more significance. The facts seem to be that sensitivity to nonlocal syntactic context seems to be at most fairly rare. So my instinct is to say that it is impossible, and to explain the instances that appear to be nonlocal as nontransparent locality. Otherwise DM would face the problem of explaining why something that is permitted, but very rarely occurs. > One question: > by 'restricted to the syntactic word' are you meaning something like > 'restricted to sister X° terminal nodes (mother a single X°)' (like > those created in the usualish idea of how head-movement works, and > maybe also by Merger Under Adjacency)? That's it. Although personally I am suspicious of "merger under adjacency" being syntactic. But maybe. - John -- Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions. (Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his opening statement to the tribunal) From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Tue Mar 23 16:10:18 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 11:10:18 -0500 Subject: "give" and person suppletion Message-ID: My recent postings have generated some discussion of the locality of context sensitivity in lexical insertion. Bernhard Comrie wrote an interesting summary to Ling-List which bears on the question.. Date: Sun, 21 May 2000 13:02:24 +0100 From: Bernard Comrie Subject: 'give' and person suppletion http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/11/11-1166.html From kacha088 at UOTTAWA.CA Wed Mar 24 17:06:50 2004 From: kacha088 at UOTTAWA.CA (Karim Achab) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 12:06:50 -0500 Subject: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DM Message-ID: Hi everyone, Let me introduce myself quickly: currently writing a Ph.D. dissertation at University of Ottawa, under Prf. Rivero's supervision, on Event Structure and Aspect: a study of Berber verbs. I have a question regarding the association of semantic content with linguistic objects in DM. It was proposed that semantic interpretation intervenes later than vocabulary insertion. According to Harley and Noyer (2000, Formal vs. Encyclopedic Properties) "a phonological annotated syntactic representation is then interpreted in consultation with the encyclopedia, along with universal semantic mechanisms" (p. 4 in the ms I have). If the terminal nodes are not specified semantically how then can the right phonological features be targeted? In other words, at which point in the derivation is the feature [+ voiced] of the phoneme /g/ specified so that the word gap be inserted instead of the word cap in a sentence for or even cat instead of a dog ? Your help will be appreciated Karim Achab -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Wed Mar 24 19:49:13 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 12:49:13 -0700 Subject: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DM In-Reply-To: <000d01c411c2$66c74700$81accb18@pctuts5r66vlsh> Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kacha088 at UOTTAWA.CA Wed Mar 24 21:29:30 2004 From: kacha088 at UOTTAWA.CA (Karim Achab) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 16:29:30 -0500 Subject: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DM Message-ID: Re: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DMHello Martha, Thank you very much for your response. That obviously helps me in that it corrects my understanding of the statement that in DM there is no lexicon. So it is admitted that there is at least a lexicon / mental dictionary composed of lexical roots (?) Regards, Karim ----- Original Message ----- From: Martha McGinnis To: DM-LIST at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 2:49 PM Subject: Re: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DM Dear Karim, If the terminal nodes are not specified semantically how then can the right phonological features be targeted? In other words, at which point in the derivation is the feature [+ voiced] of the phoneme /g/ specified so that the word gap be inserted instead of the word cap in a sentence for or even cat instead of a dog ? In DM, any lexical root (cat, cap, dog, gap) can be inserted into any syntactic position provided for lexical roots. So the syntax could generate, for example, a structure with (among other things): - a subject DP containing a definite determiner and a root - a tense node specified for past tense - a verb phrase containing a verbal head, a root, and an object DP... - ...which in turn contains a definite determiner and a root. The morphophonology could then produce 'The dog chased the cat,' 'The cap built the gap', or whatever sense or nonsense you like, as long as it has the form 'The X verbed the Y'. This output is then interpreted semantically by consulting the Encyclopedia, which tells us what cats and gaps and caps and dogs are. Does that help? Best, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Wed Mar 24 21:50:49 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 14:50:49 -0700 Subject: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DM In-Reply-To: <000d01c411c2$66c74700$81accb18@pctuts5r66vlsh> Message-ID: Dear Karim, You're right, there's no *single* lexicon in DM. (There's also no generative lexicon -- all combinatorial operations are syntactic in nature.) But actually, DM assumes that linguistic information is stored in *three* places: 1. the pre-syntactic Lexicon, which contains bundles of syntactic/semantic features and (content-free) lexical roots that are selected and manipulated by the syntax. 2. the post-syntactic Vocabulary, which contains (root and non-root) items that associate phonological strings ("the", "dog", etc) with syntactic features and/or categories. 3. the post-Vocabulary Encyclopedia, which associates chunks of syntax and phonology with "encyclopedic" meaning. The Encyclopedia lists special meanings not only for lexical roots, but also meanings for phrasal idioms (which in DM include complex words). Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Fri Mar 26 22:17:58 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 15:17:58 -0700 Subject: morphosyntactic feature geometries In-Reply-To: Message-ID: My my, how time does fly. I'm FINALLY responding to Susana Bejar's posting of Feb. 29. >if an agr-head has a [group] probe then the search for a goal can >only be halted by an element in its domain that is itself specified >for some feature that entails [group]. In a language with a >plural/dual contrast, this means that both plural and dual NPs in >the domain of the probe will Match and halt it. This is very interesting. Can you send me your thesis? Or can I download it from your website? >(Note that I'm assuming a particular view of the relation >between [group] and [minimal], namely that [minimal] is a dependent of >[group], i.e. [minimal] entails [group]. This is a controversial >assumption, but see the Cowper paper mentioned by Heidi for good arguments >in support of this). This is also very interesting. I've come to a very similar (though not identical) conclusion about Person features -- Addressee entails Speaker, though perhaps in a different way. OK, I REALLY have to read that Cowper paper! >In principle, I don't think having negative features precludes having >geometric relations between features. So if we did have negative values >in syntax, we could still have a (non-privative) feature geometry. The >negative values would simply be another way of node labelling: > >(4) +Individ > / \ > +group (-group) > / \ > +min (-min) Not in principle, but perhaps in practice. For Person features, it seems that both [+Speaker] and [-Speaker] would need to be specified as [+/- Addressee]. This suggests an unstructured feature bundle. >This does, however, preclude logical underspecification, so the question >is whether or not this is a desirable outcome. What do you mean by "logical"? It would in principle be possible to have three options: [+X], [-X], and [unspecified for X] -- Halle & Marantz argue this is the case for the [obviative] feature in Potawatomi. >we wouldn't expect the existence of languages where >plural and dual NPs can match a probe, but singular NPs cannot, since the >singular NPs would be specified as [-group] and therefore should >technically be able to match a probe for [group]. It could look for the feature [+group]. Of course, this would predict that a head could also look for [-group]. Does this not happen? >In her last posting, Martha considers this question with respect to the >example of a conjoined subject like "Rolf and Martha". If I understand >correctly, I think Martha's suggestion is that If a verb in this context >needs to be marked as dual, not plural, then we need to assume negative >features in th syntax. > >plural morphology <-> [+group, -minimal] >dual morphology <-> [+group, +minimal] > >The implication, I think, is that without the possibility of a [-minimal] >specification, nothing will prevent the incorrect use of a plural marker >rather than a dual marker. I'm not sure I understand why this is a >necessary conclusion. Couldn't we just assume that vocabulary competition >ensures the correct outcome? Yes, indeed we could. That wasn't quite my concern. I was wondering whether a subject that's semantically dual ("Rolf and Martha") can be associated with a plural number representation in the *syntax* (not just with the plural morphology). If it can't, why not? The answer to this is straightforward if the plural representation is [+group, -minimal]. It's not as straightforward if the plural is just [group]. Duals are groups -- in fact, in English, sets of two are plural. So what would block using plural number for a group of two in a language that has a dual? Rolf suggested that this could be handled by Gricean implicature: the dual is more specific, so is used if duality is intended; if the plural is used, we infer that the subject is not dual, or perhaps that its duality is irrelevant. Alana's remark that duals *can* be syntactically plural supports this view: it's not an all-or-nothing matter. I'm not sure how this carries over to person, though. In a language with an inclusive first person, can people ever use the exclusive plural to refer to inclusive-we? If you can use the plural to refer to a group of two, this should be possible too... but I suspect it isn't. If not, why not? Is exclusive plural syntactically [-addressee]? Best, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From cschutze at UCLA.EDU Mon Mar 1 03:04:53 2004 From: cschutze at UCLA.EDU (Carson Schutze) Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 19:04:53 -0800 Subject: New thread: seeking work on German(ic) nominal inflection In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Now that the list has wakened from hibernation . . . We have a student who wants to work on inflection within the German DP (relevantly related systems would also be of interest), in particular the strong/weak/mixed interactions of marking number/gender/case on determiners vs. adjectives etc. Aside from work by Schlenker and Kester, is there insightful, especially recent, stuff she should be looking at? Thanks, Carson From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Mon Mar 1 06:26:51 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 06:26:51 +0000 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <1078087406.a26893a6bf940@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: Heidi, You wrote: > In fact, the phrase/word 'competition' that these kind of periphrastic > paradigmatic effects show is in fact one of the strongest arguments, in > my mind, in favor of a postsyntactic morphology, and against the > independent existence of 'paradigms' (independent of the set of > terminal nodes made available by the syntax, that is). The phrase/word > distinction has no pretheoretical status in such a theory, and so we > expect to see such effects everywhere, as in fact we do. Indeed, the > Impoverishment story can certainly predict syncretic effects that hold > simultaneously across word-sized and phrase-sized realizations of given > feature sets/terminal nodes. > > But this kind of effect doesn't have any bearing on whether > Impoverishment is the right way to capture *all* metasyncretism > effects, I don't think... ? > > Did someone at the paradigms workshop before the LSA talk about this > kind of metasyncretism problem? > > :) hh > > First, one problem still with the Impoverishment idea, however this could be my lack of understanding of the notion, is that in the phrasal paradigm cells there is usually semantic drift, in the direction of changing the meaning of the phrasal cells so that their meaning is (i) not merely compositional and (ii) matching the expected meaning of that cell of the paradigm, as though the paradigm itself were imposing meaning. How does DM handle paradigm-influenced meaning, without paradigms? On the workshop, which I had a chance to present at but was unable to do so because of my cheap airline tickets not allowing me to change dates, I *think* that the overall thrust was largely on the phonology-morphology facts. The Word conference in Leipzig next month, judging by the abstracts and titles, will deal with some of these issues too. All the best. -- Dan ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 15:56:58 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 08:56:58 -0700 Subject: morphosyntactic feature geometries In-Reply-To: <8BC8529D-6A45-11D8-A168-000A959B3EAC@chass.utoronto.ca> Message-ID: Hi Alana, >This is that in at least one dialect of Inuktitut which is known >to have a dual, I have a story from a monolingual speaker where the >topic of the story is a couple (isolated), and they are consistently >referred to by the plural. This IS intriguing! It certainly does suggest that the plural can be used for sets of two. Any idea why the speaker used the plural rather than the dual? Makes me wonder if the dual is really used to contrast with the plural -- then once it's been established that they're an isolated couple, there'd be no need for the dual. Anyway, it suggests that the plural isn't [-Minimal]... unless the interpretation of "Minimal" is highly context-dependent. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 16:30:14 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 09:30:14 -0700 Subject: morphosyntactic feature geometries In-Reply-To: <1078024959.a6bd4f0d9f865@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: Thanks, Heidi! This helps a lot. >But I *also* thought that they were competing to realize a fully-specified >geometry under a node provided by the syntax... >As for negative feature values, in 1994 I was dead agin' 'em; was >thinking about the geometry in Avery & Rice terms. I *think* that betsy >and I were also thinking that default interpretations arose at >semantics, but that negative values in the syntax weren't possible. OK, I've given this some more thought, and I think there may indeed be a way to get disjunctive interpretations without negative feature values. Suppose that all languages have a [Speaker, Addressee] category syntactically, though only some have an [Addressee] feature morphologically. If so, we can safely make the simplifying assumption that the [Speaker] (only) syntactic category *always* means "first person exclusive" (i.e. the meaning of the syntactic node is rigid, not determined relative to other syntactic nodes). If there's no specific [Speaker, Addressee] vocab item, a [Speaker] item -- e.g. English "we" -- can be inserted EITHER into a [Speaker] node, OR into a [Speaker, Addressee] node. Does that make sense? >Finally, as for the specific problem of the semantic entailments of >number, I highly recommend a short paper of Elizabeth Cowper's (think >it's available on her website) about plural and dual. Thanks very much for the reference! I'd been meaning to read that paper... >W/r to the subgraph/subtree contrast mentioned by Rolf, if Arabic 't-' >does realize just 2, it could do so by being specified for the H&R >subtree headed by Hearer (since Arabic has the incl/excl distinction, >Hearer is active there). Hearer doesn't dominate number, so there's no >entailment relationship between 2 and number. Just to clarify: a subtree is a constituent, and a subgraph is...? A component of the tree connected by branches? So for H&R, [Participant, Addressee] would be a subtree, [Participant, Addressee, Individuation, Group] would be a subgraph, and [Participant, Addressee, Class, Animate] would be neither? Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 17:06:09 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 10:06:09 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms Message-ID: Hi Heidi, >While it's true that Impoverishment *can* do the job of creating >metasyncretism in the right way, it's actually not really too great to >have to do *all* syncretism that way. I think it's reasonable to assume that both exist. It seems to me that the learner would need different types of evidence to postulate Impoverishment than to postulate syncretism based on underspecified Vocab items. For Impoverishment, they'd need cross-"paradigmatic" evidence -- evidence that goes beyond one set of competing Vocab items. It's sometimes possible to show that a feature that isn't morphologically realized in one position hasn't been Impoverished, because it triggers agreement in another position. On the other hand, metasyncretism effects sound like a good case for Impoverishment. The prediction would be that contrasts neutralized metasyncretically would NOT trigger agreement elsewhere... can't recall if JDB discusses that in his paper or not. If a systematic contrast is totally absent from a language, then the learner can postulate a corresponding impoverishment (underspecification) of the morphosyntactic feature geometry -- or perhaps even an elimination of the feature from the Lexicon, though I'm still struggling with what this would mean at the semantic interface. Actually, I've probably said this backwards. Presumably kids need positive evidence to *activate* morphosyntactic features, not negative evidence to *neutralize* them. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Mon Mar 1 17:13:09 2004 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 12:13:09 -0500 Subject: Dual v. Plural, Syncretism references In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi all. My recollection is that Alana's description is consistent with what I have seen elsewhere: a variety of assertions about languages with dual as a morphological category, its use is not always obligatory and that to greater or lesser degrees the plural can be used to refer to a group of two. The reference I would check first is Greville Corbett's book Number from CUP, which has an extremely thorough description of what kinds of number systems are attested. I had planned to check this before posting, but my copy is lent out. The Surrey Morphology Group has produced quite a lot of accessible research bearing on a number of the recent postings. Check out: http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/ Their work on Syncretism is important for previous discussions, and there is a user-friendly searchable database of Syncretism on-line at the above website. The following paper in particular makes the case that some of the "diagonal" syncretisms (say, neuter plural nominative = masculine singular genitive) we try to explain in Indo-European occur only in Indo-European, a result that questions just how much syncretism should fall out of the system rather than being listed as homophony / language particular historical accidents. Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown & Grenville Corbett. 2001. 'Case syncretism in and out of Indo-European', in Parasession of Chicago Linguistics Society. -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 17:28:28 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 10:28:28 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <6D3546F0-6B49-11D8-BEA9-000393CE35FE@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Hi Dan, >in the phrasal >paradigm cells there is usually semantic drift, in the direction of >changing the meaning of the phrasal cells so that their meaning is (i) >not merely compositional and (ii) matching the expected meaning of that >cell of the paradigm, as though the paradigm itself were imposing >meaning. How does DM handle paradigm-influenced meaning, without >paradigms? The phrasal/nonphrasal competitions I've come across in the DM literature don't make reference to semantic drift. Some examples include 'more' vs. '-er' comparatives and 'make+V' vs. affix-derived causative Vs. A new case of Vocab competition could in principle arise as a result of semantic drift. I don't think there's anything in DM that predicts any kind of causal relation there, but I don't think anyone's tried to come up with such a theory -- perhaps you can. But there are also blocking effects that don't involve Vocab competition. Rolf Noyer has talked about different kinds of blocking effects within the DM framework. I'm not sure if this is written up -- I have it on a handout from a talk he gave some years ago at MIT. Worth pursuing if you want to explore this idea in a DM framework. -Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 17:41:08 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 10:41:08 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >cross-"paradigmatic" evidence -- evidence that goes beyond one set >of competing Vocab items Apologies... rereading this, I'm not sure it means anything within DM, where there are no paradigms or possibly even "sets" per se. What evidence the learner would need to postulate Impoverishment is not obvious (to me, anyway). In practice, *linguists* usually postulate Impoverishment only if the syncretism (or metasyncretism) in question can't be captured either by underspecified Vocab items or by underspecified morphosyntactic feature geometries. Maybe that's sensible for learners too -- Impoverish only when necessary. Not sure exactly how this would work in practice. Over to you, Heidi... -Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Mon Mar 1 18:02:53 2004 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 13:02:53 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Martha's remakrs re: acquisition, see Noyer's diss/book, extending ideas of Andrea Calabrase's - learning as the suppression of feature-cooccurrence restrictions (filters) = positive evidence for the acquisition of (contrastive) features. A clarification: Meta-syncretisms (as I used the term) do not mean that a contrast is systematically absent from the language. I (and I think Williams, implicitly) use the idea only for cases of syncretism in which the relevant contrasts are indeendently attested in the language. For example, Russian Class I nouns (and adjectives and pronouns) ["masculine" and "neuter", except those that decline as Class II -a] never show a distinct accusative form; it is always syncretic with nominative (inanimate) or genitive (animate). But the contrast certainly exists in the language: can't understand the syntax without the acc-nom contrast, and elsewhere in the morphology (class II singular nouns). The vocab-insertion based impoverishment appears to be missing a generalization (though the set of inflections is finite, hence this is a tricky notion). Thus, I'm not sure I understand Martha's prediction. If impoverishment applies before "agreement", the prediction arises, but if impoverishment arises after "agreement" then the prediction does not arise. Imagine a language like Russian, but where the meta-syncretism does not extend to adjectives: ACC=NOM/GEN for some class of nouns, but the distinction is still marked on the agreeing adjectives (this arises, in principle, in Russian for nouns that decline as "masculines" but may take a feminine adjective when refering to a woman: e.g., % xoros-aja vrac 'good-fem doctor', corresponding ACC should be: xoros-uju vrac-a: the adjective is non-syncretic accusative - because it's feminine - but the noun, being masculine animate, is syncretic with the genitive). Is there any reason to think that impoverishment (or one's favourite corresponding device) necessarily applies before agreement (or even that it can)? -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 18:24:38 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 11:24:38 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms Message-ID: Hi Jonathan, >Is there any reason to think that impoverishment (or one's favourite >corresponding device) necessarily applies before agreement (or even >that it can)? Oh good, I thought this would get a rise out of you! In the original Halle & Marantz story, Agr is inserted post-syntactically. If so, Impoverishment *could* occur before agreement (in the sense of detailed feature-copying, not in the sense of abstract syntactic agreement). If Impoverishment *must* occur before feature-copying (or *must* affect copied features as well as the originals), then the theory is stronger -- more potential evidence for Impoverishment. I don't know if there's evidence against the stronger theory. Do you? Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Mon Mar 1 18:31:06 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 18:31:06 +0000 Subject: Dual v. Plural, Syncretism references In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Grev's group is indeed doing some very valuable work. One of the distinctions that emerge from studies of agreement, not necessarily from the Surrey Group, though, is that pragmatic agreement and syntactic agreement are not the same. So, for example, "The sheriff has gone wild. She just shot the deputy." The gender on "she" is pragmatically determined. Similar things happen with number, e.g. "If anyone wants a job, they should apply", where 'they' is pragmatically singular and morphosyntactically plural (it is also a loan word, so perhaps that is related to its weird usages). In any case, such examples and the contrast in agreement types mean that the use of plural to refer to dual in texts is not necessarily relevant to formal feature matching. One has to first sort out the agreement types in a given language, their uses, discourse structure, and, even, the culture of reference. -- Dan On Monday, Mar 1, 2004, at 17:13 Europe/London, Jonathan David Bobaljik wrote: > > Hi all. > > My recollection is that Alana's description is consistent with what I > have seen elsewhere: a variety of assertions about languages with dual > as a morphological category, its use is not always obligatory and that > to greater or lesser degrees the plural can be used to refer to a > group of two. The reference I would check first is Greville Corbett's > book Number from CUP, which has an extremely thorough description of > what kinds of number systems are attested. I had planned to check this > before posting, but my copy is lent out. > > The Surrey Morphology Group has produced quite a lot of accessible > research bearing on a number of the recent postings. Check out: > http://www.surrey.ac.uk/LIS/SMG/? Their work on Syncretism is > important for previous discussions, and there is a user-friendly > searchable database of Syncretism on-line at the above website. The > following paper in particular makes the case that some of the > "diagonal" syncretisms (say, neuter plural nominative = masculine > singular genitive) we try to explain in Indo-European occur only in > Indo-European, a result that questions just how much syncretism should > fall out of the system rather than being listed as homophony / > language particular historical accidents. > > Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown & Grenville Corbett. 2001. 'Case > syncretism in and out of Indo-European', in Parasession of Chicago > Linguistics Society. > > -Jonathan ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 2920 bytes Desc: not available URL: From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Mon Mar 1 20:01:20 2004 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 15:01:20 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > >Oh good, I thought this would get a rise out of you! In the original >Halle & Marantz story, Agr is inserted post-syntactically. If so, >Impoverishment *could* occur before agreement (in the sense of >detailed feature-copying, not in the sense of abstract syntactic >agreement). If Impoverishment *must* occur before feature-copying >(or *must* affect copied features as well as the originals), then the >theory is stronger -- more potential evidence for Impoverishment. I >don't know if there's evidence against the stronger theory. Do you? > >Cheers, >Martha One of the standard arguments for unification-based approaches to underspecification in theoretical treatments of agreement (see Chapter 2 of Pollard & Sag, later: Kathol; Wechsler & Zlatic's book, etc) is that systematically non-expressed features enter into agreement relations. As Steve Wechsler puts it in a recent paper on this: "agreement systems can evince distinctions that are not reflected in the morphological paradigms themselves." The example Pollard & Sag start with is 1,2 person pronouns, which are unspecified for gender in many I-E languages, but trigger gender agreement: I could say: Je suis intelligent. Martha could say: Je suis intelligente. There appears to be a markedness generalization, say a filter of the Noyer kind: *[person, gender] = gender distinctions restricted to the third person. This filter constrains possible vocabulary items in these languages, both pronouns and agreement morphemes (no word class marks both person and gender). But--on the assumption that agreement is copying/matching--the controller must be fully specified for features. The subject must be [1 sg f] when Martha is speaking, this is matched on the targets, even though no single vocabulary item can spell out all of the features. This is, perhaps, evidence that agreement is not sensitive to the effects of Noyer-filters. If Noyer filters are instantiated via impoverishment (gender --> ? / person; certainly not the only way to do this), then impoverishment happens after agreement. I suspect this is general. One standard type of argument for underspecification is that features are not morphologically signalled on (some class of) controllers, but enter into agreement nevertheless. (What I have suggested above is of course not the only way of looking at this data. Pollard & Sag are ambivalent about these examples, using them to motivate unification rather than copying/matching on the one hand (which has the same effect as agreement before impoverishment; hence the same examples are used by Stump to argue for realization = underspecified vocabulary items partially spelling out a fully-specified syntax), but as a hybrid system of grammatical and pragmatic agreement later in the chapter.) Is this more or less what you were looking for? -Jonathan > >mcginnis at ucalgary.ca -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Mon Mar 1 20:51:15 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 13:51:15 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >One standard type of argument for underspecification is that >features are not morphologically signalled on (some class of) >controllers, but enter into agreement nevertheless. Agreed. But this general point doesn't necessarily bear on impoverishment, if, with Heidi (and Halle & Marantz), we assume that syncretism also arises through underspecification of Vocab items. Vocab underspecification would definitely NOT affect what features are available for agreement. >There appears to be a markedness generalization, say a filter of the >Noyer kind: *[person, gender] = gender distinctions restricted to >the third person. This filter constrains possible vocabulary items >in these languages, both pronouns and agreement morphemes (no word >class marks both person and gender). But--on the assumption that >agreement is copying/matching--the controller must be fully >specified for features. The subject must be [1 sg f] when Martha is >speaking, this is matched on the targets, even though no single >vocabulary item can spell out all of the features. OK... I see the point. The absence of gender marking in 1/2 person is a "metasyncretism" in that it arises in sg/pl pronouns and in finite verb agreement, as well as cross-linguistically. So it's probably not the result of underspecified Vocab items being inserted into specified syntactic nodes -- it's probably the result of Impoverishment. On the other hand, 1/2 pronouns trigger gender agreement on adjectives and participles. So it seems features *can* be Impoverished after triggering agreement (unless the agreement arises from some other source, as you noted). >Is this more or less what you were looking for? Yes, I think it is. Well, never a dull moment! Thanks. So now we return to Heidi's question: is there any reason to maintain BOTH Vocab underspecification (i.e. Vocab items having a subset of the features of the nodes they're inserted into) AND Impoverishment? The possibility of triggering agreement might have been a way to distinguish them, but if it isn't, then how can they be distinguished? There is a distinction in principle: if impoverishment is an operation (or a filter), it has to apply in specific environments, while underspecified vocabulary items tend to appear in heterogeneous environments ("elsewhere" environments). This might rule out an impoverishment analysis in some cases (I need to think about this more before I attempt any examples). If Vocab underspecification is possible in principle, minimalist aesthetics might tempt us to prefer it where possible -- because it involves minimizing the features of a Vocab item, rather than adding a potentially highly specific Impoverishment rule. What do you think? -Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Mon Mar 1 20:47:44 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 15:47:44 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: My (relatively uninformed) view has been that morphological features differ in some respects from syntactic features and that there is a nontrivial (but not particularly complicated) mapping from syntactic structure to morpheme (morpheme = bundle of morphological features) structure. Structural case, for example, gets assigned by that mapping (to my way of thinking). It has also seemed to me that impoverishment is naturally viewed as an aspect of the syntactic structure -> morpheme