16.3640, Review: Morphology/Syntax/Semantics: Orgun & Sells (2005)

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Subject: 16.3640, Review: Morphology/Syntax/Semantics: Orgun & Sells (2005)

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1)
Date: 20-Dec-2005
From: Olya Gurevich < olya at berkeley.edu >
Subject: Morphology and the Web of Grammar 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:45:26
From: Olya Gurevich < olya at berkeley.edu >
Subject: Morphology and the Web of Grammar 
 

EDITORS: Orgun, C. Orhan; Sells, Peter
TITLE: Morphology and the Web of Grammar
SUBTITLE: Essays in Memory of Steven G. Lapointe
SERIES: Stanford Studies in Morphology and the Lexicon
PUBLISHER: CSLI Publications
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2497.html 

Olya Gurevich, Department of Linguistics, University of California, 
Berkeley

This volume is a collection of papers resulting from a workshop on 
morphology in memory of Steven Lapointe, held at UC Davis in April 
2000.  Lapointe, who passed away in 1999, worked on a variety of 
topics in theoretical linguistics, with a major focus on morphology and 
its relation to syntax and phonology.  The papers in this volume relate 
to the wide variety of Lapointe's research interests.  Some of the 
papers were presented at the 2000 workshop; some describe further 
developments on presented work; finally, some papers by Lapointe's 
close colleagues were added later.

SYNOPSIS

The volume contains a preface by Lenora Trimm, Chair of the 
Linguistics department at UC Davis; a short introduction by the 
editors, C. Orhan Orgun and Peter Sells; eleven papers or varying 
lengths; and a full list of Steven Lapointe's publications.  The papers 
are ordered roughly by linguistic subfield, from morphophonology to 
morphological expression and morphosyntax, to syntax and semantics.

Larry M. Hyman and C. Orhan Orgun, in ''Endocyclicity and Paradigm 
Non-Uniformity'', argue that cyclic phonology does not necessarily 
result from constraints on paradigm uniformity, i.e. the tendency of 
morphologically related word forms to be phonologically similar.  They 
examine morphologically conditioned consonant mutation in Bantu, 
triggered by the addition of a causative suffix but not by the 
applicative morpheme.  When both morphemes are present, different 
groups of Bantu languages demonstrate different phonological effects; 
in particular, one group ends up with a consonant that is different from 
the mutated consonant, but not the same as the underlying 
consonant.  The authors argue for a cyclic analysis of all three types 
of languages within Paradigmatic Sign-Based Morphology (Dolbey 
and Orgun to appear, Orgun 1996), and suggest that cyclic phonology 
may disrupt paradigm uniformity.

''Remarks on Gerunds,'' by James P. Blevins, concerns so-called 
hybrid categories, like gerunds in English.  He suggests that gerunds 
should be treated as lexical entries underspecified for word class 
properties.  As a result, no special category is necessary to represent 
mixed cases; rather, structures that incorporate them license the 
appropriate interpretations.  Blevins takes an intuition expressed in 
Chomsky (1970), expands it and updates earlier analyses, especially 
one by Pullum (1991).  The advantage of the underspecification 
treatment is that it allows a unified representation of gerundive and 
derived nominals.  The same approach is then expanded to analyze 
Welsh deverbal nouns.  

In ''Rules about Paradigms,'' Gregory T. Stump shows that paradigms 
need to be an explicit part of a language's grammar, not just an 
epiphenomenon resulting from the application of morphosyntactic 
rules.  He presents two types of rules that seem to refer explicitly to 
inflectional paradigms.  The first is ''rules of abstraction'', where the 
realization of some paradigmatic cells is determined by other 
paradigmatic cells, regardless of the specific morphology of the forms 
in them.  Several kinds of abstraction rules are presented, with 
examples from Sanskrit.  The second type concerns interactions 
between ordered rule blocks: the particular interaction of rule blocks in 
one part of a complex inflectional system may explicitly refer to the 
rule-block interaction in a different part of the system.  Since rule 
blocks make explicit reference to paradigms, this type of rule-block 
interaction also supports the explicit need for paradigms.  The 
discussion is framed in terms of Paradigm-Function Morphology 
(Stump 2001).  Finally, the author makes a plea for a theory of 
morphology that has separate principles from theories of syntax.

