A Semantic Account of Quasi-Lexemes in Modern English - Processing Semiotic Units of Greek or Latin Origin into Lexical Units

Testing quasi-lexemes with theories of compounding enables me to analyze their specificity and limitations. Quasi-lexemes have a semantic content like complete lexemes do, but are constrained by their morphological incompleteness. Despite the fact that their lexical categories are not readily discernible, there is evidence for derivational lineages in Greek and Latin, and these derivations account for the division between primary and synthetic patterns in compounding. For that reason, quasi-lexemes can legitimately be said to obey the constraints of complete lexemes in terms of the syntactic and semantic relations. The only problem is their belonging to three lexical categories only (verb, noun, adjective), which compels me to defend that, although quasi-lexemes form compounds and are liable to undergo paradigmatic extension opening up the way for productivity, at the same time, they tend to participate in compounding in a more restrained and conventional way than complete lexemes

Derivational Trapping And The Morphosyntax Of Inflectionlessness

The broad objective of this dissertation is to advance our understanding of how grammatical operations are formulated in the postsyntactic module of the grammar. To that end, the dissertation examines the distribution of agreement morphemes, and especially the distribution of exceptionally inflectionless elements, whose lack of agreement morphology can affect other operations such as postsyntactic movement, in some cases interfering with these operations, yielding ungrammaticality. The dissertation pursues a serial rule-based approach within the Distributed Morphology (DM) framework (Halle and Marantz 1993; Embick and Noyer 2001, 2007; Arregi and Nevins 2012; Harley 2014; a.o.), focusing chiefly on postsyntactic operations that produce and refer to agreement morphology (‘node-sprouting’) and postsyntactic operations that displace heads onto neighboring elements. The key innovation of the current model is that postsyntactic operations distinguish between their triggering environments and the actual execution of a change. A theoretical consequence of making this distinction is that a derivation can crash when the conditions for application of an operation are satisfied but the change itself cannot be executed, yielding ungrammaticality. This state of affairs is referred to as derivational trapping. The evidence that bears on the theory of how postsyntactic rules are formulated comes from exceptionally inflectionless (EI) elements in various languages, including Bulgarian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS), German, Greek, Latin, Icelandic, Italian, and Russian. These EI elements belong to some syntactic category – such as adjective – whose members are specified to bear agreement morphology, while EI elements lack this morphology. The distributional properties of these elements is important for our understanding not only of the representation of inflectionlessness, but also of postsyntactic movement, the separation between the narrow syntax and the postsyntactic module, and the ways in which crashes in the postsyntactic module arise. Beyond the evidence from inflectionlessness for derivational trapping, the dissertation also examines other phenomena that motivate this approach, including lexical gaps, coordination, and other forms of postsyntactic movement. Chapter 1 defines derivational trapping and articulates a model of the postsyntax, with special attention paid to two types of postsyntactic operations: i) node-sprouting, the operation which produces dissociated morphology such as agreement morphemes, and ii) postsyntactic movement. This chapter motivates an account of node-sprouting in which the operation may target a terminal node, a morphological word (MWd) (in the sense of Embick and Noyer 2001), or a phrase, and argues that node-sprouting at the MWd occurs prior to linearly defined movement operations. It also synthesizes various case studies from the literature to motivate an account of postsyntactic movement, whose locality is argued to be restricted by adjacency, in a way defined by the stage of linearization at which the operation is specified. In Chapter 2, I claim that exceptional inflectionlessness is (often) a morphological fact that is encoded postsyntactically. Consequently, given the modularity of narrow syntax and the postsyntactic module, it is predicted that inflectionlessness can affect postsyntactic processes but not the narrow syntax. I evaluate this hypothesis by examining how the absence of agreement morphology affects postsyntactic movement and other operations in Latin, Icelandic, Bulgarian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (BCS), Italian, and Russian. For Bulgarian and BCS, I offer a derivational trapping account to capture patterns of ungrammaticality. Chapter 3 investigates German adjectival inflection, and demonstrates that its distribution is best stated in linear terms, thereby supporting its postsyntactic status, and it also demonstrates that the distribution of inflection supports the hypothesis that node-sprouting can happen at the phrasal level. I also demonstrate how exceptional inflectionlessness among adjectives is sensitive to linear order, and offer a derivational trapping account of the inability for such adjectives to be stranded by noun phrase ellipsis. Chapter 4, extends the account of derivational trapping to three other phenomena beyond agreement morphology: lexical gaps, postsyntactic movement into coordinate structures, and the (postsyntactic) formation of English possessive pronouns. I connect the stride gap (Yang 2016) to the feature structure and morphophonology of participles and preterites, showing how lexical gaps can give rise to derivational trapping due to the structure of morphophonological rules. I also argue on the basis of coordination data from various Romance languages for a derivational trapping account of postsyntactic ATB violations, with a refinement of the ATB constraint that permits certain types of attested putative violations. Lastly, I argue that derivational trapping can occur in the production of English possessive pronouns; the account captures surprising patterns of ungrammaticality that arise when an internally complex possessor contains a pronoun. Chapter 5 summarizes the findings of the dissertation, pointing to limitations of the current study as well as to directions for future work

Compounding in Namagowab and English: (exploring meaning creation in compounds)

This essay investigates compounding in Namagowab and English, which belong to two widely divergent groups of languages, the Khoesan and Indo-European, respectively. The first motive is to investigate how and why new words are created from existing ones. The reading and data interpretation seeks an understanding of word formation and an overview of semantic compositionality, structure and productivity, within the broad context of cognitive, lexicalist and distributed morphology paradigms. This coupled with history reading about the languages and its people, is used to speculate about why compounds feature in lexical creation. Compounding is prevalent in both languages and their distance in terms of phylogenetic relationships should allow limited generalizing about these processes of formation. Word lists taken from dictionaries in both languages were analyzed by entering the words in Excel spreadsheets so that various attributes of these words, such as word type, compound class (Noun, Verb, Preposition, Adjective and Adverb) and constituent class could be counted, and described with formulae, and compound and constituent meaning analyzed. The conclusion was that socio historical factors such as language contact, and aspects of cognition such as memory and transparency, account for compounding in a language in addition to typology