structure mapping. Under this view, impoverishment happens before the lexicon comes into play in filling in the nodes of the morpheme structure. Are there any knock-down arguments against this view? - John Frampton -- Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions. (Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his opening statement to the tribunal) From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Mar 1 22:14:37 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 15:14:37 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi all! Jonathan writes -- Meta-syncretisms (as I used the term) do not mean that a contrast is systematically absent from the language. I (and I think Williams, implicitly) use the idea only for cases of syncretism in which the relevant contrasts are indeendently attested in the language. This is the way I was understanding it, too. The following paper in particular makes the case that some of the "diagonal" syncretisms (say, neuter plural nominative = masculine singular genitive) we try to explain in Indo-European occur only in Indo-European, a result that questions just how much syncretism should fall out of the system rather than being listed as homophony / language particular historical accidents. But are the kind of meta-syncretism facts that you & Williams discuss facts only about indo-european lgs like latin & russian, or does the meta-syncretism effect show up in other lgs too? I expect those surrey people know; I'll have to take a look. I think the point is particularly well-made by the impoverishment analysis of the various English verbal inflection paradigms that you present early in the Syncretism w/o Paradigms paper. It's of course very easy to do each of those syncretic patterns entirely with undespecified vocab items, as you note. And, as Martha says, on grounds of minimalist aesthetics, that might be the nicer way to go if possible. But in order to capture the *meta*syncretism effect across those paradigms (e.g. the 'to be' paradigm and the regular paradigm, which involve different vocab items), noted by Williams, you had to go to the Impoverishment story even for those English facts ? vocab underspecification just doesn't cut it. *Within a single paradigm*, that is, vocab underspecification is a fine way to go. But when the same syncretisms show up again in another paradigm of the lg that is spelled out with different vocab items, it'd be a remarkable coincidence if it just so happened that the undespecification of the vocab items conditioned by features relevant to paradigm A created the same syncretic effects as the underspecification of the vocab items that are conditioned by features relevant to paradigm B. The point, which I think you prove admirably well, is that the only way to get that effect is with Impoverishment of terminal nodes (post-syntax, pre vocab insertion, as John Frampton notes). So the question really is, how robust are metasyncretic effects? If they're just accidents of a single language family, great. But if they're a very widespread phenom, such that we are moved to propose Impoverishment analyses in a wide range of cases of syncretism, not so great (though if that's what you gotta do, that's what you gotta do, of course -- I still would think a postsyntactic morphology would be the way to go for independent reasons). from a learnability perspective, I imagine there'd have to be a simultaneous process of building up the feature structure relevant to a language from the contrasts visible in the morphology (e.g. a 3-way person, 2-way number, 3-way gender split in English based on the pronominal system), and also positing Impoverishment rules to account for syncretisms they hear in other places where they would *expect* to get distinct forms. So, e.g., the english acquirer knows that there's 18 different possible feature combinations available, based on the feature they've had to posit to distinguish the pronouns from one another. Plus the english acquirer knows there's verbal agreement with those features (based on, say, the different forms of 'to have'). Each time the learner hears a verb form that's identical with a form they have remembered hearing with a featurally distinct subject, they say, aha! that's a place where I have to invent an Impoverishment rule. Then, the syncretisms they observe in, e.g. the 'to have' paradigm will be predictive of syncretisms they expect to hear in other paradigms (though if they're not, as in the 'to be' paradigm, that's no problem either, they just go back and annotate their initial Impoverishment rule with 'not for "to be"', or 'only for verbs of class X'). The overall effect will be a tendency to metasyncretism, without requiring a Basic Paradigm in Williams' sense. But of course, there's no place in that kind of system for underspecification of vocab items to play a role; it would all be taken care of by Impoverishment. hmm! yrs thoughtfully, hh From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Mar 2 00:02:18 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 17:02:18 -0700 Subject: morphosyntactic feature geometries In-Reply-To: Message-ID: hey martha! OK, I've given this some more thought, and I think there may indeed be a way to get disjunctive interpretations without negative feature values. Suppose that all languages have a [Speaker, Addressee] category syntactically, though only some have an [Addressee] feature morphologically. If so, we can safely make the simplifying assumption that the [Speaker] (only) syntactic category *always* means "first person exclusive" (i.e. the meaning of the syntactic node is rigid, not determined relative to other syntactic nodes). If there's no specific [Speaker, Addressee] vocab item, a [Speaker] item -- e.g. English "we" -- can be inserted EITHER into a [Speaker] node, OR into a [Speaker, Addressee] node. Does that make sense? Well, it certainly could work, but it does carry the somewhat curious consequence that a language's syntax has a full geometry of features even when there is no morphological evidence present in the language showing that they're there. Betsy and I were thinking more of an incremental acquisition approach, where the tree was elaborated as the morphological contrasts were observed, on the basis of positive evidence. Consequently no English speaker would ever get beyond just having the [Speaker] feature -- they'd never (syntactically) activate the [Addressee] feature. So any meaning compatible with a [+Speaker] interpretation would have to be represented with the same [Adressee]-free geometry in English, whether the intended interp was inclusive or exclusive, which I guess would result in semantic underspecification. I now forget what your original point about the problem with that was... sorry! But you're right that if the whole tree is used in the syntax of all languages, given by UG, then this would give you the full semantic specification while still allowing for morphololgical underspec. >W/r to the subgraph/subtree contrast mentioned by Rolf, if Arabic 't-' >does realize just 2, it could do so by being specified for the H&R >subtree headed by Hearer (since Arabic has the incl/excl distinction, >Hearer is active there). Hearer doesn't dominate number, so there's no >entailment relationship between 2 and number. ... So for H&R, [Participant, Addressee] would be a subtree, [Participant, Addressee, Individuation, Group] would be a subgraph, and [Participant, Addressee, Class, Animate] would be neither? Actually, I think Rolf was thinking that any subtree with Participant in it would necessarily need to have Individuation in it too, so you couldn't have 't-' realizing 2 without also realizing number, so he was distinguishing between subtree (which i think on Rolf's terminology would have to include a root) and a subgraph (which is closer to the syntactic notion of subtree, I think). (Rolf, is that sort of like what you were getting at?) Anyway, I think I was trying to suggest that if you fission off the 'subgraph' headed by Individuation, then you could realize '2' as a subtree including root without predicting that number should still be there as well. the [participant, addressee, class, animate] collection of features could not exist without an [individuation] node, though, so absolutely that would be an impossible collection as either a subtree or subgraph. :) hh Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Mar 2 03:50:46 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 20:50:46 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: hey jdb et al -- (below are some remarks of jonathan's that were meant to go to the list, so don't be surprised if you haven't seen them before) -- You wrote: Hi Heidi: >But are the kind of meta-syncretism facts that you & Williams discuss >facts only about indo-european lgs like latin & russian, or does the >meta-syncretism effect show up in other lgs too? Meta-syncretisms as an effect are not constrained to I-E. But some of the hairier patterns that motivate extremely intricate analyses, and feature decompositions, are, apparently. The $64K question is where to draw the lines between accidental and deep patterns. Sorry, I didn't mean to give the idea that I (or the BBC paper) was suggesting relegating syncretism all to (synchronically) accidental homohpony. no, no, I knew you weren't suggesting that; I just was interested in whether the bigger phenomenon could possibly also be a historical kind of fact. Does anyone know of acquisition studies of any kind about syncretism and features? My (very limited) understanding is that children overgeneralize regular to irregular, but that it is claimed that they do not overgeneralize agreement morphemes in the manner that underspecification would suggest. For example, they supposedly do not overgeneralize 3sg forms to other parts of the paradigm (I guess the tests exclude speech varieties where "I's the b[o]y what catches the fish..." is acceptable), ditto for case. My naive impression is that most of this is based on production data, though, and a limited range of languages, where for some (English, French) zero morphology might confuse the issue. Comments? i don't know the literature on this, though it would surely be interesting and surely there must be data on this from e.g. the German or Dutch CHILDES kids? speaking of i'se the b'y dialects (like Nfld. Engl., spoken where I'se from), it has always seemed to me that the spreading of -s throughout the paradigm is symptomatic of the unmarkedness of 3sg in English... but of course it really doesn't look in standard English like 3sg is unmarked. However, without negative values, the feature geometric approach of mine and betsy's really *can't* have a marked 3 person sg form -- any VI that realizes a bare RE. or an RE with just an Indiv node dependent (for sg.) would be eligible for insertion in geometries for every person. (Of course, if we allow negative values, which maybe we have to anyway, there is no problem). Without negative values, I see two ways out of this: English geometries other than 3sg are subject to a radical Impoverishment rule reducing them to a bare RE node (Bonet-style retreat-to-the-unmarked Impoverishment) (this is for a marked treatment of -s) -s is unmarked; there is one or more zero-morphs realizing the other present tense agreement features. (this would be an unmarked treatment of -s) of course the latter would predict the i'se the b'y dialects well, but it doesn't predict the 2nd person/pl elsewhere-looking forms in the 'to be' paradigm (confirmed by the 'aren't I' inversion. anyone remotely sympathetic to the latter? :) hh -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ From cschutze at UCLA.EDU Wed Mar 3 01:11:45 2004 From: cschutze at UCLA.EDU (Carson Schutze) Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2004 17:11:45 -0800 Subject: another semi-unrelated query: predicative vs. attribute adjectival inflection In-Reply-To: <1078199446.a598e3f89764e@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: Hello again, Can anyone point me to references other than Bernstein and Kester on explaining the difference between inflection on attributive adjectives and lack thereof on predicative ones, in languages that have this difference (e.g. German), and what makes these languages different from those in which both kinds of adjectives are inflected (e.g. Italian)? Also, am I right in guessing that there aren't any languages that show the opposite pattern from German? Thanks. -- Prof. Carson T. Schutze Department of Linguistics, UCLA Email: cschutze at ucla.edu Box 951543, Los Angeles CA 90095-1543 U.S.A. Office: Campbell Hall 2224B Deliveries/Courier: 3125 Campbell Hall Campus Mail Code: 154302 Web: www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/cschutze Phone: (310)995-9887 Fax: (310)206-8595 From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Wed Mar 3 20:37:54 2004 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 09:37:54 +1300 Subject: New thread: seeking work on German(ic) nominal inflection In-Reply-To: Message-ID: See Linguist List 14.825 (March 20, 2003). I listed there a lot of references on this issue that people had supplied in response to a query from me. I was interested because it seemed to me that the various factors influencing how determiners, adjectives and nouns are inflected in German could be seen as violable ranked constraints -- though language-specific ones, rather like Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel's 'system-defining structural principles'. I haven't got any further with this in the last year, due to other work, but hope to get back on to it soon. Good luck to Carson's student! Andrew >Now that the list has wakened from hibernation . . . > >We have a student who wants to work on inflection within the German DP >(relevantly related systems would also be of interest), in particular the >strong/weak/mixed interactions of marking number/gender/case on determiners >vs. adjectives etc. Aside from work by Schlenker and Kester, is there >insightful, especially recent, stuff she should be looking at? > >Thanks, > Carson -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Professor, Department of Linguistics, School of Classics and Linguistics. University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108 fax +64-3-364 2969 e-mail andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Wed Mar 3 21:05:42 2004 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Thu, 4 Mar 2004 10:05:42 +1300 Subject: another semi-unrelated query: predicative vs. attribute adjectival inflection In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi there Hungarian shows the opposite pattern, I'm pretty sure. That is, attributive adjectives show no case or number inflection but predicative ones do inflect for number (case not being relevant there). Andrew >Hello again, > >Can anyone point me to references other than Bernstein and Kester on >explaining the difference between inflection on attributive adjectives and >lack thereof on predicative ones, in languages that have this difference >(e.g. German), and what makes these languages different from those in which >both kinds of adjectives are inflected (e.g. Italian)? Also, am I right in >guessing that there aren't any languages that show the opposite pattern from >German? Thanks. > >-- > >Prof. Carson T. Schutze Department of Linguistics, UCLA >Email: cschutze at ucla.edu Box 951543, Los Angeles CA 90095-1543 U.S.A. > >Office: Campbell Hall 2224B Deliveries/Courier: 3125 Campbell Hall >Campus Mail Code: 154302 Web: www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/cschutze >Phone: (310)995-9887 Fax: (310)206-8595 -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Professor, Department of Linguistics, School of Classics and Linguistics. University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108 fax +64-3-364 2969 e-mail andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Mar 10 11:09:53 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 11:09:53 +0000 Subject: paradigms Message-ID: Folks, I am still bothered by a lack of understanding on my part as to how DM would handle non-compositional meaning in periphrastic morphology, when that meaning corresponds exactly to what would be expected for individual paradigm cells. That is, the basic idea is that the meanings of the phrases are not composed bottom-up, but that their literal meanings are overridden to meet the 'needs' of the paradigm. I won't bother to include examples here, because this issue won't interest everyone. But one robust case is documented in the first half of the Liminal Categories paper on my website. Prima facie, this type of phenomenon would seem to offer strong support for a word and paradigm type of morphology, against a syntactic-tree approach. But I wouldn't want to say this without hearing from readers of this list, who have repaired my understanding on previous occasions. Dan --------------------------------------------- Daniel L. Everett Postgraduate Programme Director Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Department of Linguistics and English Language University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL UK Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Phone: 44-161-275-3158 http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de/ From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Wed Mar 10 19:30:25 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 12:30:25 -0700 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <74B0A12E-7283-11D8-8489-000A95A689DC@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dan, >I am still bothered by a lack of understanding on my part as to how DM >would handle non-compositional meaning in periphrastic morphology, when >that meaning corresponds exactly to what would be expected for >individual paradigm cells. That is, the basic idea is that the >meanings of the phrases are not composed bottom-up, but that their >literal meanings are overridden to meet the 'needs' of the paradigm. Two possibilities come to mind: (1) the periphrastic alternative has the same underlying syntactic structure as the synthetic alternative, but is realized morphologically differently (cf. comparative more vs. -er), and the non-compositionality is only apparent, arising because of underspecification or even homophony; (2) the periphrastic alternative has a different underlying syntactic structure from the synthetic alternative, and this structure is co-opted to fill a perceived "gap" in the synthetic system. I don't know enough about the facts you're talking about to hazard a guess as to which of these two alternatives is more plausible; you could explore both options and see what you find. >Prima facie, this type of phenomenon would seem to offer strong support >for a word and paradigm type of morphology, against a syntactic-tree >approach. Since paraphrases aren't words, why would a word-and-paradigm model be particularly suited to accounting for such a phenomenon? I'm skeptical about the traditional claim that non-compositional meaning indicates that a phrase has been reanalyzed as a word, since there's evidence that idioms retain syntactically (though not Encyclopedically) determined aspects of compositional meaning. Such a phenomenon *might* be taken to suggest that morphology is not purely interpretive, but influences the syntax in some way. So far I've been unconvinced by specific claims of this kind. -Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Mar 10 19:36:37 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 19:36:37 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Martha, Thanks. Neither of these alternatives you propose is relevant to the facts at hand. But since the facts are not on the list, there is no point, I suppose in belaboring the point. Stump and Ackerman have a paper, in addition to mine on my website, on this stuff. The paradigm conclusion seems fairly unavoidable, though, as these things go. Best, Dan On Wednesday, Mar 10, 2004, at 19:30 Europe/London, Martha McGinnis wrote: > Dan, > >> I am still bothered by a lack of understanding on my part as to how DM >> would handle non-compositional meaning in periphrastic morphology, >> when >> that meaning corresponds exactly to what would be expected for >> individual paradigm cells. That is, the basic idea is that the >> meanings of the phrases are not composed bottom-up, but that their >> literal meanings are overridden to meet the 'needs' of the paradigm. > > Two possibilities come to mind: (1) the periphrastic alternative has > the same underlying syntactic structure as the synthetic alternative, > but is realized morphologically differently (cf. comparative more vs. > -er), and the non-compositionality is only apparent, arising because > of underspecification or even homophony; (2) the periphrastic > alternative has a different underlying syntactic structure from the > synthetic alternative, and this structure is co-opted to fill a > perceived "gap" in the synthetic system. I don't know enough about > the facts you're talking about to hazard a guess as to which of these > two alternatives is more plausible; you could explore both options > and see what you find. > >> Prima facie, this type of phenomenon would seem to offer strong >> support >> for a word and paradigm type of morphology, against a syntactic-tree >> approach. > > Since paraphrases aren't words, why would a word-and-paradigm model > be particularly suited to accounting for such a phenomenon? I'm > skeptical about the traditional claim that non-compositional meaning > indicates that a phrase has been reanalyzed as a word, since there's > evidence that idioms retain syntactically (though not > Encyclopedically) determined aspects of compositional meaning. > > Such a phenomenon *might* be taken to suggest that morphology is not > purely interpretive, but influences the syntax in some way. So far > I've been unconvinced by specific claims of this kind. > > -Martha > -- > mcginnis at ucalgary.ca > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Wed Mar 10 19:36:04 2004 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 14:36:04 -0500 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <74B0A12E-7283-11D8-8489-000A95A689DC@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Hi Dan, Since my name came up in an earlier posting on this, I'll make a couple of remarks, though I'm limited by (i) other pressing obligations this week, (ii) an imperfect undertanding (on my part) as to what the questions are, and (iii) a hazy recollection of the paper you mention, with no time to look it up (see (i)). If the discussion continues, I'll try to jump in again later. Question 1: (Apparent) non-compositional meaning is discussed in DM work on, e.g., idioms. Is there anything here that is specific to paradigms? In particular, is there any reason to suspect that existing approaches to (apparent) non-compositionality won't extend to cover the cases that are apparently "in paradgims"? My recollection was that one of the cases you discussed had a structure [A B] for something filling the role of a pronominal of some sort, while A's use elsewhere was as a determiner. Is this qualitatively different from (other) idioms, which may contain determiners without the (full) determiner sematnics... "on the run", etc.? Question 2: Relatedly, I am not sure I understand what is meant by: >meaning corresponds exactly to what would be expected for >individual paradigm cells. See the brief discussion of paradigms in Dave Embick's LI paper on Latin, where he responds directly to the "periphrastic cells" approach to Latin analytic passives in B?rjars, Vincent & Chapman. One point Embick makes is that paradigms are a convenient device for "looking up" the output that corresponds to some set of input, defined, say in terms of admissible feature combinations and a base lexeme, but surely these are the observations we seek to have a theory of, not the theory itself. If the observation is that the feature combination [leave, F1, F2] yields a word, while [leave, F1, F3] yields a phrase, simply listing these as such in a list somewhere seems (to me) to add little to our understanding. For F1 = past, F3 = neg, we get left versus did not leave in English. Compare this with a language that has negative and positive forms of the verb, and one would be tempted to say that 'did not leave' is non-compositional (do does not have its regular meaning) and has a meaning corresponding exactly to the neg, past paradigm 'cell'. But rather than simply listing the periphrastic form in a cell, these observations formed the starting point for a syntactic analysis which seeks to explain the distribution of the forms, why the latter is (observationally) periphrastic, and why the particular pieces that are used have the forms they do. From this perspective, the argument "for paradigms" from meaning looks mis-constituted. Since you asked earlier, in the Syncretism w/o Paradigms paper mentioned by Heidi and others, I engaged Edwin Williams's theory of paradigm structure (rather than the periphrastic arguments) because it was one of the few 'paradigm theories' that I've seen (see also Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy's work, and in phonology, work by John McCarthy and Michael Kenstowicz; this list is not exhaustive) where paradigms are more than a listing of input-output correspondences, and the actual structure of the paradigm plays some non-trivial role. I happen not to be convinced by these theories, for reasons I've put forward elsewhere, but I'm less convinced (perhaps out of igorance) that the arguments from periphrasis actually require paradigms in a deeper sense than that (perhaps unfairly) sketched above. Open to pointers to the arguments out there... Best, -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Wed Mar 10 20:48:38 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 13:48:38 -0700 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <3F49D840-72CA-11D8-BC5E-000393CE35FE@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: >Neither of these alternatives you propose is relevant to the >facts at hand. I must have been unclear. The two alternatives were meant to be exhaustive: either the underlying syntactic structure of the synthetic and periphrastic forms is the same, or it's different. Different consequences follow from the two possibilities. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Mar 10 20:46:37 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 20:46:37 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Jonathan, It probably isn't going to be productive to discuss this on the list. The facts are too detailed. But you can rest assured that the points about what theories are for aren't really necessary at this level of discussion. Saying that you want to derive the facts rather than say that they are merely memorized adds no new information to anyone's processor, at least not anyone reading such a list. Wrt paradigms, there are similar arguments to be made for phonemic charts, i.e. that they actually derive facts, not merely list them. In fact, I would go farther and say that one cannot even understand simple verb formation in some languages without a careful understanding of the culture involved as well, as Andrew Pawley, inter alia, has pointed out. But that would be gratuitous, since it would require several full-blown articles to develop the idea and consequences. But this is all better left to the journals and papers. I therefore withdraw my query. Cheers, Dan ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1308 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Mar 10 20:56:07 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 20:56:07 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Well, the alternatives are not exhaustive. But, once again, I asked a question that obviously is not appropriate for the give and take of a list. The answers and questions take a larger context (primarily empirical) than a list can accommodate well. Thanks for the courtesy of offering answers, though. They did at least give me some more insight into DM. Best, Dan On Wednesday, Mar 10, 2004, at 20:48 Europe/London, Martha McGinnis wrote: >> Neither of these alternatives you propose is relevant to the >> facts at hand. > > I must have been unclear. The two alternatives were meant to be > exhaustive: either the underlying syntactic structure of the > synthetic and periphrastic forms is the same, or it's different. > Different consequences follow from the two possibilities. > > Cheers, > Martha > -- > mcginnis at ucalgary.ca > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Wed Mar 10 21:22:52 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 14:22:52 -0700 Subject: paradigms Message-ID: >But you can rest assured that the points about what theories are for >aren't really necessary at this level of discussion. Saying that you >want to derive the facts rather than say that they are merely >memorized adds no new information to anyone's processor, at least >not anyone reading such a list. Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't think Jonathan was making a metatheoretical statement. I understood him to be making a falsifiable empirical claim: that paradigms may be a useful descriptive tool, but they have no theoretical status. The example of do-support nicely illustrates how a paradigmatic description of a synthetic / analytic alternation doesn't tell us anything about the source of the alternation -- i.e. whether the two structures are syntactically identical or not. There's still no firm consensus on whether do-support is a morphological or syntactic alternation. Some have argued that it's purely morphological (for example, see Jonathan's work on adjacency), while others have argued that do-support adds a verbal head (e.g. see Embick & Noyer's LI paper). DM doesn't force one view or the other: both are possible, and only empirical arguments can decide the matter. If those empirical arguments are telling us something meaningful, then a paradigmatic analysis is inadequate. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Wed Mar 10 21:32:12 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 21:32:12 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: On Wednesday, Mar 10, 2004, at 21:22 Europe/London, Martha McGinnis wrote: >> But you can rest assured that the points about what theories are for >> aren't really necessary at this level of discussion. Saying that you >> want to derive the facts rather than say that they are merely >> memorized adds no new information to anyone's processor, at least >> not anyone reading such a list. > > Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't think Jonathan was making a > metatheoretical statement. I understood him to be making a > falsifiable empirical claim: that paradigms may be a useful > descriptive tool, but they have no theoretical status. > But they do have theoretical status. Just not in DM. Dan From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Thu Mar 11 02:16:57 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 10 Mar 2004 19:16:57 -0700 Subject: paradigms Message-ID: >>Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't think Jonathan was making a >>metatheoretical statement. I understood him to be making a >>falsifiable empirical claim: that paradigms may be a useful >>descriptive tool, but they have no theoretical status. > >But they do have theoretical status. Just not in DM. Again, I didn't mean this metatheoretically. I understood J to be proposing that paradigms aren't part of the human linguistic system, i.e. that they have no status in a *correct* theory, whether that's DM or some other theory. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Mar 11 07:17:44 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 07:17:44 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Martha, Tsk, Tsk. Of course I understood this. But if you are telling anyone what the components of the 'correct' theory are, that just *is* a metatheoretical statement. Good luck, Dan On Thursday, Mar 11, 2004, at 02:16 Europe/London, Martha McGinnis wrote: >>> Perhaps I misunderstood, but I don't think Jonathan was making a >>> metatheoretical statement. I understood him to be making a >>> falsifiable empirical claim: that paradigms may be a useful >>> descriptive tool, but they have no theoretical status. >> >> But they do have theoretical status. Just not in DM. > > Again, I didn't mean this metatheoretically. I understood J to be > proposing that paradigms aren't part of the human linguistic system, > i.e. that they have no status in a *correct* theory, whether that's > DM or some other theory. > > Cheers, > Martha > -- > mcginnis at ucalgary.ca > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From ejp10 at PSU.EDU Thu Mar 11 13:16:03 2004 From: ejp10 at PSU.EDU (Elizabeth J. Pyatt) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 08:16:03 -0500 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <74B0A12E-7283-11D8-8489-000A95A689DC@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dan: I'm interested in your question, but am not familiar with the data. Would it be possible to provide a few examples? The discussion seems out of context to me without an example. If nothing else an example would provide me insight on why you feel this issue is too complex for a Listserv. With regards Elizabeth >I won't bother to include examples here, because this issue won't >interest everyone. But one robust case is documented in the first half >of the Liminal Categories paper on my website. > >Prima facie, this type of phenomenon would seem to offer strong support >for a word and paradigm type of morphology, against a syntactic-tree >approach. But I wouldn't want to say this without hearing from readers >of this list, who have repaired my understanding on previous occasions. > >Dan > -- Elizabeth J. Pyatt, Ph.D. http://www.personal.psu.edu/ejp10 From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Mar 11 20:11:24 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 20:11:24 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Elizabeth, The reason it is too difficult to discuss on the listserv is that there are no facts without consensus and the establishment of facts as supporting this or that requires detailed discussion. It is, to use a Noam analogy, like trying to talk about anything meaningful on TV between commercials. Unless everyone