paradigms

[Daniel L. Everett]

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