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<p>Dear colleagues,</p>
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<p>I wonder a little bit how theory-dependent you are discussing, using existential phrases about what language "is" or "does". Let us agree about the fact that we can differentiate spoken and signed languages in the object area from other phenomena exactly
enough and that we may be able to come to joint results of linguistic analysis of them. The theoretical side is that everyone can try to put forward a model of how he thinks that language and communication are working. But we should not confuse any model
with reality (which we perceive in a somehow constructive manner). From that view, neither "What is in a morpheme" can be described as based on a generally/absolutely valid fact, nor Randy La Polla's sentence:
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</p>
<p>"the fundamental aspect of communication is not the linguistic structure, but the interaction of the speaker and hearer in performing a communicative activity."</p>
<p>The reasons: 1. "morpheme" is a model-dependent notion; 2. The sentence comes from a constraint-based model and cannot explain all language phenomena in humans.</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>Best Regards</p>
<p>Franz Dotter <br>
</p>
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<div id="divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><font style="font-size:11pt" color="#000000" face="Calibri, sans-serif"><b>Von:</b> Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org> im Auftrag von Seino van Breugel <seinobreugel@gmail.com><br>
<b>Gesendet:</b> Dienstag, 11. Oktober 2016 18:42<br>
<b>An:</b> Stela Manova<br>
<b>Cc:</b> LINGTYP@LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG<br>
<b>Betreff:</b> Re: [Lingtyp] CfP WS at SLE2017: What is in a morpheme? Theoretical, experimental and computational approaches to the relation of meaning and form in morphology</font>
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<div dir="ltr">Dear Stela.
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<div>I think that the question "What meaning is encoded in a morpheme?" is a wrong question. Nothing is "encoded" in language. Morphemes are not boxes which contain meaning and from which a certain meaning can be taken (see Ready 1979). Morphemes, like all
other linguistic features, are tools, which are used to restrict the number of possible inferences the hearer needs to make in order to guess what the speaker's communicative intentions are. A hearer constructs their own meaning in their own brain. The communicative
process of Ostension and Inference is very clearly described in LaPolla 2003 and 2015. I think it would certainly be worthwhile to take this literature (and references therein) into account in the preparation of this very interesting conference.<br>
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<div>Yours faithfully,</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Seino van Breugel</div>
<div><br>
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<div>REFERENCES<br>
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<div>LaPolla, Randy J. 2003. Why languages differ: variation in the conventionalization of constraints on inference. In: David Bradley, Randy LaPolla, Boyd Michailovsky & Graham Thurgood (eds.).
<i>Language variation: papers on variation and change in the Sinosphere and in the Indosphere in honour of James A. Matisoff</i>. Pacific Linguistics. Canberra: Australian National University. 113-144.</div>
<div><span lang="EN-AU"><br>
</span></div>
<div><span lang="EN-AU">LaPolla, Randy. 2015. </span>On the logical necessity of a cultural and cognitive connection for the origin of all aspects of linguistic structure. In: Rik De Busser & Randy LaPolla (Eds.). Language Structure and Environment: Social
Cultural and Natural Factors. John Benjamins.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Reddy, Michael J. 1979. The conduit metaphor – a case of frame conflict in our language about language. In: Andrew Ortony (ed.)
<i>Metaphor and thought.</i> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 284–324.</div>
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<div dir="ltr">Dr. Seino van Breugel<br>
<a href="https://independent.academia.edu/SeinovanBreugel" target="_blank">https://independent.academia.edu/SeinovanBreugel</a><br>
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<div dir="ltr"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHfiZwqyWC7HfZUAQ1RH1ew" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHfiZwqyWC7HfZUAQ1RH1ew</a></div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 5:34 PM, Stela Manova <span dir="ltr">
<<a href="mailto:stela.manova@univie.ac.at" target="_blank">stela.manova@univie.ac.at</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<div dir="auto" style="word-wrap:break-word"><b>What is in a morpheme? Theoretical, experimental and computational approaches to the relation of meaning and form in morphology <br>
</b><br>
Dates: 10 – 13 September 2017 (50th SLE Meeting)<br>
Location: Zurich, Switzerland<br>
Call Deadline: 11 November 2016<br>
<br>
<b>Organizers:</b> Stela Manova1, <wbr>Harald Hammarström2 and Itamar Kastner3<br>