agrees with you, your points take too much time to develop because they go against the grain. And this is not the list to discuss general morphology. But I did send you the draft I mentioned earlier. You can at least look at the facts if you have the time or inclination. A recent paper by Greg Stump and Farrell Ackerman (to appear in a volume edited by Louisa Sadler and Andrew Spencer) makes the point quite forcefully. But of course in many theories of morphology, the paradigm is causally implicated in many analyses. To say that a statement to the effect that "the correct theory won't use paradigms" is not metatheoretical is quite strange. A statement about facts is theoretical (one might say 'empirical' but I don't believe that that word does a lot of work). A statement about theories is metatheoretical. Saying that the 'correct theory' has no paradigms is somewhat reminiscent of Paul Postal's 'The best theory' article, in which a particular approach of the early 70s was argued to be in principle the best. Best to watch your wallet and cover your beer with your other hand when that kind of talk starts. -- Dan ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Thu Mar 11 20:30:02 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 13:30:02 -0700 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <459CD359-7398-11D8-AFA9-000393CE35FE@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: Dan, I appreciate your efforts to be provocative, but you're seriously misrepresenting the discussion of paradigms. DM doesn't deserve the criticism you're levelling at it. Defining a priori what the correct theory looks like may be metatheory. More importantly, it's bad science. But DM *doesn't* place a priori limits on the form of the correct theory. It's just a framework of testable hypotheses. Proposing a testable hypothesis isn't metatheory, it's just "theory", i.e. normal science. Anyway, I don't have any more time to devote to this discussion, so I'm afraid that's my last word on the subject. -M. -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From barner at FAS.HARVARD.EDU Thu Mar 11 20:27:36 2004 From: barner at FAS.HARVARD.EDU (David Barner) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 15:27:36 -0500 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <459CD359-7398-11D8-AFA9-000393CE35FE@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: How about one or two examples just for the heck of it? If we don't agree we'll be forced to read the papers to find out why! Dave Barner On 3/11/04 3:11 PM, "Daniel L. Everett" wrote: > Elizabeth, > > The reason it is too difficult to discuss on the listserv is that there > are no facts without consensus and the establishment of facts as > supporting this or that requires detailed discussion. It is, to use a > Noam analogy, like trying to talk about anything meaningful on TV > between commercials. Unless everyone agrees with you, your points take > too much time to develop because they go against the grain. And this is > not the list to discuss general morphology. > > But I did send you the draft I mentioned earlier. You can at least look > at the facts if you have the time or inclination. > > A recent paper by Greg Stump and Farrell Ackerman (to appear in a > volume edited by Louisa Sadler and Andrew Spencer) makes the point > quite forcefully. But of course in many theories of morphology, the > paradigm is causally implicated in many analyses. > > To say that a statement to the effect that "the correct theory won't > use paradigms" is not metatheoretical is quite strange. A statement > about facts is theoretical (one might say 'empirical' but I don't > believe that that word does a lot of work). A statement about theories > is metatheoretical. > > Saying that the 'correct theory' has no paradigms is somewhat > reminiscent of Paul Postal's 'The best theory' article, in which a > particular approach of the early 70s was argued to be in principle the > best. Best to watch your wallet and cover your beer with your other > hand when that kind of talk starts. > > -- Dan > > > > > > ------------------------------------------ > > Daniel L. Everett > Professor of Phonetics & Phonology > Postgraduate Programme Director > Department of Linguistics > The University of Manchester > Oxford Road > Manchester, UK M13 9PL > http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de > Fax: 44-161-275-3187 > Office: 44-161-275-3158 From dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK Thu Mar 11 21:04:07 2004 From: dan.everett at MAN.AC.UK (Daniel L. Everett) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 21:04:07 +0000 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: For the record, I have (i) not tried to be provocative (though apparently I was); (ii) not leveled any criticisms at DM. Just Martha's view of what counts as metatheory. It may very well be that paradigms should be rejected. Nothing I have said was a criticism of DM. Just the confines of the particular universe of discourse. And the problem is of my own making. That is what was meant by my 'provocative' letter. I raised an issue. There were several reasonable replies. However, I realized that the things I found unsatisfactory about the replies were not things I could deal with with an example sentence or word or two. This is not the fault of DM or any theory. So, to reiterate I did not criticize DM per se. Thanks to Jonathan, Heidi, Martha and all for comments. -- Dan On Thursday, Mar 11, 2004, at 20:30 Europe/London, Martha McGinnis wrote: > Dan, I appreciate your efforts to be provocative, but you're > seriously misrepresenting the discussion of paradigms. > > DM doesn't deserve the criticism you're levelling at it. Defining a > priori what the correct theory looks like may be metatheory. More > importantly, it's bad science. But DM *doesn't* place a priori > limits on the form of the correct theory. It's just a framework of > testable hypotheses. Proposing a testable hypothesis isn't > metatheory, it's just "theory", i.e. normal science. > > Anyway, I don't have any more time to devote to this discussion, so > I'm afraid that's my last word on the subject. > > -M. > -- > mcginnis at ucalgary.ca > > ------------------------------------------ Daniel L. Everett Professor of Phonetics & Phonology Postgraduate Programme Director Department of Linguistics The University of Manchester Oxford Road Manchester, UK M13 9PL http://ling.man.ac.uk/info/staff/de Fax: 44-161-275-3187 Office: 44-161-275-3158 From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Thu Mar 11 23:38:45 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 16:38:45 -0700 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: <459CD359-7398-11D8-AFA9-000393CE35FE@man.ac.uk> Message-ID: A word from your moderator... >this is not the list to discuss general morphology. I just wanted to clarify that discussions of morphology in general are in fact very welcome on the DM-list. List members, please feel free to post on any topic relating to morphology! Intriguing data are welcome too. What are you working on these days? Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Thu Mar 11 23:53:42 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 16:53:42 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <20040301153108.4605.JFRAMPTO@lynx.dac.neu.edu> Message-ID: Hi John, >It has also seemed to me that impoverishment is naturally viewed as an >aspect of the syntactic structure -> morpheme structure mapping. >Under this view, impoverishment happens before the lexicon comes >into play in filling in the nodes of the morpheme structure. > >Are there any knock-down arguments against this view? I don't think so, but there are arguments that things are a bit more complicated. Jonathan Bobaljik and Andrew Nevins have both argued in recent work that impoverishment can be 'interleaved' with vocabulary insertion into syntactic nodes. That is, a syntactic feature can condition the insertion of one vocabulary item, then be deleted before another vocabulary item is inserted. This hypothesis makes interesting predictions about the order of vocabulary insertion. For example, if vocabulary insertion proceeds from the inside out (i.e. root outwards), the prediction is that items that reflect the pre-impoverishment feature complex will be closer to the root than items that reflect the post-impoverishment feature complex. Jonathan's paper is called "The ins and outs of contextual allomorphy", and the relevant work of Andrew's that I saw was a conference handout discussing (among other things) person agreement in Mam (perhaps WECOL 2002? -- he can give you more useful information). Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Fri Mar 12 01:48:16 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 18:48:16 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <1078179277.eb2b38488df00@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: Hi Heidi, Hmmmm indeed. >Each time the learner hears a verb form that's identical with a form they >have remembered hearing with a featurally distinct subject, they say, >aha! that's a place where I have to invent an Impoverishment rule. >Then, the syncretisms they observe in, e.g. the 'to have' paradigm will >be predictive of syncretisms they expect to hear in other paradigms >(though if they're not, as in the 'to be' paradigm, that's no problem >either, they just go back and annotate their initial Impoverishment >rule with 'not for "to be"', or 'only for verbs of class X'). Just to clarify -- I don't have JDB's paper (obviously I need to get it) -- but is the point that none of the English past tense Vocabulary items make person distinctions, except "is/was/were"? If so, then the issue would be whether this is a deep generalization about English past tense (hence, Impoverishment) or a coincidence (hence, underspecification of Vocab items). There's something unnerving to me about the Impoverishment analysis you sketched above. I've always felt that Impoverishment rules should be posited only for 'special cases', i.e. when syntactic representations and Vocab underspecification can't account for the facts at hand. Using it for cases of metasyncretism seems to lose the distinction between 'general cases' of syncretism (which are also consistent with Vocab underspecification) and these 'special cases', e.g. a case from Piedmontese described by Bonet, where the 1pl reflexive clitic looks like the default 3rd person reflexive, instead of like the 1sg reflexive. I also think of Impoverishment as a rule that targets a limited, well-defined case -- so (speaking broadly) if there's an exception to a morphological generalization, the exception, not the generalization, should be due to Impoverishment. But the English case you described goes the other way: Impoverishment gives us the general case (no person agreement in past tense) and then we need to prevent it from applying in the more specific case (e.g. by saying "except for 'be'"). Another view would be that "be" constitutes evidence that we actually *don't* Impoverish person in the past tense, so the only possible analysis of the absence of person distinctions elsewhere is Vocabulary-based (i.e., coincidence). I'm not sure how to decide between these two views. How would the learner decide? The Impoverishment analysis seems to require the learner's grammar to notice a (semi-systematic) absence of distinctions, and posit a corresponding rule; while the Vocab analysis requires the learner's grammar to notice the presence of morphological distinctions, and posit corresponding Vocabulary items. The latter view makes more sense to me -- let's see if I can say why. Suppose UG gives us a multidimensional syntactic/semantic "space" for making morphosyntactic distinctions, but the features we actually posit for Vocabulary items are activated by positive evidence in the form of contrasts. Under this view, our initial hypotheses about Vocabulary items would be maximally underspecified, and specifications would be added as necessary. For example, we might originally posit that "her" is the only 3sg.f pronoun, but when we realize that "she" also exists, we would invoke a case feature: "she" is 3sg.f.nom. If nothing else happens, then 3sg.f genitive and accusative will remain identical. Why would we take the additional step of impoverishing genitive case in 3sg.f? It seems to me that this would require some motivation -- i.e., evidence that the existing grammar is incorrect. The Impoverishment analysis maintains that the motivation is paradigmatic: *elsewhere* English has a gen/acc distinction, so we expect one for 3sg.fem, and if there isn't one, we need to impoverish it away. But if there are no sub-paradigms, i.e. just one huge paradigmatic space for all morphosyntactic distinctions, then shouldn't we also have to notice that there are no tense, mood, mass/count, positive/negative, proximal/distal, ETC distinctions in 3sg.fem pronouns? If so, we'd need to posit a huge number of Impoverishment rules to get the fact that there are just 2 forms of the 3sg.fem pronoun (or 3, including "hers"). I can't think of any coherent empirical arguments against this, but I do find it highly implausible. The problem may well be lack of imagination, though. Any help is most welcome! Best, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From anevins at MIT.EDU Fri Mar 12 01:54:29 2004 From: anevins at MIT.EDU (Andrew Nevins) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 20:54:29 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hello, and thanks Martha -- the paper (handout!) was from LASSO, is "When 'we' dis-agrees in Circumfixes" and can be downloaded from http://web.mit.edu/anevins/www/lasso.pdf Basically it seems to be to be the null hypothesis that impoverishment happens AT a TERMINAL precisely when THAT TERMINAL is being WORKED on. It seems like a bizarre state of affairs to do impoverishment globally on the whole tree BEFORE doing ANY VI. I tried to take advantage of this in a case of "derivational opacity" w.r.t. spellout: instead of adopting discontinuous bleeding as a principle, or having constraints against redundant spellout of the same feature twice, it seems that one way to deal with circumfix-type systems where the suffix "realizes" a feature usually reserved for the prefix is to have contextual allomorphy for the suffix governed by the presence of F, (under the Bobaljikian/Carstairsian constraint of upwards-only featural allomorphy), followed by deletion of F. Basically just like the Tiberian Hebrew epenthesis-before-a-glottal-stop, followed by deletion-of-the-glottal-stop: the conditioner for rule 1 gets zapped before the surface. Of course, there are declarative alternatives to that case, and to the morph. case, but I think it's worth exploring. I am sorry I haven't had more time to pipe up myself! One of these days we will get the online DM-archive working with enough papers that, just like the OT-sters, Late-Insertionists can be guaranteed of finding a paper in a reliable place. All the nest AIN From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Fri Mar 12 02:06:52 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 21:06:52 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Thanks Martha, > >It has also seemed to me that impoverishment is naturally viewed as an > >aspect of the syntactic structure -> morpheme structure mapping. > >Under this view, impoverishment happens before the lexicon comes > >into play in filling in the nodes of the morpheme structure. > > > >Are there any knock-down arguments against this view? > > I don't think so, but there are arguments that things are a bit more > complicated. Jonathan Bobaljik and Andrew Nevins have both argued in > recent work that impoverishment can be 'interleaved' with vocabulary > insertion into syntactic nodes. That is, a syntactic feature can > condition the insertion of one vocabulary item, then be deleted > before another vocabulary item is inserted. This seems to me to be a strong counterargument, not just a complication. I'll look at the papers you mentioned. - John From anevins at MIT.EDU Fri Mar 12 02:21:39 2004 From: anevins at MIT.EDU (Andrew Nevins) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 21:21:39 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >There's something unnerving to me about the Impoverishment analysis >you sketched above. I've always felt that Impoverishment rules >should be posited only for 'special cases', i.e. when syntactic >representations and Vocab underspecification can't account for the >facts at hand. Using it for cases of metasyncretism seems to lose >the distinction between 'general cases' of syncretism (which are also >consistent with Vocab underspecification) and these 'special cases', >e.g. a case from Piedmontese described by Bonet, where the 1pl >reflexive clitic looks like the default 3rd person reflexive, instead >of like the 1sg reflexive. I think I disagree. Take the systematic absence of gender distinctions in the plural in Russian. On the VI view, it is an accident that every Case+Plural affix happens to be underspecified for Gender. On the impoverishment view, the generalization that Gender is completely absent in the Plural is captured, irrespective of the features realized by individual VIs. I guess I am going for the impoverishment in marked-environment view: Languages that make Gender distinctions in the singular but Zap them in the plural do so because the Plural is already a marked environment. Using the H&R feature geometry, where number of nodes directly reflects markedness, allows this to fall out in a natural way. AIN From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Fri Mar 12 02:23:22 2004 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:23:22 +1300 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi everyone Dan Everett certainly set something off! As I am one of the people who think that paradigms deserve a central place in the theory of inflectional morphology, let me try to respond to some of the points made. I agree that it's not sensible to have a preconceived opinion about whether any particular notion belongs in a good theory of morphology, including the notion 'paradigm'. A good theory, I take it, is one that (a) is economical, (b) is sufficiently powerful, i.e. is consistent with what does happen (pretty much: some inconsistencies may count as problems for future research rather than fatal counterevidence, though deciding which is which may be controversial), and (c) is not excessively powerful, i.e. is inconsistent with as much as possible of what doesn't happen. A theory such as DM that doesn't use the notion 'paradigm' is more economical than one that does, so to that extent it would be nice if DM were correct. But DM practitioners need to check whether their compliance with criterion (a) in this respect is compatible with satisfying criteria (b) and (c). I approach the paradigm issue from the following angle. It's puzzling that languages tolerate complex inflection class systems, with a variety of ways of expressing e.g. 