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<p>The general issue that Mae Carroll brought up is indeed important
to keep in mind: There is often no unique solution to grammatical
analysis, something that has been known to linguists since
Yuen-Ren Chao's classic paper on phonemic non-uniqueness from 1934
(see <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://dlc.hypotheses.org/3381">https://dlc.hypotheses.org/3381</a>).</p>
<p>Somehow linguists keep forgetting this old insight, acting as if
there were a unique solution after all and we simply have not
searched hard enough. Cognitively oriented linguistics shifted the
focus to mental grammars, hoping that the phychological
perspective would help select the true grammar out of the many
possibilities (e.g. by an evaluation metric, or by a
parameter-setting model). But of course different speakers could
have different mental grammars, and perhaps all they share is a
set of social conventions – and these social conventions can be
described in multiple ways.</p>
<p>For the goal of rigorous and complete description, this is not a
problem – one may even say that variety is good because of
different esthetic preferences (and because students have multiple
ways of guessing a right answer :-)).</p>
<p>But for the goal of general understanding (of Human Language,
i.e. g-linguistics), we need cross-linguistic generalizations,
which must be based on comparative concepts (see my 2021 paper:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005158">https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005158</a>).</p>
<p>So I think that for comparative work on grammar, such as Phillip
Rogers's and Tim Zingler's work on morph length, we do need a way
of identifying morphs in a uniform way, using the same criteria in
all situations and in all languages. (The issue is actually the
same as was brought up on this list a few weeks ago, by people
like Volker Gast and Mark Donohue:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/2024-September/011692.html">https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/2024-September/011692.html</a>)</p>
<p>Best,</p>
<p>Martin<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 21.10.24 01:37, Mae Carroll via
Lingtyp wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAL6crXCpBW76gsLxatL42jX1iCRQoYER0W28tBNpam55g9cGXw@mail.gmail.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<div dir="ltr">Hi Joe
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Not really in direct answer to your question but you raise
a really interesting point that we all rub against when both
teaching and describing languages with complex morphology,</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Sacha Beniamine (Surrey) and I have a paper under review
discussing this and related problems in the context of
morphological theory and typology. It's what people have
called 'The Segmentation Problem' (Manning 1998; Beniamine
& Naranjo 2021); basically while linguists can be trained
to do segmentation, there is no single algorithm that a
linguist or a computer can apply to the segmentation of words
into component morphs to produce a consistent output that also
aligns with how linguists traditionally think about these
things. Andy Spencer (2012, p.92) has talked about this, he
says: “when we look
at the practice of grammarians, it should be clear from a
cursory glance through descriptions of familiar
morphologically complex languages that there is no consensus
on segmentation even for extremely well-studied languages.”</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>The Nida example provided by Christian is really still the
best version out there but it can't be formalised in an
explicit way but I have also found it very useful for
teaching. I think it's a really fascinating problem.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I also think this makes sense. Descriptive linguists,
myself included, like to use the concept of morphemes when
writing grammars because they are intuitive, useful and we all
learn them but they are a theoretical notion, i.e. a minimal
pairing of form and meaning. But so much of morphological
typology has shown that below the word level (and above in
many cases) the alignment of meaning and form is rarely so
neat or isomorphic. Further, many, if not most, morphological
theories either eschew the notion or use a very specific
definition that doesn't really correspond to the traditional
definition most of us were trained to think about. </div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Anyway, just some thoughts on the topic. <br>
<br>
Best<br>
Mae<br>
<br>
Beniamine, S. and M. Guzmán Naranjo. 2021. Multiple alignments
of inflectional
paradigms. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in
Linguistics 4(21) .<br>
<br>
Manning, C.D. 1998. The segmentation problem in morphology
learning. In Proceedings of the Joint Conferences on New
Methods in Language Processing and
Computational Natural Language Learning, NeMLaP3/CoNLL ’98,
Stroudsburg,
PA, USA, pp. 299–305. Association for Computational
Linguistics.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Spencer, A. 2012. Identifying stems. Word Structure 5(1):
88–108</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at
10:56 PM Zingler, Tim via Lingtyp <<a
href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org"
moz-do-not-send="true" class="moz-txt-link-freetext">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote"
style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div class="msg3624381778661661700">
<div dir="ltr">
<div id="m_4949563496317178455divtagdefaultwrapper"
style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif"
dir="ltr">
<div id="m_4949563496317178455divtagdefaultwrapper"
style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif,Helvetica,EmojiFont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",NotoColorEmoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",EmojiSymbols"
dir="ltr">
<p>Dear Joe, dear all,</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<p>Phillip Rogers and I have a paper coming out with
LT any day now where we look at that issue for a
worldwide sample of 25 languages and about 1,500
affixes. The bottom line is as follows: both types
are usually monosyllabic, but when they are not,
prefixes tend to be sub-syllabic (i.e., vowelless)
more often than suffixes, whose second-favorite
option is disyllabic size. Those results are
statistically significant. So in a way, both your
guiding principles are correct.</p>
<br>
Previous research on that issue, with
compatible results, can be found in Bybee et al.