Jerry Sadock's ''Optimal Morphology'' makes an argument for 
autonomous morphology in which inflectional forms compete to satisfy 
constraints imposed by various syntactic, semantic, and morphological 
factors rather than being deterministically constructed by the syntax.  
The argument is based on an Internet exploration of case marking on 
conjoined pronouns ''you and I'' vs. ''you and me''.  The suggested 
implementation is a sort of stochastically-based optimality theory, 
although the author does not present a specific formalism.

Andrew Spencer, in ''Towards a Typology of 'Mixed 
Categories,''' examines possible relationships between lexemes: 
morphological, syntactic and semantic.  He suggests that most often, 
the relations between the three layers in a lexicon are one-to-one, so 
that a single morphological class (e.g. adjectival inflection) 
corresponds to a single syntactic class (modifier) and a single 
semantic class (denoting a property), but that there can exist 
mismatches in all possible combinations of properties.  He presents 
examples of most types of mismatches, relying on various types of 
transpositions and unusual derivations.  The major theoretical point is 
that languages can 'subvert the canonical mappings' between 
morphology, syntax, and semantics, in many possible ways, and these 
possibilities must be key in describing the lexicon of a given language.

''Dual Lexical Categories and Inflectional Morphology'' by James Yoon 
argues that inflected forms and mixed lexical categories are 
fundamentally alike in that the features determining phrase-internal 
syntax differ from the features determining external syntax.  This fact 
is fairly well established for mixed categories.  For inflectional 
categories, Yoon presents arguments from Korean and Salish to 
demonstrate that features of the root are responsible for internal 
syntax, whereas inflectional features are responsible for external 
syntax, and the two may be independent.  Yoon examines these two 
types of categories within Lexicalist approaches to morphology (such 
as Pollard and Sag 1994), where they are treated as fundamentally 
different, and suggests an extension to Lapointe's Dual Lexical 
Category Theory (DLC; Lapointe 1993; 1999) so as to accommodate 
inflectional morphology.

Patrick Farrell's ''Prepositional Small Clauses in English: A Dual-
Category Analysis'' looks at English phrases like 'the pope in a bikini' 
and argues that such phrases are subject-containing small clauses 
headed by a preposition.  The author presents evidence that the small 
clauses behave like DPs with respect to the rest of the sentence, and 
like subject-containing PPs internally.  He suggests an analysis along 
the lines of Lapointe's DLC, arguing that the heads of such small 
clauses are prepositions (P) with respect to internal syntax, and 
determiners (D) with respect to external syntax.

''Morphological and Constructional Expression and Recoverability of 
Verbal Features'' by Peter Sells deals with the auxiliary 'ha' ('have') in 
Swedish, which in some contexts is optional.  A careful examination of 
such contexts reveals that 'ha' can be omitted when some other verb 
in the clause overtly expresses finiteness, or when finiteness can be 
recovered from context, such as from the presence of certain 
auxiliaries or nominative subject pronouns.  An analysis is presented 
within Optimality-Theoretic Lexical-Functional Theory (Bresnan 2000, 
Kuhn 2001).

Almerindo Ojeda and Tamara Grivicic, in ''The Semantics of Serbo-
Croatian Collectives,'' discuss a regular class of nouns in Serbo-
Croatian that have separate forms for singular and plural individuals, 
and singular and plural collections of individuals.  The semantics of 
such nouns are analyzed within a model-theoretic approach 
developed in (Ojeda 1993).  The basic claim is that the sets of 
possible individuals and their combinations into groups form a 
mereological lattice, and the word forms pick out different sub-parts of 
this lattice.

Greg Carlson's ''When Morphology . . . Disappears'' examines several 
cases in which otherwise expected morphological markers are absent, 
e.g. lack of articles, case-marking, and doubled clitics.  The contexts 
with missing morphology involve weak indefinite or generic 
interpretations of nouns.  The author proposes a multi-level semantic 
analysis in which the interpretation of weak indefinites can happen at 
the initial, lexical levels of meaning assignment, whereas the 
interpretation of specific and definite noun phrases requires more 
contextual information and thus must happen at the later, sentence-
related levels.  Thus, there is no reason to assume that the absence 
of morphology carries meaning; rather, weak indefinites correspond to 
a ''zero'' meaning, and definites receive additional meaning carried by 
overt morphology.

In ''The Puzzle of Ambiguity,'' Thomas Wasow, Amy Perfors, and David 
Beaver examine the relation between linguistic theories and 
ambiguity.  They suggest that despite being extremely widespread, 
ambiguity in natural language is not accounted for in any obvious way 
by existing theories of linguistic analysis, language use, evolution, or 
processing.  They evaluate several speculative suggestions for the 
communicative function of possible sources of ambiguity, and come to 
the conclusion that it remains a very difficult problem, and much more 
research is needed to place it properly within the study of natural 
language.