'genitive plural' or '2nd person singular' that don't correlate neatly with any independent syntactic or semantic or even phonological factors. No creator of an artificial auxiliary language (such as Esperanto) has ever saddled it with an inflection class system, and if all languages lacked them (as many do), no linguists would puzzle their heads about why this was so. It could be (as has traditionally been thought) that inflection class systems are just one kind of messy residue that phonological change leaves in its wake, and what allows this residue to perpetuate itself down the generations is the human brain's phenomenal capacity to remember arbitrary linguistic facts. If that is correct, then we can be satisfied with a theory of morphology that essentially imposes no constraint on the array of inflectional resources that a language can have (the number of distinct '2nd person singular' suffixes, for example), nor on how these can be organised and distributed among inflection classes. So, if that is correct, there will be no problem about fulfilling criterion (c) in relation to inflection class behaviour: no theory could ever be too powerful. It seems to me that at least some DM practitioners reject the paradigm as a theoretical notion because they take precisely this view (usually implicitly rather than explicitly) of inflection class systems: 'paradigms' as arrays of forms are useful in pedagogical grammars, perhaps, but they are not linked to any constraint on what can or cannot happen in languages. So: are inflection class systems such a free-for-all, or not? That's where I part company with the DM view, and am somewhat disappointed by DMers' lack of interest in the question. It seems to me that, over the years, quite a body of evidence has accumulated that inflection class systems are not a free-for-all, and that the inflectional resources of a language are distributed (broadly speaking) 'economically', so as to yield a total of inflection classes that is at or near the minimum that is mathematically possible, given those resources. Dave Barner asks for some examples, so here is one (taken, slightly adapted, from Carstairs-McCarthy 1994). Standard German has a considerable array of inflectional resources for nouns, some of which is arbitrary in that the choice that any given noun makes from within the array is not predictable on the basis of gender (masculine, feminine or neuter) or anything else. Of the eight case-number cells for which German masculine nouns inflect, the two that are most lavishly endowed with inflectional resources are the genitive singular and the plural (syncretised for all cases except the dative): Gen Sg: -s, -en, -ens Plural: -e, -en, -er, -s (I ignore here some phonologically conditioned e/? alternations.) The inflectional resources of German are thus compatible with the existence of as many as 12 inflection classes, which is what we would observe if each noun's choice of Gen Sg suffix implied nothing about its choice of Plural suffix, and vice versa. At the other end of the scale, the minimum number of inflection classes is four, because all four Plural suffixes need work (so to speak). So what is the actual total of masculine inflection classes in German? The answer is six: I II III IV V VI Gen Sg -s -s -s -en -s -ens Plural -e -er -s -en -en -en What are we to make of this from the point of view of morphological theory? Conceivably, nothing. It could be just how various historical residues panned out. But one thing is noticeable about this distribution of inflectional resources: there is precisely one 'elsewhere' suffix for each of the two cells Gen Sg and Plural, i.e. precisely one suffix that appears in more than one inflection class, namely -s for Gen Sg, and -en for Plural. All the other suffixes are found in one inflection class only. That's far from inevitable: there are innumerable ways in which one could redistribute the German resources among six inflection classes such that that observation would not hold. Again, what are we to make of this? Again, perhaps nothing: it could be an accident. But it seems at least worth exploring the possibility that it is not an accident. We could explore, in other words, the possibility that, in any language, given an array of competing inflectional resources, each item must either (a) identify its inflection class or (b) be the sole 'elsewhere' item, used in those inflection classes that lack an exponent of their own for the cell in question. Well, explorations of that kind have begun, and the results seem promising (I give references at the end, in response to Dave Barner's request). For present purposes, though, what's important (it seems to me) is that conducting such explorations relies on according to the notion 'inflection class' a central place in morphological theory -- in other words, in making theoretical use of the notion 'paradigm', in one of its senses. If one still wishes to do without 'paradigm' as a theoretical notion, there are two choices: either (i) to produce reasons for thinking that the German state of affairs and similar states of affairs in other languages really are accidental (showing, perhaps, that there are many languages where the inflectional resources can't be parcelled out neatly into the two categories 'class-identifying' and 'elsewhere'), or (ii) to show that I am wrong in thinking that the notion 'paradigm' (in some sense) is needed in order to accommodate this observation in a morphological theory that satisfies criterion (c), i.e. a theory that is sufficiently restrictive. I know that Jonathan Bobaljik has said he has given his reasons for not liking the paradigm notion; nevertheless, I am not aware that anyone has yet done either of (i) or (ii). If I've missed something in the literature on this, please tell me! I've gone on long enough. I'll close by saying three things. First, I've given one kind of reason for the theoretical centrality of the paradigm. Other people, such as Greg Stump, Andy Spencer and Kersti B?rjars, have argued for the paradigm on grounds that are substantially independent of mine, and I don't want to comment here on those other reasons. Secondly, I feel sheepish in that all the references I cite below are by me. It looks like naked self-promotion. But, by way of excuse, I seem to be about the only person conducting this particular line of inquiry. (The references from before 1994 assume a now superseded version of the 'paradigm economy' idea, but the data should still be of interest and perhaps even some of the discussion.) Thirdly -- yes, I did say earlier that it would be nice, in the interests of criterion (a) (economy), to dispense with the notion 'paradigm' if we can. But there is also criterion (c) to consider -- a criterion that no one forgets about when doing syntax, but which for some reason doesn't seem to be so generally borne in mind by people doing morphology. Carstairs, Andrew. 1983. Paradigm economy. Journal of Linguistics 19: 115-25. Carstairs, Andrew. 1984. Paradigm economy in the Latin third declension. Transactions of the Philological Society 117-37. Carstairs, Andrew. 1987. Allomorphy in Inflexion. London: Croom Helm. Carstairs, Andrew. 1988. Nonconcatenative inflection and paradigm economy. In: Theoretical Morphology: Approaches in Modern Linguistics, ed. by Michael Hammond and Michael Noonan, 71-7. San Diego: Academic Press. Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 1994. Inflection classes, gender and the Principle of Contrast. Language 70: 737-88. Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 1998. How lexical semantics constrains inflectional allomorphy. Yearbook of Morphology 1997, 1-24. Cameron-Faulkner, Thea and Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2000. Stem alternants as morphological signata: evidence from blur avoidance in Polish nouns. NLLT 18: 813-35 Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2001. Grammatically conditioned allomorphy, paradigmatic structure, and the Ancestry Constraint. Transactions of the Philological Society 99: 223-45. [Discusses Bobaljik 'The ins and outs of contextual allomorphy'.] Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2002. Directionality and locality in allomorphy: a response to Adger, B?jar and Harbour. Transactions of the Philological Society 101: 117-24. [A reply to a DM-based critique of C-McC 2001.] Any comments on all this? Apologies again for the length. Andrew -- Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Professor, Department of Linguistics, School of Classics and Linguistics. University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand phone (work) +64-3-364 2211; (home) +64-3-355 5108 fax +64-3-364 2969 e-mail andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at canterbury.ac.nz http://www.ling.canterbury.ac.nz/adc-m.html From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Fri Mar 12 02:25:01 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 19:25:01 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <1078199446.a598e3f89764e@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: To continue!: > Does anyone know of acquisition studies of any kind about syncretism > and features? My (very limited) understanding is that children > overgeneralize regular to irregular, but that it is claimed that they > do not overgeneralize agreement morphemes in the manner that > underspecification would suggest. A couple of references: Poeppel & Wexler's 1993 Language paper discusses this for German, and Colin Phillips has a MITWPL 26 paper that discusses it for German (based on Clahsen & Penke 1992) and Italian (based on Guasti 1992). Part of Colin's paper is included in a Lang Acq paper to appear -- not sure if these facts are in there, but both are on his website anyway. >English geometries other than 3sg are subject to a radical >Impoverishment rule reducing them to a bare RE node (Bonet-style >retreat-to-the-unmarked Impoverishment) > > (this is for a marked treatment of -s) > >-s is unmarked; there is one or more zero-morphs realizing the other >present tense agreement features. > > (this would be an unmarked treatment of -s) > >of course the latter would predict the i'se the b'y dialects well, but >it doesn't predict the 2nd person/pl elsewhere-looking forms in the 'to >be' paradigm (confirmed by the 'aren't I' inversion. > >anyone remotely sympathetic to the latter? Me. Also, I believe, John Frampton, who has a CLS 38 paper arguing (on metasyncretic grounds!) that 1sg is impoverished in Germanic generally, leading to the 1/3sg syncretism with 'be'. His analysis makes extensive use of negative feature values, but I think it could be recast along the lines you suggest -- in fact, I think Andrew Nevins may have done this in his 2003 LSA talk. OK, my brain is now picked clean. I need to go home. Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From kleanthes at PUNKSINSCIENCE.ORG Fri Mar 12 06:50:24 2004 From: kleanthes at PUNKSINSCIENCE.ORG (Kleanthes Grohmann) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 08:50:24 +0200 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: > Take the systematic absence of gender > distinctions in the plural in Russian. This is from an outsider who simply reads all the messages on the list but doesn't really get half of them. (I'm neither a morphologist nor working particularly close within DM, but hope that one day the workload goes down and I get my head around it.) If anyone is interested (if this is at all relevant), Artemis Alexiadou and Gereon M?ller have an intriguing paper on "Class Features as Probes" on their respective homepages (nominal "paradigms" in Greek, German and Russian), and Gereon has a couple of papers on a DM approach to nominal inflections in Russian. N-joi, K From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Fri Mar 12 18:42:42 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:42:42 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Andrew Nevins wrote: > Hello, and thanks Martha -- the paper (handout!) was from LASSO, > is "When 'we' dis-agrees in Circumfixes" and > can be downloaded from http://web.mit.edu/anevins/www/lasso.pdf > > Basically it seems to be to be the null hypothesis that > impoverishment happens AT a TERMINAL precisely when THAT > TERMINAL is being WORKED on. It seems like a bizarre > state of affairs to do impoverishment globally on the > whole tree BEFORE doing ANY VI. I admire Andrew's strong feelings about what would and would not be bizarre about the way the brain does linguistic computations. That aside, he misunderstood my own hunch about the way things work. My hunch is that spellout is not a direct translation of syntactic nodes (i.e. bundles of syntactic features) to phonology. There is an intermediate step in which syntactic nodes are mapped to morphological nodes (i.e. bundles of morphological features) -- this an aspect of linearization. The mapping may preserve many syntactic features, but the mapping can delete (i.e. fail to map) certain features (i.e. impoverishment) and can add other features (i.e. case features). I agree that it makes a certain amount of sense if impoverishment happens at the point that syntactic node is "being worked on", for me that would be the point that it is mapped into a bundle of morphological features and put into a linear structure. The main point is that vocabulary insertion does not interact directly with impoverishment. I have no particularly evidence for the correctness of my hunch, my inquiry was directed in seeing if there was significant counterevidence. I looked at the analysis of Algonquin in the handout mentioned above and am not convinced that it provides much evidence that my hunch is wrong. There may be other facts about Algonquin morphology that bear on the issue, but on the basis of what you have in the handout, it seems to me that the following works fine: 1) Group is deleted in the context of Author. 2) Author is deleted in the context of Addressee. -wa is the Group suffix; the Minimal suffix is null; and /-nan/ is the default Individuation suffix. The two impoverishments must be ordered --- whether for a reason of the kind Andrew discusses or for some other reason. It could be simply that pairs of rules of this form are automatically ordered in the only way that makes sense. I think that this could most likely be formalized without difficulty. - John Frampton From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Mar 12 20:33:18 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:33:18 -0700 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hey Martha -- You wrote: Hi Heidi, ... Just to clarify -- I don't have JDB's paper (obviously I need to get it) -- but is the point that none of the English past tense Vocabulary items make person distinctions, except "is/was/were"? If so, then the issue would be whether this is a deep generalization about English past tense (hence, Impoverishment) or a coincidence (hence, underspecification of Vocab items). Sort of, but the point isn't restricted to the past tense: it's that if you think about the syncretisms for English tense, they're all "add-ons" to the basic 'be' syncretisms, in terms of what gets syncretized, no matter what the vocab items are. And it's not just English: Williams shows the paradigm-persistence-effect for Latin, Jonathan exhibits it in Russian (which Andrew N refers to), and I suspect it's a frequent property of languages in general. It's not a total thing -- as jdb shows, there is no Instantiated Basic Paradigm requirement -- but it is significant. To capture it, you need syncretism to be created by Impoverishment, not just by vocab insertion + the Elsewhere principle. English is really not the ideal case, since there aren't so many paradigms involving different VIs, but Russian makes the point beautifully. There's something unnerving to me about the Impoverishment analysis you sketched above. I've always felt that Impoverishment rules should be posited only for 'special cases', i.e. when syntactic representations and Vocab underspecification can't account for the facts at hand. me too! i've always felt that way too, which is why I'm anxious about the metasyncretism observation. If we're doing Impoverishment everywhere, to get these syncretisms, then we don't need the Elsewhere principle AT ALL.... since every terminal node will end up with a set of features that match one and only one VI. and since the Elsewhere principle VI-insertion is one of the coolest things about DM, I'm feeling a bit disturbed, and wanting to look for other explanations for the metasyncretism effect. The questions you raise about the learning path for the pervasive-Impoverishment are I think very relevant & valid (and of course I don't know the answers). But since Andrew N. says that the pervasive-Impoverishment approach seems reasonable to him, then it could well be that there's good independent reasons to buy it -- which would be fine with me, too; it's kind of the story I was trying to tell in Hug a Tree. Though i'll miss the Elsewhere principle. I'm glad that the unmarkedness of English 3sg -s doesn't seem like too strange of a claim. But of course I still don't know why 'are' is otherwise all over the paradigm and also showing up in negative T-C inversion cases with 1st person subjects (though luckily 'were' doesn't do this. It must just be a weird kind of phonotactic-nightmare avoidance of amn't, somehow). Anyway, syncretically yrs, hh -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From anevins at MIT.EDU Fri Mar 12 20:42:14 2004 From: anevins at MIT.EDU (Andrew Nevins) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:42:14 -0500 Subject: syncretism w/o paradigms In-Reply-To: <20040312123218.582C.JFRAMPTO@lynx.dac.neu.edu> Message-ID: Hello All (esp. John): > >I admire Andrew's strong feelings about what would and would not >be bizarre about the way the brain does linguistic computations. >That aside, he misunderstood my own hunch about the way things >work. A clarification: My message was a response to Martha, and an elaboration on her reference to why I thought Impoverishment happened at a Node. It was not a response to John's hunch; I don't know what that was and I didn't read his original message. That said, the points you make are interesting, John. I will see if they work in their entirety and have to think about extrinsic ordering of Impoverishment rules a little longer. --AIN >I looked at the analysis of Algonquin in the handout mentioned >above and am not convinced that it provides much evidence that my >hunch is wrong. There may be other facts about Algonquin >morphology that bear on the issue, but on the basis of what you >have in the handout, it seems to me that the following works >fine: > > 1) Group is deleted in the context of Author. > 2) Author is deleted in the context of Addressee. > >-wa is the Group suffix; the Minimal suffix is null; and /-nan/ >is the default Individuation suffix. > >The two impoverishments must be ordered --- whether for a reason >of the kind Andrew discusses or for some other reason. It could From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Mar 12 20:46:06 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 13:46:06 -0700 Subject: paradigms In-Reply-To: Message-ID: Hi Andrew CmC! (I think you summed up the criteria relevant to the paradigm debate very concisely, btw) Just a quick I'm-out-of-it question: You wrote: (The references from before 1994 assume a now superseded version of the 'paradigm economy' idea, but the data should still be of interest and perhaps even some of the discussion.) I only ever had a tenuous hold on the paradigm economy idea, and since I haven't been thinking about these things much for a very long time, I'm even more sketchy on it now. Did the original version of paradigm economy predict something like Williams' Instantiated Basic Paradigm requirement, such that there would be some maximally complex paradigm in a language, and the syncretisms of that paradigm are carried over to all the other simpler paradigms, plus some? Or did paradigm economy only make claims about the cross-classifications predicted by having a certain number of distinct affixes? I guess what I really want to know is whether there's some paper of yours that details the evolution of the paradigm economy idea, from its former to its new instantiation, with the reasons for the changes? i'll have to look at your replies to bobajik and adger, bejar & harbor -- didn't know they were out there! that would be a great collection of stuff to have archived online somewhere together -- :) hh From andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ Fri Mar 12 21:34:32 2004 From: andrew.carstairs-mccarthy at CANTERBURY.AC.NZ (Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy) Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 10:34:32 +1300 Subject: paradigms Message-ID: Hi Heidi You said: You wrote: Did the original version of paradigm economy predict something like Williams' Instantiated Basic Paradigm requirement, such that there would be some maximally complex paradigm in a language, and the syncretisms of that paradigm are carried over to all the other simpler paradigms, plus some? Or did paradigm economy only make claims about the cross-classifications predicted by having a certain number of distinct affixes? Only the latter. What it said was that you can't have more paradigms (= inflection classes) for a given wordclass than there are competing inflectional exponents for whichever inflectional cell (or combination of feature values) is most generously endowed with exponents. So, in my German example, the prediction would be that there should be no more than four inflection classes, because there are four exponents available for the most generously endowed cell, i.e. the Plural. Too strong a claim, as you can see. I did indeed have things to say about syncretism (a whole chapter on it in my 1987), but that was distinct from paradigm economy. As for Williams's IBP idea -- it would be nice if it were true, but there is too much counterevidence, I think: the syncretisms in a given wordclass in a given language don't always nest neatly like Russian dolls. There's a huge range of data on syncretism now available on line at the Surrey Syncretism Database run by the Surrey Morphology Group (Grev Corbett, Dunstan Brown and colleagues), and publications are emerging from there too. You asked: I guess what I really want to know is whether there's some paper of yours that details the evolution of the paradigm economy idea, from its former to its new instantiation, with the reasons for the changes? My Language 1994 article compares my newer idea (blur avoidance) with the original paradigm economy idea, and attempts to show that blur avoidance is better. It captures what's good about paradigm economy, it allows for counterexamples to strict PE such as German, and it is easy to see how a child could learn an inflection class system incorporating blur avoidance (whereas strict paradigm economy posed learnability problems). The last gasp of pure paradigm economy was in my chapter in Frans Plank (ed.) _Paradigms: The Economy of Inflection_ (Mouton, 1991). I proposed there baroque elaborations, involving 'primary' and 'secondary' reference forms and the like, to try to take care of prima facie counterevidence (as in German). That's all superseded. But I also develop there further my argument that affixal inflection behaves differently from nonaffixal, and it's only when two lexemes differ affixally that they count as being in different inflection classes from the point of view of blur avoidance (or paradigm economy). That, I think, is still correct. Thus I differ from Greg Stump, and perhaps agree with DM, in thinking that there is an important theoretical difference between affixation and nonconcatenative processes. It may indeed be that affixes are 'Vocabulary items', as per DM, whereas things such as umlaut and ablaut are not. You said: i'll have to look at your replies to bobajik and adger, bejar & harbor -- didn't know they were out there! that would be a great collection of stuff to have archived online somewhere together -- The Transactions of the Philological Society shouldn't be hard to get hold of in most places. If your library doesn't subscribe, it should! It must be the cheapest linguistic journal in the world -- only 10 UK pounds a year for two issues. I'd be happy to have the stuff archived, though, provided that is consistent with the copyright requirements of TPhS and Blackwell (the publisher). Best Andrew From thaian1 at HCM.VNN.VN Fri Mar 19 16:47:37 2004 From: thaian1 at HCM.VNN.VN (Thai An) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 23:47:37 +0700 Subject: English conversion Message-ID: Dear All, I'm doing a research on English word formation focusing on conversion. Any of you happen to know articles (on WWW) about it? Thanks. Thai An Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Fri Mar 19 17:14:39 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 10:14:39 -0700 Subject: possible rule environments (from John Frampton) In-Reply-To: <468DDDC0BAEBD648821F71AF87A0284B0F8078@cantwe2.giga.canterbury.ac.nz> Message-ID: Dear all, In an attempt to understand the phenomenal vs. epiphenomenal paradigm brouhaha, I took a look the Ackerman and Stump paper "Paradigms and periphrastic expression: ..." that was recommended to us by Dan Everett. There seems to be (in Mari, a Uralic language) the equivalent (at least for the purposes of my question) of the following: I am not going. We are not going. You are not going. You are not going. He is not wending. They are not going. Note the choice of /wend/ in the 3sg. The point is that allomorphic selection of the lower root form appears to depend on the phi-features at the higher node. Has allomophy (or readjustment) which depends on the syntactic environment rather than the local intra-word environment been discussed in the DM literature? Thanks, John Frampton -- Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions. (Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his opening statement to the tribunal) -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Fri Mar 19 23:35:54 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 16:35:54 -0700 Subject: English conversion Message-ID: Dear Thai An, Conversion, also known as zero-derivation, raises a couple of interesting issues relating to DM. First, zero-affixation. DM takes the position that some Vocabulary items are phonologically null (zero). There's some discussion of this issue in Halle & Marantz's 1993 paper in _The View from Building 20_, though with respect to inflection, rather than derivation. Second, the nature of derivation. DM postulates that there is no generative lexicon: word-formation is a syntactic (and post-syntactic) process. You may be interested in Marantz's 1997 paper "No escape from syntax", in which he argues that lexical roots don't have syntactic categories such as N, V, A; instead, nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. are created by merging with functional heads in the syntax. There's been a lot of work following up on this proposal (try Googling "category-neutral roots syntax") . Good luck with your research. -Martha >Dear All, > >I'm doing a research on English word formation focusing on >conversion. Any of you happen to know articles (on WWW) about it? > >Thanks. > >Thai An >Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh City -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From anevins at MIT.EDU Sat Mar 20 00:29:26 2004 From: anevins at MIT.EDU (Andrew Nevins) Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 19:29:26 -0500 Subject: possible rule environments (from John Frampton) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: >The point is that allomorphic selection of the lower root form >appears to depend on the phi-features at the higher node. Has >allomophy (or readjustment) which depends on the syntactic >environment rather than the local intra-word environment been >discussed in the DM literature? > Yes, by Julie Legate on Irish pronoun/agreement complementarity. AIN From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Sat Mar 20 23:10:31 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2004 18:10:31 -0500 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation Message-ID: Dear all, I read the Ackerman and Stump paper that was mentioned here in the course of the paradigm discussion. Their criticisms of "syntactic approaches" to morphology are rather wide of the mark because they have some incorrect ideas about what theories like Distribute Morphology are all about. Nevertheless, the verb forms from Mari (a Uralic language) which they discuss do seem to pose a problem for DM, at least superficially. Not the (purported) problem that they focus on, but a problem nevertheless. In what is called the first-past tense, for example, negated verbs are much like "didn't forms" in English, with an auxiliary verb bearing inflection and negation and the verb root standing apart. The problem is that there are two forms of the root, one of which is used in the 3pl and the other elsewhere. The problem is to account for the dependence of root allomorphy (or readjustment, or suffixation, or whatever) on agreement, which is attached to a different word. I had some thoughts on the matter which I wrote up and posted at http://www.math.neu.edu/ling/friends/mari.pdf . Since some others of you may also have taken a look at the Ackerman and Stump paper, I thought there might be some interest. - John Frampton From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Sun Mar 21 19:32:43 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 12:32:43 -0700 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation In-Reply-To: <20040320180459.114C.JFRAMPTO@lynx.dac.neu.edu> Message-ID: ... hi all! I haven't read any of the relevant stuff by stump&ackerman, or you, John, but I'm having trouble perceiving the issue raised by the allomorphy/suppletion cases you're describing below. You wrote: In what is called the first-past tense, for example, negated verbs are much like "didn't forms" in English, with an auxiliary verb bearing inflection and negation and the verb root standing apart. The problem is that there are two forms of the root, one of which is used in the 3pl and the other elsewhere. The problem is to account for the dependence of root allomorphy (or readjustment, or suffixation, or whatever) on agreement, which is attached to a different word. I don't see why, within DM, it should matter whether a conditioning feature for allomorphy/suppletion/readjustment, etc., is within the same phonological word or not. What should matter is that the feature be sufficiently syntactically local for the relevant insertion or readjustment rule to 'see'. Allomorphy/suppletion/readjustment of a verb stem in the context of a subject agreement feature, doesn't seem too strange to me, whether the verb stem is actually affixed to the tense/agr head or not, and even if a negation head intervenes structurally. What such facts DO bear on, I think, is the issue of how big the locality domain that a VI can be sensitive to is. Is it just string- or tree-adjacent features/material? Is it any features anywhere in its extended projection (or phase)? Is it any features upwards in the tree but not downwards? Is it features of heads but not features of phrases? etc. (See, e.g., JDB's 2000 Itelmen allomorphy paper for the Maryland Morphology Mayfest). This is clearly an empirical issue, whose answer should be determined by looking cross-linguistically at facts like these -- but I don't see anything about the architecture of DM that will preclude a treatment of these facts. Indeed, since DM is an explicitly post-syntactic theory of morphology, I would think that we'd have a better shot at it than pre-syntactic theories, which might have a problem getting featural info from one item to affect an item in a different phonological word before the syntax has introduced the first item's featural info into the structure. But perhaps I'm missing something? Is there some part of the problem I'm not percieving? yrs suppletively, hh From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Mon Mar 22 20:08:37 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 15:08:37 -0500 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation In-Reply-To: <1079897563.6d47ba3ee2c64@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: > ... hi all! I haven't read any of the relevant stuff by stump&ackerman, > or you, John, but I'm having trouble perceiving the issue raised by the > allomorphy/suppletion cases you're describing below. > > You