1University of Vienna (Vienna), stela.manova (at) <a href="http://univie.ac.at/" target="_blank">univie.ac.at</a><br>
2Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena), hammarstroem (at) <a href="http://shh.mpg.de/" target="_blank">shh.mpg.de</a><br>
3Humboldt University (Berlin), itamar.kastner (at) <a href="http://hu-berlin.de/" target="_blank">hu-berlin.de</a><br>
<br>
<br>
<div>There are enough examples in science that obvious things are the most difficult to explain: issues such as how inorganic matter turns into organic or how a child learns to understand language. There is a similar problem in morphology. It is well known
that morphemes consist of phonemes but only the former can be associated with meaning (systematically); and it is a non-trivial question how exactly this association happens. <br>
</div>
<div>There are three possible ways to approach the relation of meaning and form:<br>
A. Form and meaning emerge simultaneously;<br>
B. The association is from meaning to form;<br>
C. The association is from form to meaning. <br>
<br>
The most important difference between these scenarios consists in the fact that in scenarios B and C meaning may be assigned at the level of word, i.e. one may claim that morphemes do not have meaning of their own or even that there are no morphemes at all
(in scenario B). (Information (syntactic/morphological/<wbr>morphosyntactic) that does not refer to (phonological) form is called ‘meaning’ in this proposal.)<br>
<br>
Theoretical, experimental and computational linguistics approach word structure from different perspectives and seem to diverge with respect to which is the “right” scenario. Theoretical linguistics is interested in generalizations over meaning (features) (scenarios
A and B), both within languages and typologically: e.g., only a language with plural can have dual; or <wbr>no language makes more gender <wbr>distinctions in the non-singular than in the singular (Greenberg 1963). Experimental linguistics researches perception,
parsing, processing and production of word structure; computational <wbr>linguistics is focused on parsing and distribution of word structure. Consequently, both experimental and computational linguistics follow scenario C and their findings seem to contradict
theoretical linguistics (see below). Nevertheless, <wbr>theoretical linguists (seem to) agree that speakers have somewhat reliable intuitions about n-gram frequency over sub-word units. Thus, the goals of this workshop are threefold: to encourage interdisciplinary discussion;
to clarify and unify assumptions; and to pave the way for collaboration.<br>
<br>
Let us first illustrate the different scenarios. <i>Minimalis<wbr>t Morphology (MM)</i> (Wunderlich 1996) is an example of <b>scenario A</b>. In MM, a morpheme has form and meaning; (inflectional) morphemes are heads; a(n) (inflectional) morpheme minimally
includes a representation of its phonological form, a specification of the base’s category, and an output specification. (1) gives the specification of the 2 Sg marker -st in German (Stiebels 2011):<br>
<br>
(1) /st/; [+min]; [+2]/+V <br>
<br>
[+min] indicates that the form is bound, i.e. a morpheme; [+2] means that it contributes the specification of 2 person and “+V” indicates that -st attaches to verbs. The slash / stands for “output/input”.<br>
<br>
In <i>Realizational Morphology (RM)</i>, theories such as <i>Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM) </i>(Stump 2001) and <i>Distributed Morphology (DM) </i>(Halle & Marantz 1993), meaning and form are modeled separately and semantic derivation precedes formal derivation,
the so-called late insertion (<b>scenario B</b>). Roughly, one can predict form based on meaning, while the opposite does not hold and therefore the form-to-meaning direction is not activated in RM.<br>
<br>
PFM manipulates morphosyntactic property sets (2). A PFM representation from Stewart & Stump (2007):<br>
<br>
(2) PF(⟨L, σ⟩) = ⟨R, σ⟩<br>
<br>
The value of the paradigm function (PF) of a paradigm cell ⟨L, σ⟩ (L stands for ‘lexeme') is the pairing of this cell’s realization R with the morphosyntactic property set σ. Such a theory does not necessarily need morphemes, although in the different versions
of PFM one finds ‘roots' and ‘stems'.</div>
<div><br>
DM relies on syntactic structures and ‘morpheme’, [past] in (3) below, is an abstract unit that refers to a syntactic terminal node (INFL in this case) and its content, not to the phonological expression of that terminal. A DM representation from Bobaljik (2015):<br>
<br>
(3) Vocabulary of English (fragment)<br>
a. [past] ↔ -t /]V __ ; where V ∈ {dream, dwell etc.}<br>
b. [past] ↔ Ø /]V__ ; where V ∈ {run, hit, fly etc.}<br>
c. [past] ↔ -d /] V__<br>
<br>
To explain the fact that in DM syntactic structure derives morphological structure, Müller (2016) refers to the meaning-form dichotomy as two different dimensions of a linguistic unit: a representational and an algorithmic one respectively.<br>
<br>
In the RM literature, the assumption that semantics precedes exponence is claimed to make RM superior in comparison to incremental theories of morphology that follow scenario A because in RM one manipulates the semantic side of the derivation, which takes place
at an abstract level and is always compositional, while exponence (formal derivation) often entails idiosyncrasies.<br>
