[Lingtyp] CfP: The Determinism Assumption in Morphology (Workshop Proposal, SLE 2024)

Fri Oct 6 16:01:11 UTC 2023

The Determinism Assumption in Morphology

Proposers: Dunstan Brown (University of York)
and Neil Bermel (University of Sheffield)

We're proposing a workshop for the Societas Linguistica Europaea 2024
conference
entitled "The Determinism Assumption in Morphology" and would like to
invite relevant contributions as below.

(The 57th Annual Meeting of SLE will take place from 21 - 24 August at the
University of Helsinki; see the meeting website
<https://societaslinguistica.eu/sle2024/first-call-for-papers/> for
details.)

We welcome submissions of abstracts from researchers at any level of
seniority who are working on relevant topics; postgraduate students and
postdoctoral fellows are especially encouraged to submit. We aim to have
the workshop consider the phenomena under investigation in a diverse range
of languages and relevant sub-fields (see below for a fuller description).

Interested colleagues should submit a 300-word abstract by 10 November 2023 to
dunstan.brown at york.ac.uk. We will make selections and inform all presenters
of acceptance of their abstracts before the workshop proposal is submitted
to the Society.

Best regards,

Dunstan Brown
Neil Bermel

Many models of morphology are essentially deterministic. That is,
computation of the morphological realization yields one outcome. Recent
advances have accepted the challenge that non-deterministic morphology
poses (see Blevins, Milin and Ramscar 2017; Kapatsinski 2022), but
determinism still pervades much reasoning about both derivational and
inflectional morphology. For word-formation, different processes are
associated with different functions or meanings, rather than being treated
as manifestations of the same underlying conceptual structure with more
than one outcome. For inflection, the assumption appears to be even
stronger, namely that where we have to deal with particular inflectional
features there is by default a biunique mapping between form and function
(but with well-known violations of this such as syncretism). The
determinism assumption for morphology also forms an important contrast with
conceptions of syntax, where the structures described, in whatever form or
framework, can involve multiple constituent types for the same categorial
distinction.

Among the multiple challenges for deterministic approaches, overabundance
and defectivity are prominent examples of the challenge to the Determinism
Assumption, although by no means the only ones. The former (Thornton 2011)
represents a non-deterministic outcome where multiple forms serve what
appears to be a single function (e.g., Meakins and Wilmoth 2020), and the
latter represents the failure to converge on a mutually agreed outcome for
the language community (Sims 2015), resulting in avoidance or the
production of a variety of forms that do not enjoy broad acceptability
(Nikolaev and Bermel 2022). However, overabundance and defectivity are only
part of a bigger story. They can be construed as emerging properties of
uncertainty: either of outcome, as per Kapatsinski (2010), or more
generally in the underlying system, as per Blevins, Ackerman and Malouf
(2016), forming part of a broader spectrum of phenomena that fall within
the purview of morphological non-determinism. These include variable morph
ordering, in particular where it occurs in the same paradigm (see, for
instance, Crysmann and Bonami 2016, Riese et al 2010 on variable order in
Mari). The choice between periphrasis and synthesis (Sims 2009) is another
phenomenon that raises issues for the Determinism Assumption, as well as
apparently unmotivated stress variation (as demonstrated to be widespread
in Russian by Ukiah 1999, 2000, 2003).

This workshop is an invitation to researchers of all persuasions interested
in interrogating this Determinism Assumption and what this might tell us
about morphology in general and its relationship with other elements of
language. In doing this we welcome contributions that address: the broader
typological context of non-deterministic inflectional morphology; the
relationship between non-deterministic outcomes and frequency;
non-determinism’s relationship to the structure of the lexicon; its
sociolinguistic aspects (intersection with age, education, region or
gender); its relationship to language acquisition and attrition; its
cognitive aspects; our attempts to model non-deterministic outcomes
computationally; and our attempts to represent them in prescriptive or
norm-creating works.

Key research questions for the workshop include, but are not limited to,
the following:

   -

   Is there an underlying theoretical unity to the set of morphological
   phenomena that involve non-determinism or are they merely manifestations of
   a diverse range of factors that shape morphological systems?
   -

   To what extent do the manifestations of non-determinism in morphology
   change over the life-cycle, according to age, region, educational
   background or gender?
   -

   Is non-determinism to be seen as a challenge in child language
   acquisition, or a natural consequence of the world, linguistic and other,
   in which humans grow up?
   -

   Is it correct to consider that linguistic authorities (such as language
   institutes) contribute to a deterministic view of standard morphological
   systems?
   -

   What types of methods and models (computational, corpus-based or
   experimental) should we apply in the study of non-deterministic
   morphological phenomena?

A major contribution of the workshop will be to expand on our understanding
of non-determinism as it arises from corpus data; appears in experimental
data; and can be reflected in computational approaches as well as in
language planning.

In experimental studies, non-determinism can be interpreted as reflecting a
mediation between individual speaker variation, or alternatively as an
outcome that individual speakers/hearers can entertain as a viable option
without problems. This tension is visible most clearly in a
psycholinguistic approach to non-deterministic features, found both in
adult and child language. On one account, each speaker can have a
deterministic outcome in his/her idiolect, with non-determinism being
simply the by-product of differences between speakers, and therefore an
issue for reception but not for production. On a second account, at least
some subset of speakers in a language have non-deterministic systems,
pushing non-determinism to the centre of concerns for production as well as
for reception.  In corpus and experimental work, the existence of more
available forms of a word has been shown, paradoxically, to facilitate
quicker processing, which gives non-deterministic paradigm cells, with
their greater number of potential realisations, an advantage (Lõo et al.
2018; Lõo et al. 2022).