wrote: > > In what is called the first-past tense, for example, negated > verbs are much like "didn't forms" in English, with an auxiliary > verb bearing inflection and negation and the verb root standing > apart. The problem is that there are two forms of the root, one > of which is used in the 3pl and the other elsewhere. The problem > is to account for the dependence of root allomorphy (or > readjustment, or suffixation, or whatever) on agreement, which is > attached to a different word. > > I don't see why, within DM, it should matter whether a conditioning > feature for allomorphy/suppletion/readjustment, etc., is within the > same phonological word or not. What should matter is that the feature > be sufficiently syntactically local for the relevant insertion or > readjustment rule to 'see'. Allomorphy/suppletion/readjustment of a > verb stem in the context of a subject agreement feature, doesn't seem > too strange to me, whether the verb stem is actually affixed to the > tense/agr head or not, and even if a negation head intervenes > structurally. > What such facts DO bear on, I think, is the issue of how big the > locality domain that a VI can be sensitive to is. Is it just string- or > tree-adjacent features/material? Is it any features anywhere in its > extended projection (or phase)? Is it any features upwards in the tree > but not downwards? Is it features of heads but not features of phrases? > etc. (See, e.g., JDB's 2000 Itelmen allomorphy paper for the Maryland > Morphology Mayfest). This is clearly an empirical issue, whose answer > should be determined by looking cross-linguistically at facts like > these -- but I don't see anything about the architecture of DM that > will preclude a treatment of these facts. Indeed, since DM is an > explicitly post-syntactic theory of morphology, I would think that we'd > have a better shot at it than pre-syntactic theories, which might have > a problem getting featural info from one item to affect an item in a > different phonological word before the syntax has introduced the first > item's featural info into the structure. > > But perhaps I'm missing something? Is there some part of the problem I'm > not percieving? No, you are not missing anything. I took it as a given that we would like vocabulary items to have highly local context conditions on their use--- restricted to the syntactic word in which the features they realize appear. - John Frampton From hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Mar 22 20:39:42 2004 From: hharley at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Heidi Harley) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 13:39:42 -0700 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation In-Reply-To: <20040322150053.65FB.JFRAMPTO@lynx.dac.neu.edu> Message-ID: hi john! No, you are not missing anything. I took it as a given that we would like vocabulary items to have highly local context conditions on their use--- restricted to the syntactic word in which the features they realize appear. Ah, I see. Obviously the more restricted the locality domain, the better -- but I don't think there's any deep assumption about the DM framework at stake. Maybe it'll turn out to be small, maybe big... One question: by 'restricted to the syntactic word' are you meaning something like 'restricted to sister X? terminal nodes (mother a single X?)' (like those created in the usualish idea of how head-movement works, and maybe also by Merger Under Adjacency)? Or is there another idea of 'syntactic word' that you're referring to? best, hh From jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA Mon Mar 22 20:43:18 2004 From: jonathan.bobaljik at MCGILL.CA (Jonathan David Bobaljik) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 15:43:18 -0500 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation In-Reply-To: <20040322150053.65FB.JFRAMPTO@lynx.dac.neu.edu> Message-ID: At 15:08 -0500 3/22/04, John Frampton wrote: > >No, you are not missing anything. I took it as a given that we would >like vocabulary items to have highly local context conditions on their >use--- restricted to the syntactic word in which the features they >realize appear. > >- John Frampton My recollection of what I've read (read as an invitation for clarification or correction): Suppletive alternations in verb stems for characterstics of their arguments are attested in a number of languages, even in languages with no morphological agreement (paradigmatic or affixal) for the GF in question. In some cases, this is classificatory (a limited set of shapes: to give a round object ? to give a straight object), but in other cases suppletion is reported to be for person (and, impressionistically, more often) number of an argument. For example, Gilligan 1987 (USC diss) presents Waskia, which has subj-verb agreement only, except for 'give' which has suppletive forms for psn/# of the indirect object. (I'm writing from home and relying on the second hand report in Murasugi 1994). This looks like John's characterization of the Mari cases, and suggests that suppletion is not (morphological)-word-constrained. [What's a syntactic word?] A view I thought I had gleaned from the literature is that such suppletive agreement-like alternations (as opposed to simpe stem-selection alternations with related stems) are typically restricted to internal arguments. I thought I had seen this stated explicitly in Dixon's 1994 book on ergativity (as a restriction to S/O), but couldn't find this when I looked again quickly. This would square with Marantz's view of locality as the syntactic domain of an Agent being the domain of "special sound or special meaning". The Mari facts appear, as presented, to challenge even that locality condition, though, if they occur relative to surface subjects rather than agents. -Jonathan -- _______________________ Jonathan David Bobaljik University of Connecticut Department of Linguistics, Unit 1145 337 Mansfield Road Storrs, CT 06269-1145 USA tel: (860) 486-0153 fax: (860) 486-0197 http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/ From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Mon Mar 22 21:28:10 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 16:28:10 -0500 Subject: synthetic/periphrastic alternation In-Reply-To: <1079987982.cd62ad8167252@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: Martha wrote: > Ah, I see. Obviously the more restricted the locality domain, the better > -- but I don't think there's any deep assumption about the DM framework > at stake. Maybe it'll turn out to be small, maybe big... If you get far enough away, it is a not a deep assumption. Up close, it seems to be of more significance. The facts seem to be that sensitivity to nonlocal syntactic context seems to be at most fairly rare. So my instinct is to say that it is impossible, and to explain the instances that appear to be nonlocal as nontransparent locality. Otherwise DM would face the problem of explaining why something that is permitted, but very rarely occurs. > One question: > by 'restricted to the syntactic word' are you meaning something like > 'restricted to sister X? terminal nodes (mother a single X?)' (like > those created in the usualish idea of how head-movement works, and > maybe also by Merger Under Adjacency)? That's it. Although personally I am suspicious of "merger under adjacency" being syntactic. But maybe. - John -- Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions. (Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, in his opening statement to the tribunal) From jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU Tue Mar 23 16:10:18 2004 From: jframpto at LYNX.DAC.NEU.EDU (John Frampton) Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2004 11:10:18 -0500 Subject: "give" and person suppletion Message-ID: My recent postings have generated some discussion of the locality of context sensitivity in lexical insertion. Bernhard Comrie wrote an interesting summary to Ling-List which bears on the question.. Date: Sun, 21 May 2000 13:02:24 +0100 From: Bernard Comrie Subject: 'give' and person suppletion http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/11/11-1166.html From kacha088 at UOTTAWA.CA Wed Mar 24 17:06:50 2004 From: kacha088 at UOTTAWA.CA (Karim Achab) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 12:06:50 -0500 Subject: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DM Message-ID: Hi everyone, Let me introduce myself quickly: currently writing a Ph.D. dissertation at University of Ottawa, under Prf. Rivero's supervision, on Event Structure and Aspect: a study of Berber verbs. I have a question regarding the association of semantic content with linguistic objects in DM. It was proposed that semantic interpretation intervenes later than vocabulary insertion. According to Harley and Noyer (2000, Formal vs. Encyclopedic Properties) "a phonological annotated syntactic representation is then interpreted in consultation with the encyclopedia, along with universal semantic mechanisms" (p. 4 in the ms I have). If the terminal nodes are not specified semantically how then can the right phonological features be targeted? In other words, at which point in the derivation is the feature [+ voiced] of the phoneme /g/ specified so that the word gap be inserted instead of the word cap in a sentence for or even cat instead of a dog ? Your help will be appreciated Karim Achab -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Wed Mar 24 19:49:13 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 12:49:13 -0700 Subject: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DM In-Reply-To: <000d01c411c2$66c74700$81accb18@pctuts5r66vlsh> Message-ID: An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kacha088 at UOTTAWA.CA Wed Mar 24 21:29:30 2004 From: kacha088 at UOTTAWA.CA (Karim Achab) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 16:29:30 -0500 Subject: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DM Message-ID: Re: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DMHello Martha, Thank you very much for your response. That obviously helps me in that it corrects my understanding of the statement that in DM there is no lexicon. So it is admitted that there is at least a lexicon / mental dictionary composed of lexical roots (?) Regards, Karim ----- Original Message ----- From: Martha McGinnis To: DM-LIST at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 2:49 PM Subject: Re: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DM Dear Karim, If the terminal nodes are not specified semantically how then can the right phonological features be targeted? In other words, at which point in the derivation is the feature [+ voiced] of the phoneme /g/ specified so that the word gap be inserted instead of the word cap in a sentence for or even cat instead of a dog ? In DM, any lexical root (cat, cap, dog, gap) can be inserted into any syntactic position provided for lexical roots. So the syntax could generate, for example, a structure with (among other things): - a subject DP containing a definite determiner and a root - a tense node specified for past tense - a verb phrase containing a verbal head, a root, and an object DP... - ...which in turn contains a definite determiner and a root. The morphophonology could then produce 'The dog chased the cat,' 'The cap built the gap', or whatever sense or nonsense you like, as long as it has the form 'The X verbed the Y'. This output is then interpreted semantically by consulting the Encyclopedia, which tells us what cats and gaps and caps and dogs are. Does that help? Best, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Wed Mar 24 21:50:49 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 14:50:49 -0700 Subject: Semantic content & linguistic objects in DM In-Reply-To: <000d01c411c2$66c74700$81accb18@pctuts5r66vlsh> Message-ID: Dear Karim, You're right, there's no *single* lexicon in DM. (There's also no generative lexicon -- all combinatorial operations are syntactic in nature.) But actually, DM assumes that linguistic information is stored in *three* places: 1. the pre-syntactic Lexicon, which contains bundles of syntactic/semantic features and (content-free) lexical roots that are selected and manipulated by the syntax. 2. the post-syntactic Vocabulary, which contains (root and non-root) items that associate phonological strings ("the", "dog", etc) with syntactic features and/or categories. 3. the post-Vocabulary Encyclopedia, which associates chunks of syntax and phonology with "encyclopedic" meaning. The Encyclopedia lists special meanings not only for lexical roots, but also meanings for phrasal idioms (which in DM include complex words). Cheers, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca From mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA Fri Mar 26 22:17:58 2004 From: mcginnis at UCALGARY.CA (Martha McGinnis) Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 15:17:58 -0700 Subject: morphosyntactic feature geometries In-Reply-To: Message-ID: My my, how time does fly. I'm FINALLY responding to Susana Bejar's posting of Feb. 29. >if an agr-head has a [group] probe then the search for a goal can >only be halted by an element in its domain that is itself specified >for some feature that entails [group]. In a language with a >plural/dual contrast, this means that both plural and dual NPs in >the domain of the probe will Match and halt it. This is very interesting. Can you send me your thesis? Or can I download it from your website? >(Note that I'm assuming a particular view of the relation >between [group] and [minimal], namely that [minimal] is a dependent of >[group], i.e. [minimal] entails [group]. This is a controversial >assumption, but see the Cowper paper mentioned by Heidi for good arguments >in support of this). This is also very interesting. I've come to a very similar (though not identical) conclusion about Person features -- Addressee entails Speaker, though perhaps in a different way. OK, I REALLY have to read that Cowper paper! >In principle, I don't think having negative features precludes having >geometric relations between features. So if we did have negative values >in syntax, we could still have a (non-privative) feature geometry. The >negative values would simply be another way of node labelling: > >(4) +Individ > / \ > +group (-group) > / \ > +min (-min) Not in principle, but perhaps in practice. For Person features, it seems that both [+Speaker] and [-Speaker] would need to be specified as [+/- Addressee]. This suggests an unstructured feature bundle. >This does, however, preclude logical underspecification, so the question >is whether or not this is a desirable outcome. What do you mean by "logical"? It would in principle be possible to have three options: [+X], [-X], and [unspecified for X] -- Halle & Marantz argue this is the case for the [obviative] feature in Potawatomi. >we wouldn't expect the existence of languages where >plural and dual NPs can match a probe, but singular NPs cannot, since the >singular NPs would be specified as [-group] and therefore should >technically be able to match a probe for [group]. It could look for the feature [+group]. Of course, this would predict that a head could also look for [-group]. Does this not happen? >In her last posting, Martha considers this question with respect to the >example of a conjoined subject like "Rolf and Martha". If I understand >correctly, I think Martha's suggestion is that If a verb in this context >needs to be marked as dual, not plural, then we need to assume negative >features in th syntax. > >plural morphology <-> [+group, -minimal] >dual morphology <-> [+group, +minimal] > >The implication, I think, is that without the possibility of a [-minimal] >specification, nothing will prevent the incorrect use of a plural marker >rather than a dual marker. I'm not sure I understand why this is a >necessary conclusion. Couldn't we just assume that vocabulary competition >ensures the correct outcome? Yes, indeed we could. That wasn't quite my concern. I was wondering whether a subject that's semantically dual ("Rolf and Martha") can be associated with a plural number representation in the *syntax* (not just with the plural morphology). If it can't, why not? The answer to this is straightforward if the plural representation is [+group, -minimal]. It's not as straightforward if the plural is just [group]. Duals are groups -- in fact, in English, sets of two are plural. So what would block using plural number for a group of two in a language that has a dual? Rolf suggested that this could be handled by Gricean implicature: the dual is more specific, so is used if duality is intended; if the plural is used, we infer that the subject is not dual, or perhaps that its duality is irrelevant. Alana's remark that duals *can* be syntactically plural supports this view: it's not an all-or-nothing matter. I'm not sure how this carries over to person, though. In a language with an inclusive first person, can people ever use the exclusive plural to refer to inclusive-we? If you can use the plural to refer to a group of two, this should be possible too... but I suspect it isn't. If not, why not? Is exclusive plural syntactically [-addressee]? Best, Martha -- mcginnis at ucalgary.ca