<br>
On the other hand, affixes are directly accessible through their form, i.e. affixes can be identified and processed even without having a contentful stem to attach to, as evidenced by recent <i>psycholinguistic studies</i>, which speaks in favor of <b>scenario
C.</b> For example, Crepaldi et al. (2016) uses as primes non-words and demonstrates that they facilitate lexical decisions to target words ending with the same suffix as well as that the priming effect depends on the affix position in the non-word, i.e. a
prefix in the non-word does not facilitate the recognition of a suffix in the target word, even if the prefix and the suffix share the same form. Lázaro et al. (2016) uses suffixes as primes and shows that the prime suffix facilitates the recognition of words
ending with that suffix. Both studies conclude that the priming effect of suffixes is not orthographic but morphological, i.e. the effect holds for derived and pseudo-derived words (such as corn:er) but was not found for simplex words as targets. Findings
similar to those in Crepaldi et al. (2016) and Lázaro et al. (2016) are also reported in Beyersmann et al. (2016). Additionally, Manova & Brzoza (2015) shows that native speakers, if provided with a list of existing and non-existing suffix combinations without
bases (i.e. without semantic cues), can, with a remarkably high accuracy, judge which combinations exist and which do not.<br>
<br>
In <i>computational linguistics</i>, the “emergence” of morphological structure invariably starts from form, since corpora are not annotated for meaning (Baroni 2003, among others). An approach called Unsupervised Learning of Morphology (ULM) takes raw data
such as an unannotated corpus and provides a list of affixes and stems that occur in those data. The most popular strategies on which ULM relies include comparison, grouping and weighting of substrings (of letters), see Hammarström and Borin (2011) for an
overview of ULM research. Only after the extraction of potentially related forms, semantics (in terms of semantic similarity) can be assigned (Baroni et al. 2002).<br>
<br>
The workshop will provide a platform for exchange of ideas and for an interdisciplinary discussion of the meaning-form issue in morphology. It will bring together theoretical and computational linguists (including computer scientists), psycho- and neurolinguists
(including psychologists), fieldworkers and typologists. The questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following:<br>
<br>
1. What information is encoded in a morpheme?<br>
2. Does an analysis with emphasis on either meaning (scenario B) or form (scenario C) provide evidence for a (complete) separation of form and meaning in the morpheme?<br>
3. Could it be that a morpheme relates meaning and form and semantic stimuli activate derivation through meaning, while formal stimuli activate access through form?<br>
4. How does morphology “emerge” in fieldwork, i.e. how does a fieldworker decide that something is a morpheme, is it according to A, B or C?<br>
5. How does morphology “emerge” in child language?<br>
6. What exactly does a language borrow when it borrows morphological structure such as, e.g., a plural nominal marker, if that language already has ‘plural' and its speakers are not expected to be able to perform a morpheme analysis of </div>
<div><span class="m_-5561741404034684476Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"></span>the donor language’s words?<br>
7. If important generalizations are (necessarily) stated over either meaning or form, how are the two types of generalizations related to one another; and are they both needed for an adequate characterization of speakers' knowledge of their </div>
<div><span class="m_-5561741404034684476Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"></span>language?<br>
8. Can a computational analysis based on n-gram frequency distributions and distributional semantics account for the kinds of generalizations that interest theoretical linguists and motivate the B (or A) perspective?<br>
<br>
As an alternative, non-linguistic source of inspiration, we would like to turn your attention to the following video on how computers learn to understand pictures: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40riCqvRoMs" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.<wbr>com/watch?v=40riCqvRoMs</a> (the
speaker, Fei-Fei Li, is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University). Computer vision is one of the most important areas of research in machine learning and many striking analogies with linguistic analyses can be made.<br>
<br>
We invite abstracts that are no longer than 300 words, excluding examples and references, and tackle any aspect of the form-meaning issue in morphology. Papers that report recent psycho-, neuro-, computational and theoretical linguistics research are particularly
welcome. Please submit a pdf of your abstract to <a href="mailto:stela.manova@univie.ac.at" target="_blank">stela.manova@univie.ac.at</a> <wbr>by November 11, 2016.<br>
<br>
<br>
<b>Important Dates</b><br>
<b>11 November 2016: deadline for submission of 300-word abstracts to the workshop organizers</b><br>
20 November 2016: notification of acceptance by the workshop organizers<br>
25 November 2016: submission of the workshop proposal to SLE<br>
25 December 2016: notification of acceptance of workshop proposals by SLE<br>
15 January 2017: deadline for submission of full abstracts to SLE for review<br>
31 March 2017: notification of paper acceptance<br>
10-13 September 2017: SLE conference in Zürich<br>
<br>
<br>
<b>References</b><br>
<span style="font-size:11px">Baroni, M. (2003). Distribution-driven morpheme discovery: A computational/experimental <wbr>study. In G. Booij and J. van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 2003, 213-248. Dordrecht: Springer.<br>
Baroni, M.; J. Matiasek and H. Trost. (2002). Unsupervised discovery of morphologically related words based on orthographic and semantic similarity. In Mike Maxwell (ed.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Morphological and Phonological Learning of <span class="m_-5561741404034684476Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap">
</span> <span class="m_-5561741404034684476Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap">
</span> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size:11px"><span class="m_-5561741404034684476Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"></span>ACL/SIGPHON-2002, 48-57. East Stroudsburg PA: ACL.<br>
Beyersmann, E; JC Ziegler; A Castles, M Coltheart, Y Kezilas & J Grainger (2016). Morpho- orthographic segmentation without semantics. Psychon Bull Rev 23(2): 533-9. Abstract available at: <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26289649" target="_blank">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.<wbr>gov/pubmed/26289649</a> <br>
Bobaljik, J. (2015). Distributed <wbr>Morphology. Ms. University of Connecticut. Available at: <a href="http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/papers/DM_ORE.pdf" target="_blank">http://bobaljik.uconn.edu/<wbr>papers/DM_ORE.pdf</a><br>
Crepaldi D., L. Hemsworth, C. J. Davis & K. Rastle. (2016). Masked suffix priming and morpheme positional constraints. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) 69(1): 113-28. Abstract at: <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25760942" target="_blank">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.<wbr>gov/pubmed/25760942</a> <br>
Greenberg, J. H. (ed.) (1963). Universals of Human Language. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.<br>
Halle, M. & A. Marantz (1993). Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection. In Hale K. and S. J. Keyser (eds.), The view from building 20, 111-176. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.<br>
Hammarström, H. & L. Borin (2011). Unsupervised Learning of Morphology. Computational <wbr>Linguistics 37(2): 309-350.<br>
Lázaro, M, V. Illera & J. Sainz (2016). The suffix priming effect: Further evidence for an early morpho-orthographic segmentation process independent of its semantic content. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) 69(1): 197-208. Abstract at: </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size:11px"><span class="m_-5561741404034684476Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"></span><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25801451" target="_blank">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/<wbr>pubmed/25801451</a> <br>
Manova, S. & B. Brzoza. (2015). Suffix combinability and the organization of the mental lexicon. Paper presented at the 10th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (MMM), Haifa, Israel, 7-10 September 2015. Handout available at: </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size:11px"><span class="m_-5561741404034684476Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"></span><a href="http://homepage.univie.ac.at/stela.manova/uploads/1/2/2/4/12243901/manova_brzoza_mmm2015.pdf" target="_blank">http://homepage.univie.ac.at/<wbr>stela.manova/uploads/1/2/2/4/<wbr>12243901/manova_brzoza_<wbr>mmm2015.pdf</a> <br>
Müller, G. (2016). Minimize <wbr>Satisfaction in Harmonic Serialism. Paper presented at the workshop The Word and the Morpheme. Humboldt University zu Berlin, 22.9-24.9.2016. Abstract available at: <a href="https://www.angl.hu-/" target="_blank">https://www.angl.hu-</a></span></div>
<div><span style="font-size:11px"><span class="m_-5561741404034684476Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre-wrap"></span><a href="http://berlin.de/department/staff/artemis_alexiadou/abstracts/muller.pdf" target="_blank">berlin.de/department/staff/<wbr>artemis_alexiadou/abstracts/<wbr>muller.pdf</a> <br>
Stewart, T. & G. Stump (2007). Paradigm Function Morphology and the Morphology–Syntax Interface. In G. Ramchand & C. Reiss (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces, 383-421. Oxford: Oxford University Press.<br>
Stiebels, B. (2011). Minimalist Morphology. Ms. University of Leipzig. Available at: <a href="http://home.uni-leipzig.de/stiebels/papers/handbook_morphology_stiebels_mm-2011.pdf" target="_blank">http://home.uni-leipzig.<wbr>de/stiebels/papers/handbook_<wbr>morphology_stiebels_mm-2011.<wbr>pdf</a> <br>
Stump, G. T. (2001). Inflectional morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<br>
Wunderlich, D. (1996). Minimalist morphology: the role of paradigms. In G. Booij & J. van Marle (eds.),Yearbook of Morphology 1995, 93–114. Dordrecht: Kluwer.</span></div>
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