Upper limits to morpheme length - formal vs. functional account.

[john]

I think that folk etymologies (e.g. 'sparrow grass' for 'asparagus')
might be one way to see what the 

'comfortable' limit on phonemes per
morpheme is. It may be that people only feel the need to make 

up folk
etymologies with borrowings with more than a certain number of phonemes.


John 

On 22.12.2013 23:05, Lise Menn wrote: 

> Thanks, Dan, but at
the risk of opening another topic, I'd say that a
psycholinguistic/diachronic account doesn't obviate the need for a
formal account (or vice versa), because formal accounts and functional
accounts are different kinds of entities. They serve different purposes
and both are useful.
> Formal constraints/accounts, like macro-level
physical laws, look elegant and abstract away from particulars (think
about the simple, elegant laws relating pressure, temperature, and
volume of gases). Functional accounts are clunkier, concrete, but
provide explanations for why things are the way they are (cf. the
statistics of how molecules behave when they bump into each other, which
is way beyond me but is what underlies the simple gas laws). Both kinds
of accounts should yield testable predictions, and it seems that
different folks prefer to work more with the abstract formulations or
more with the concrete mechanics. And both kinds of people are needed to
keep a science both accessible and empirical.
> 
> Lise
> 
> Lise Menn
>
Home Office: 303-444-4274
> 1625 Mariposa Ave
> Boulder CO 80302
>
http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html
> 
> Professor Emerita of
Linguistics
> Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Science
> University of
Colorado
> ________________________________________
> From: Everett,
Daniel [DEVERETT at bentley.edu]
> Sent: Saturday, December 21, 2013 3:15
PM
> To: Lise Menn
> Cc: Funknet List;
LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORGSubject: Re: [FUNKNET] Upper limits to
morpheme length
> 
> Lise,
> 
> Great comments. These remarks likely
obviate the need for a more formal account. But now we have a bit of
both.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Dan
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Dec 21,
2013, at 17:09, "Lise Menn" <lise.menn at Colorado.EDU [4]> wrote: The
cognitive underpinnings of the Hayes and Wilson constraint (and of
Zipf's law, of course) would come from several sources that I can think
of (there might well be others): 1) the difficulty of catching all the
phonemes when you a long, unfamiliar, unanalyzed word (hard to imagine
Chaugoggagoggmanchagaugagoochaubungungamogg surviving in English without
having been written down) 2) The very sparse neighborhoods of long
monomorphemic words (that is, the rarity of pairs of long monomorphemic
words that differ by only one phoneme) means that they are identifiable
by listeners even when some of the sounds are inaudible, so
misunderstandings won't offer any barrier to elision of the sounds 3)
Speakers will abbreviate long words because - other things being equal -
they are more work to produce. Lise Lise Menn Home Office: 303-444-4274
1625 Mariposa Ave Boulder CO 80302
http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html [5] Professor Emerita of
Linguistics Fellow, Institute of Cognitive Science University of
Colorado ________________________________________ From:
funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [6] [funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu
[7]] On Behalf Of Everett, Daniel [DEVERETT at bentley.edu [8]] Sent:
Saturday, December 21, 2013 12:39 PM To: Funknet List;
LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG [9]Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Upper limits
to morpheme length Folks, Thanks for the suggestions. I just received
the following from Bruce Hayes which exactly answers my question. With
Bruce's permission, I pass this along here. All the best for the end of
one year and the beginning of another. I hope you have all finished
posting your grades and are now able to relax a bit. -- Dan 
>> 
>>> 1)
The main way to get really long morphemes, I suspect, is to borrow from
languages with which you have little contact, so you can't parse their
long polymorphemic words. Hence English Okaloacoochee, Hanamanioa,
Chaugoggagoggmanchagaugagoochaubungungamogg. 2) I think the upper limit
for English morphemes is three metrical feet. When I make up a four-foot
word it sounds odd to me, e.g. ?Okaloaseppacoochee. The famous lake
Chaugoggagoggmanchaugagoggchaubungungamogg is not an exception; it
pronounced as three separate phonological words: Chaugoggagogg,
manchaugagaug, ch[schwa]bunagungamogg. 3) If you adopt the phonotactic
model of Hayes and Wilson (LI 2008), then if you include a contraint of
the type *Struc, and train up the grammar, you get the right
predictions: *Struc gets a modest weight, which predicts a
descending-exponential probability function for words of ever-increasing
length. In this theory, the extreme unlikelihood of extremely long words
is simply an extrapolation from the moderate unlikelihood of
somewhat-long words. Best regards, Bruce Bruce Hayes Professor and Chair
Department of Linguistics, UCLA Los Angeles CA 90095-1543
bhayes at humnet.ucla.edu [1] www.linguistics.ucla/people/hayes [2]
>>

>>>>>> Please excuse the double-posting. I haven't worked
>>> on this
stuff for a while, so I will undoubtedly show my ignorance of some large
body of research, but I was wondering (due to a question from a
colleague) whether there is any work that tries to derive a maximum
morpheme length (I wouldn't think this would be the way to address the
issue, frankly, but I could be quite wrong). As the question was put to
me: "It seems to me that almost all morphemes are quite short?probably
not easy to find one with e.g. 12 phoneme segments. The question is is
there anything in known phonological theories which predict this?or is
it just assumed that morphemes can be of any length and that the reason
there are none of length e.g. 624, 578 is simply that they would be
unlearnable? The latter would be my ideal view, just as the reason that
no one uses a sentence of length 624,578 words has to do with practical
performance limitations." I know that there is work on "resizing theory"
(Pycha 2008) and various other approaches linking morphology and
metrical structure. But those approaches so far as I know offer no
principled upper bound to morpheme length. Any help would be
appreciated. Happy holidays to all, Dan Everett Links: ------ [1]
mailto:DEVERETT at bentley.edu [3]

 

Links:
------
[1]
mailto:bhayes at humnet.ucla.edu
[2]
http://www.linguistics.ucla/people/hayes
[3]
mailto:DEVERETT at bentley.edu
[4] mailto:lise.menn at Colorado.EDU
[5]
http://spot.colorado.edu/~menn/index.html
[6]
mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu
[7]
mailto:funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu
[8]
mailto:DEVERETT at bentley.edu
[9]
mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG