Conf érence de Laura Downing àSaint-Denis, le 8 mars

[AROUI Jean-Louis]

L'UMR 7023 a le plaisir de vous convier, dans le cadre des séances de son 
séminaire (http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/-Seminaire-de-l-UMR-7023,50-.html),

le lundi 8 mars 2010
10h00-12h00,
Université Paris VIII, 2, rue de la liberté, 93200 Saint-Denis (métro 
Saint-Denis Université, ligne 13), bâtiment D, salle D 143

à une conférence de Laura Downing (ZAS - Berlin)

intitulée

« A morphological motivation for minimality and other templates »

Résumé :
 It has been widely observed that words and morphemes in many languages of the 
world have a canonical size, and in particular that words and prosodic 
morphemes like reduplicative morphemes, also tend to be required to have a 
minimal size. Strikingly, cross-linguistic surveys show that minimal words 
cross-linguistically strongly tend to be either one or two syllables long. 
The challenge is to determine what linguistic factors this tendency follows 
from.  Since McCarthy & Prince's (1986) pioneering work, it has been claimed 
that the one or two syllable minimal size constraint follows from the 
independently motivated Foot structure of the language. Metrical feet are 
minimally (and maximally) either one (heavy) or two syllables. Morphemes 
minimally have this size so that they can be footed. There are a number of 
problems, however, with this hypothesis. For one thing, numerous languages 
with minimal morpheme constraints do not have bounded lexical stress systems, 
so metrical footing cannot provide an explanation. Surveys of the correlation 
between stress systems and minimal word size show no correlation, in fact. 
Further, the metrical approach to minimality cannot explain why there is a 
cross-linguistic tendency for derived words to be minimally longer than 
non-derived. In this talk, I motivate a different approach to minimal size 
constraints, one based on the proposal that the default morphology-prosody 
match is: 1 morpheme = 1 syllable. This constraint automatically accounts for 
why derived words tend to be minimally longer than non-derived: they by 
definition have more than one morpheme. It also provides an account for why 
languages without bounded lexical stress systems still can impose minimality 
constraints on words and other morphemes.


-- 
Jean-Louis AROUI
Université Paris 8
UFR des Sciences du Langage
2, rue de la liberté
93200 Saint-Denis
FRANCE
http://www.umr7023.cnrs.fr/-Aroui-Jean-Louis-.html
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