Issues in Esahie Nominal Morphology: From Inflection to Word-formation

The present study is a documentation-oriented research which aims at exploring the nominal morphology of Esahie, an otherwise unexplored cross-border Kwa language. Essentially, it examines pertinent inflectional and word formation issues in the nominal domain of Esahie such as noun class system, agreement, syncretism, nominalization, and compounding. The overall goal of this thesis is to investigate and provide a comprehensive account of the attested types, structure, formation, and the lexical semantics of nouns and nominalizations in Esahie. This thesis also seeks to understand what the facts about the structure and formation of nouns and nominalizations in Esahie reveal about the nature of the interface between morphology, phonology, syntax, and semantics, and about the architecture of the grammar in general. In interpreting the Esahie data, we ultimately hope to contribute to current theoretical debates by presenting empirical arguments in support of an abstractive, rather than a constructive view of morphology, by arguing that adopting the formalism of Construction Morphology (CxM, see Booij 2010a-d), as an abstractive model, comes with many advantages. We show that the formalism espoused in CxM is able to deal adequately with all the inflectional and word formation issues discussed in this thesis, including the irregular (non-canonical) patterns which are characterized either by cumulative exponence or extra-compositionality. With regards to compounding, this study confirms the view (cf. Appah 2013; 2015; Akrofi-Ansah 2012b; Lawer 2017) that, in Kwa, notwithstanding the word class of the input elements, the output of a compounding operation is always a nominal. This characterization points to a fascinating (mutual) interplay between the word-formation phenomena of compounding and nominalization, since the former operation invariably feeds into the latter. Overall, this thesis shows that nominalization is a prominent word-formation operation in Kwa grammar. Data used in this thesis emanates from several fieldtrips carried out in some Esahie speaking communities in the Western-North region of Ghana, as well as other secondary sources

Semantic packaging in verb-based compounds in English and Bulgarian

Semantic packaging in verb­ based compounds in English and BulgarianThe article contrasts the word­ formation types of (para)synthetic compound nouns and compound verbs in two genetically distantly related but typologically distinct languages Bulgarian and English. While the nature of synthetic compound nouns in both languages is comparable, compound verbs show greater contrasts in terms of types, restrictions and preferences for intra­ compound relations and semantic diversity. An explanation is sought in terms of the influence of word­ relevant syntactic properties on word­ formation phenomena in the two languages. An additional powerful factor is the ubiquity of conversion or syntactic promiscuity in English. A hypothesis is formulated that in Bulgarian the iconicity of word­ formation processes and products associated with the biuniqueness of the sign as understood by Natural Morphology accounts for restrictions on the absolute reign of word­ formation paradigms in Bulgarian, where the distinction between inflectional morphology and word­ formation is more sharply delineated. The typological character of the two languages is ultimately taken into account as a factor which determines the preferences for compounds in English and the prevalence of affixal derivation in Bulgarian. Kompresja semantyczna w złożeniach czasownikowych w językach bułgarskim i angielskimAutorzy artykułu dokonali porównania mechanizmów słowotwórczych wykorzystywanych przy derywacji (para)syntetycznych złożeń rzeczownikowych oraz czasownikowych w językach bułgarskim i angielskim. Badane języki wykazują dalekie pokrewieństwo genetyczne, lecz z typologicznego punktu widzenia są one od siebie różne. W odróżnieniu od mechanizmów tworzenia syntetycznych złożeń rzeczownikowych, które w obu językach są podobne, złożenia czasownikowe różnią się, jeżeli chodzi o ich typy, ograniczenia użycia oraz preferencje odnośnie relacji zawartych w określonych złożeniach, jak również różnorodność semantyczną. Omawiane zjawiska są prawdopodobnie warunkowane tym, jak cechy składniowe danego języka wpływają na jego mechanizmy słowotwórcze. Kolejnym istotnym czynnikiem, kształtującym naturę tych mechanizmów w języku angielskim, jest konwersja semantyczna. W języku bułgarskim podział na morfemy słowotwórcze i fleksyjne jest dużo bardziej wyrazisty niż w języku angielskim. Autorzy stawiają hipotezę, że przyczyny tego zjawiska należy upatrywać w dwóch czynnikach: ikoniczności bułgarskich procesów słowotwórczych oraz bijekcji znaku (w rozumieniu morfologii naturalnej). W ostatecznym rozrachunku wydaje się, że to cechy typologiczne wpływają na to, że język angielski wykazuje wyraźną skłonność do tworzenia złożeń wyrazowych, zaś w języku bułgarskim dominuje zjawisko afiksacji derywacyjnej

Binominal Lexemes in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Towards a Typology of Complex Lexemes

The typological, contrastive, and descriptive studies in this volume investigate the strategies employed by the world’s languages to create complex denotations by combining two noun-like elements, together with the kinds of semantic relation they involve, and their acquisition by children. The term ‘binominal lexeme’ is employed to cover both noun-noun compounds and a range of other naming strategies, including prepositional compounds, relational compounds, construct forms, genitival constructions, and more. Overall, the volume suggests a new, cross-linguistic approach to the study of complex lexeme formation that cuts across the traditional boundaries between syntax, morphology, and lexicon

Diachronic Morphology: an Overview

A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies Joint Committee on Eastern Europe