(1990), in this volume:</div>
<div id="m_4949563496317178455divtagdefaultwrapper"
style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif,Helvetica,EmojiFont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",NotoColorEmoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",EmojiSymbols"
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<br>
</div>
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dir="ltr">
<a
href="https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.20?srsltid=AfmBOopGoDDksgrf9l02wZ41FuMVBL8d5wdfgVZ6EW_uOndXCFIWFl63"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.20?srsltid=AfmBOopGoDDksgrf9l02wZ41FuMVBL8d5wdfgVZ6EW_uOndXCFIWFl63</a></div>
<div id="m_4949563496317178455divtagdefaultwrapper"
style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif,Helvetica,EmojiFont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",NotoColorEmoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",EmojiSymbols"
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<br>
</div>
<div id="m_4949563496317178455divtagdefaultwrapper"
style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif,Helvetica,EmojiFont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",NotoColorEmoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",EmojiSymbols"
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Best,</div>
<div id="m_4949563496317178455divtagdefaultwrapper"
style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif,Helvetica,EmojiFont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",NotoColorEmoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",EmojiSymbols"
dir="ltr">
<br>
</div>
<div id="m_4949563496317178455divtagdefaultwrapper"
style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:Calibri,Helvetica,sans-serif,Helvetica,EmojiFont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",NotoColorEmoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",EmojiSymbols"
dir="ltr">
Tim<br>
<div style="color:rgb(0,0,0)">
<hr style="display:inline-block;width:98%">
<div id="m_4949563496317178455divRplyFwdMsg"
dir="ltr"><font style="font-size:11pt"
face="Calibri, sans-serif" color="#000000"><b>Von:</b>
Lingtyp <<a
href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>>
im Auftrag von Joe Blythe via Lingtyp <<a
href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a>><br>
<b>Gesendet:</b> Sonntag, 20. Oktober 2024 07:22<br>
<b>An:</b> <a
href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true"
class="moz-txt-link-freetext">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org</a><br>
<b>Betreff:</b> [Lingtyp] Explicating morpheme
boundaries</font>
<div> </div>
</div>
<div>
<div><span
style="font-family:Aptos,sans-serif;font-size:medium">Dear typologists,</span></div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin:0cm;font-size:medium;font-family:Aptos,sans-serif">
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin:0cm;font-size:medium;font-family:Aptos,sans-serif">
I’d like some help please coming up with a
better rule of thumb for explicating morpheme
boundaries to students. I teach a third year
undergraduate morphosyntax unit. When
beginning with orthodox agglutinative
morphology, I usually give my students a kind
of rule of thumb, that when presented with a
particular problem set, they should generally
allocate as much phonological material as
possible to the root (or stem), and the
remainder can be allocated to an affix. I
don’t recall where I learned this, but it
always seemed to me the sensible thing to do.
Whether it is justified I’m not so sure. There
are however occasions when it seems sensible
to ensure that an affix contains at least a
vowel. Yet there are certainly some affixes
that lack a nucleus (the examples I’m thinking
of are all suffixes). So rightly or wrongly, I
have two guiding principles here that are
pushing in opposite directions. And there are
always a few students who get all the glosses
correct but have carved the joints
differently. These solutions look odd to me
but I struggle to explain why I find them
unsatisfactory. Now for every language it is
usually possible determine where to carve the
joints, given enough data. But when presented
with a small dataset for some random language
(perhaps without even a name), how should we
explain why prefixes generally need vowels?
Actually, is this last point even true? I feel
these issues has probably been discussed
somewhere at length. If so, can you point me
to some relevant literature, as I’d like to
provide some advice that’s typologically
grounded, not on what feels like the right
thing to do. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin:0cm;font-size:medium;font-family:Aptos,sans-serif">
All the best</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin:0cm;font-size:medium;font-family:Aptos,sans-serif">
Joe</p>
</div>
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<div><font
color="#424242"><span style="font-size:13px"><b>Joe Blythe</b></span></font></div>
<div><font
color="#424242"><span style="font-size:11px">Associate Professor </span></font><font
color="#424242"><span style="font-size:11px">| </span></font><span
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style="color:rgb(66,66,66);font-size:11px">Macquarie University</span><font
color="#424242"><span style="font-size:11px"> </span></font></div>
<div><font
color="#424242"><span style="font-size:11px">Room 514, 12 Second Way, </span><span
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style="font-family:Calibri,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:11px">Vice
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/">https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/</a></pre>
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