EVALUATION

The papers in this volume represent a wide spread of linguistic topics, 
reflecting the diversity of Steven Lapointe's interests.  The quality of 
the papers is almost uniformly high, and many of the contributors are 
researchers well-known in their fields.  A common thread in many of 
the papers is that morphology has separate principles of organization 
from syntax or phonology.

Thematically, the largest group of papers concerns ''dual'' (or ''mixed'') 
lexical categories, reflecting one of Lapointe's most important 
contributions to the discipline (Lapointe 1993, 1999).  It is perhaps 
useful here to summarize the main point of Lapointe's theory.  He 
looks at cases, such as gerunds, that represent mismatches between 
phrase-internal and phrase-external syntax, e.g. ''Their reading the 
paper was unexpected.''  The analysis involves dual categories <X|Y>, 
where X and Y are major lexical categories, such that X determines 
the external syntactic distribution of the phrase it heads, and Y 
determines internal syntactic properties of that phrase.  Thus, English 
gerunds are represented as <N|V>, behaving as nouns externally and 
as verbs phrase-internally.

Blevins deals with some of the same data as Lapointe and expresses 
a similar intuition that categorial hybrids fulfill multiple functions within 
a single phrase.  However, his well-argued analysis involves under-
specification rather than over-specification of the properties of such 
hybrids.  Spencer, on the other hand, views the idea of dual, or mixed, 
categories as somewhat misguided, because it reifies the notion 
of 'category' and makes it sound more stable than it really is.  He 
argues that what we think of as part-of-speech categories is simply 
one of the ways in which different levels of grammar (morphology, 
syntax, and semantics) can be mapped onto each other.  However, he 
does not specify how such possible mappings may be implemented in 
a grammar, so it is conceivable that Blevins' under-specification 
analysis of gerunds could fit into Spencer's expanded typology.

The papers by Yoon and Farrell represent extensions of Lapointe's 
DLC theory.  Farrell argues convincingly that prepositional small 
clauses have a DP-like external distribution and suggests that they 
are headed by prepositions.  From here, it is easy to see how an 
analysis of prepositions as <D|P> categories would work, although the 
arguments that the clauses are, indeed, headed by prepositions seem 
to depend crucially on the assumptions of X-bar theory, and more 
theory-independent evidence would be welcome.  Yoon's suggestion 
that inflectional morphology is a case of mixed categories is 
interesting; however, his arguments against existing Lexicalist views of 
inflection seem somewhat problematic.  He assumes a very simple 
version of the Head-Feature Principle in which all properties of the 
head must be passed up to the higher node.  However, it is easy 
enough to imagine that only some of the features of a word (i.e. just 
the inflectional features) are passed up to determine external syntax, 
while only some of the features (i.e. just the root features) are used to 
determine internal syntax.  Lapointe's DLC theory was designed 
primarily for lexical categories; it seems that modifying it to work for 
inflection is a radical step that may not be necessary given a 
sufficiently sophisticated view of the Lexicalist proposals.

Two of the papers touch on paradigms.  Stump provides very 
convincing arguments for the inclusion of paradigm structure in 
grammar.  Unfortunately, some of his arguments are a bit difficult to 
follow without knowing the details of Paradigm-Function Morphology 
(Stump 2001).  Hyman and Orgun suggest that not only does 
grammar include paradigms, but it also explicitly specifies their 
structure.  Although this was not a major part of their paper, some 
explanation as to why this should be, and what kinds of constraints 
grammar may put on paradigms, would have been a good addition.

Several papers concern Optimality Theory and, more generally, 
constraint satisfaction and ranking.  Sadock, dealing with 
morphological choice, suggests that linguistic forms must comply with 
a set of probabilistically ranked constraints on form, syntax, semantics, 
etc.  He makes a convincing argument that there are different kinds of 
pressures acting on a speaker when making this choice.  This 
approach, however, needs more elaboration: it is unclear exactly how 
a constraint-ranking analysis would work and what role is given to 
individual speaker parameters such as dialect, speech register, etc.  
Sells analyzes optionality as two possible constraint rankings: one in 
which the auxiliary is omitted, and one in which it is present.  However, 
it is unclear when speakers prefer one ranking over another, i.e. 
whether there are additional discourse factors affecting the choice, or 
whether some speakers omit the auxiliary more often than others.

