[Lingtyp] Explicating morpheme boundaries

Sun Oct 20 23:37:04 UTC 2024

Hi Joe

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,

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.”

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.

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.

Anyway, just some thoughts on the topic.

Best
Mae

Beniamine, S. and M. Guzmán Naranjo. 2021. Multiple alignments of
inflectional paradigms. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in
Linguistics 4(21) .

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.

Spencer, A. 2012. Identifying stems. Word Structure 5(1): 88–108

Dr Mae Carroll (she/her)
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Languages and Linguistics
University of Melbourne
www.maecarroll.com

*I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land where I live and work,
the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, and pay my respects to Elders
past and present. I recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.*

On Sun, Oct 20, 2024 at 10:56 PM Zingler, Tim via Lingtyp <
lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org> wrote:

> Dear Joe, dear all,
>
>
> 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.
>
> Previous research on that issue, with compatible results, can be found in
> Bybee et al. (1990), in this volume:
>
>
> https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.20?srsltid=AfmBOopGoDDksgrf9l02wZ41FuMVBL8d5wdfgVZ6EW_uOndXCFIWFl63
>
> Best,
>
> Tim
> ------------------------------
> *Von:* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> im Auftrag von
> Joe Blythe via Lingtyp <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Gesendet:* Sonntag, 20. Oktober 2024 07:22
> *An:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> *Betreff:* [Lingtyp] Explicating morpheme boundaries
>
> Dear typologists,
>
> 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.
>
> All the best
>
> Joe
>
> *Joe Blythe*
> Associate Professor | Department of Linguistics | Macquarie University
> Room 514, 12 Second Way, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia
> Vice President (Conferences), Australian Linguistic Society
>
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