Sociolinguistic approaches can highlight the way certain outcomes vary
across different regions, educational levels of speakers, age and gender.
In some instances this argues for the first account above, where variation
only occurs on a societal rather than an individual level, but in other
situations it is . On a larger level, studying standardized languages that
have a significant educational, publishing and regulatory apparatus may
display different tendencies from non-standardized languages, which often
evince a greater variety of outcomes without any visible communicative
barriers for participants. Within standardized languages, there are also a
variety of approaches, with some prescribing the possibility of
non-deterministic outcomes in the form of sanctioned variation, while
others attempt to forestall non-deterministic outcomes by decreeing that
certain cells shall remain unfilled.

Corpus accounts are significantly affected by the extent to which
non-deterministic outcomes surface in the source data, which is affected by
corpus size and composition (Kováříková et al. 2020; Nikolaev and Bermel
forthc.). Contributions are encouraged that explore the interplay of these
factors in developing robust methods for work on non-deterministic cells.
The workshop also welcomes a wide range of computational approaches that
address the Determinism Assumption in morphology, from generative
rule-based descriptions to empirical supervised or unsupervised model
construction.

References

Blevins, J. P., Ackerman, F., & Malouf, R. (2016). Morphology as an
adaptive discriminative system. In D. Siddiqi & H. Harley (Eds.), Morphological
Metatheory (pp. 271–302). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.229.10ble

Blevins, J. P., Milin, P., & Ramscar, M. (2017). The Zipfian Paradigm Cell
Filling Problem. In Perspectives on Morphological Organization (pp.
139–158). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004342934_008

Crysmann, B., & Bonami, O. (2016). Variable morphotactics in
Information-based Morphology. Journal of Linguistics, 52(2), 311–374.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022226715000018

Kapatsinski, V. (2010). What is it I am writing? Lexical frequency effects
in spelling Russian prefixes: Uncertainty and competition in an apparently
regular system. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 6(2).
https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt.2010.007

Kapatsinski, V. (2022). Morphology in a Parallel, Distributed, Interactive
Architecture of Language Production. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence,
5, 803259. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2022.803259

Kováříková, D., Škrabal, M., Cvrček, V., Lukešová, L., & Milička, J.
(2020). Lexicographer’s Lacunas or How to Deal with Missing Representative
Dictionary Forms on the Example of Czech. International Journal of
Lexicography, 33(1), 90–103. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecz027

Lõo, K., Järvikivi, J., Tomaschek, F., Tucker, B. V., & Baayen, R. H.
(2018). Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word
frequency and paradigmatic effects. Morphology, 28(1), 71–97.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-017-9318-7

Lõo, K., Tomaschek, F., Lippus, P., & Tucker, B. V. (2023). Paradigmatic
and Syntagmatic Effects in Estonian Spontaneous Speech. Language and Speech,
66(2), 474–499. https://doi.org/10.1177/00238309221107000

Meakins, F., & Wilmoth, S. (2020). Overabundance resulting from language
contact: Complex cell-mates in Gurindji Kriol. In P. Arkadiev & F. Gardani
(Eds.), The Complexities of Morphology (pp. 81–104). Oxford University
Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198861287.003.0004

Nikolaev, A., & Bermel, N. (2022). Explaining uncertainty and defectivity
of inflectional paradigms. Cognitive Linguistics, 33(3), 585–621.
https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2021-0041

Nikolaev, A., & Bermel, N. (forthc.). Studying negative evidence in Finnish
language corpora. To appear in Word Structure 16(2).

Riese, T., Bradley, J., Yakimova, E., & Krylova, G. (2010). Онай марий
йылме: A comprehensive introduction to the Mari language. Department of
Finno-Ugric Studies, University of Vienna.

Sims, A. (2007). Why defective paradigms are, and aren’t, the result of
competing morphological patterns. Proceedings from the Annual Meeting of
the Chicago Linguistic Society, 43(2), 267–281.

Sims, A. D. (2015). Inflectional Defectiveness (1st ed.). Cambridge
University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107053854

Thornton, A. M. (2011). Overabundance (multiple forms realising the same
cell): A non-canonical phenomenon in Italian verb morphology. In M. Maiden,
J. Charles Smith, M. Goldbach, & M. Hinzelin (Eds.), Morphological
autonomy: Perspectives from Romance inflectional morphology (pp. 357–381).
Oxford University Press.

Ukiah, N. (1999). Some Notes on Mobile Stress in the Past Indicative Forms
of Russian Verbs amongst Moscow Speakers. Russian Linguistics, 23(3),
233–260.

Ukiah, N. (2000). Mobile Stress in the Four-Part Paradigms of Modern
Russian Verbs and Adjectives. Russian Linguistics, 24(2), 117–147.

Ukiah, N. (2003). The Stress of Russian Nouns in -a and -я of Zaliznjak’s
Pattern d’ (спина́ Type). Russian Linguistics, 27(1), 1–22.
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