The papers on semantics round out the volume nicely, although they 
seem somewhat disconnected from the rest of the papers and do not 
display the same sophistication as others, especially in morphological 
or syntactic matters.  In Ojeda and Grivicic's analysis, it is unclear, 
given the denotational similarity between individualized plurals and 
collective forms, how the different word forms are semantically 
different.  The assumption that morphological derivation must 
correspond exactly to semantic derivation also leads to a strange 
conclusion that the meaning of the root underlying all the count nouns 
is a mass noun.  Carlson's analysis of missing morphology would 
benefit from a reference to other articles arguing in favor of 
paradigms, where the contrast between the presence and absence of 
morphology could automatically signal a contrast in meaning.  While 
his suggestion that missing morphology corresponds to missing 
semantics is intriguing, there is too little data to support the 
overarching conclusions about how indefinites are marked 
morphologically or semantically.

Finally, some more general critical remarks are in order.  It is stated in 
the introduction that some of the papers were presented at the 2000 
workshop on morphology at UC Davis.  However, it is often unclear 
from the papers themselves whether the same material was presented 
at the workshop, or whether they were included in the volume later.  
Such clarifications would have given a more accurate picture of the 
workshop.  Also, there seems to be no interaction between the 
papers.  Given that some of the authors attended the same workshop, 
and that many of the papers deal with similar topics, some amount of 
cross-reference would make the volume more coherent as a unit.  In a 
similar vein, some of the authors present very technical analyses 
without explaining the necessary background for their respective 
theories.  Given that this is a fairly broad-coverage collection of 
papers, it would have been nice to see more effort to make them 
accessible to the general reader.

REFERENCES

Bresnan, Joan (2000)  Optimal Syntax.  In J. Dekkers, F. van der 
Leeuw, and J. van de Weijer, (eds.), Optimality Theory: Phonology, 
Syntax, and Acquisition.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 334-385.

Chomsky, Noam (1970)  Remarks on Nominalization.  In R.A. Jacoms 
and P.S. Rosenbaum, (eds.), Readings in English Transformational 
Grammar.  Waltham: Ginn and Company, 232-286.  [Reprinted in 
Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar.  The Hague: Mouton, 1-
61].

Dolbey, Andrew, and C. Orhan Orgun (to appear)  Phonology-
Morphology Interaction in a Constraint-Based Framework.  In C. Reiss 
and G. Ramchand, (eds.)  Handbook on Interface Research in 
Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Kuhn, Jonas (2001). Generation and Parsing in Optimality Theoretic 
syntax: Issues in the formalization of OT-LFG.  In P. Sells, (ed.), 
Formal and Empirical Issues in Optimality Theoretic Syntax. Stanford: 
CSLI Publications, 313-366.

Lapointe, Steven G. (1980) A Theory of Grammatical Agreement, 
Ph.D. Dissertation.  University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Lapointe, Steven G. (1993) Dual Lexical Categories and the Syntax of 
Mixed Category Phrases. I In A. Kathol and M. Bernstein, (eds.), 
Proceedings of the Eastern States Conference on Linguistics.  Dept. 
of Linguistics, Cornell University, 199-210.

Lapointe, Steven G. (1999)  Dual Lexical Categories vs. Phrasal 
Conversion in the Analysis of Gerund Phrases.  In P. DeLacy and A. 
Nowak, (eds.), University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in 
Linguistics 24: Papers from the 25th Aniiversary.  University of 
Massachusetts, Amherst: GLSA, 157-189.

Ojeda, Almerindo (1993)  Linguistic Individuals.  [CSLI Lecture Notes, 
31].  Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Orgun, C.Orhan (1996)  Sign-Based Morphology and Phonology with 
Special Attention to Optimality.  Ph.D. Dissertation, University of 
California, Berkeley.

Pollard, Carl and Ivan Sag (1994)  Head-Driven Phrase Structure 
Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pullum, Geoffrey K. (1991)  English nominal gerund phrases as noun 
phrases with verb-phrase heads.  Linguistics 29: 763-799.

Stump, Gregory T. (2001) Inflectional Morphology: A Theory of 
Paradigm Structure.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Olya Gurevich is a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at UC Berkeley.  Her 
research interests include morphology, syntax, and semantics; and 
cognitive and computational linguistics.  She is currently completing 
her dissertation, "Constructional Morphology: The Georgian Version."





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