No lo he visto 'masque' yo? : Emergence and properties of a negative polarity item in Peninsular Spanish

This paper shows that Spanish 'más que' (lit. more than) is much more than a comparative construction synchronically. Phonological, syntactic, and semantic evidence shows that various grammatically different entities hide under this single spelling. The most prominent of these is a (phonologically unstressed) negative polarity item with a meaning "only" or "just". By means of robust synchronic and diachronic corpus evidence, this paper explores its morphosyntactic properties and geographic distribution in the modern language, as well as when and how a comparative expression with no polarity associations could come to grammaticalize into a negative polarity item

Stress and stem allomorphy in the Romance perfectum: emergence, typology, and motivations of a symbiotic relation

Perfective stem allomorphy and stress are morphological traits which interact in complex ways in Romance verbal inflection. This article surveys the whole range of variation of these traits across Romance varieties, typologizes the observed interactions between the two, and examines attested and unattested possibilities. A comparison between the modern-day and the original Latin systems suggests that there is a strong pan-Romance bias against having verbs with a concrete combination of properties: perfective root-stress and no perfective stem alternation. This is a combination of traits that would have frequently resulted in diagonal syncretisms between past and present given the phonological changes attested in the daughter languages. Homophony avoidance (and the adaptive-discriminative role of morphology more generally) are therefore argued to motivate the observed bias. Keywords: change biases; diachrony; homophony; morphology; predictability; syncretis

The Typological Diversity of Morphomes: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Unnatural Morphology

This is the first typologically-oriented book-length treatment of morphomes, systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes. In the first half of the book, Borja Herce outlines the theoretical and empirical challenges associated with the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with related notions such as syncretism, homophony, segmentation, and economy, among others. He also presents the different ways in which morphomic structures in a language have been observed to emerge, change, and disappear. The second part of the book contains its core contribution: a database of 120 morphomes across 79 languages from a range of families, which are presented and analysed in detail. A range of findings emerge as a result, including the idiosyncratic nature of morphomes in the Romance languages, the existence of cross-linguistically recurrent unnatural patterns, and the preference for more natural structures even among morphomes. The database also allows further explorations of other issues such as the effect of learnability and communicative efficiency on morphological structures, and the lexical and grammatical informativity of morphs and their distribution

Morphological autonomy and the long-term vitality of morphomes: stem-final consonant loss in Romance verbs and paradigmatic analogy

Morphologists of different backgrounds disagree with respect to the degree of autonomy of the morphological component of language from syntax and semantics. A precise and objective quantification of the diachronic productivity of Romance morphomes is the piece of evidence most crucially missing from this debate. On the basis of 502 morphophonological innovations associated with the loss of stem-final consonants across 63 Romance varieties, this paper quantifies the degree of productivity of different morphomes (the N pattern is found to be the most productive one) and of morphomic templates generally (15% of novel stem alternations are found to abide by them). Although a strong attraction effect is detectable for morphomes, the numbers suggest that the morphological autonomy and longevity of stem alternations in the family might have been somewhat overstated. For an optimal account of the morphological innovations observed, reference to inherited morphomic structure, semantic structure, and to frequency of use are needed in similar proportions

A typological approach to the morphome

407 p.Esta tesis constituye la primera monografía de orientación eminentemente tipológica sobre morfomas. Este término denota estructuras morfológicas sistemáticas cuya extensión paradigmática no se corresponde con distinciones semánticas o morfosintácticas como 'plural', 'genitivo singular' etc.El Capítulo 1 presenta y discute la literatura previa y cuestiones terminológicas, y el Capítulo 2 clarifica cuestiones relativas a la definición e identificación de los morfomas en casos concretos. La discusión se traslada a continuación a un plano más empírico. El Capítulo 3 discute las nociones de 'clase natural' y 'economía', y explora la relación entre morfomicidad y otras desviaciones morfológicas. La diacronía se convierte en protagonista en el Capítulo 4, donde se presentan y discuten las diferentes maneras en que pueden surgir, cambiar o desaparecer los morfomas en las lenguas.El Capítulo 5 es el central de la tesis y presenta 110 morfomas identificados por el autor en lenguas de todo el mundo. Todas estas estructuras son presentadas detalladamente junto con su historia en muchos casos. En base a la variedad observada entre morfomas, se ha definido una docena de variables independientes en torno a las cuales se estructura dicha variación. Tras operacionalizar dichas variables y establecer su valor en los 110 morfomas mencionados, se explora estadísticamente su correlación.Otro resultado derivado de esta base de datos sincrónica se refiere a la recurrencia cross-lingüística de morfomas concretos. Algunas estructuras, arbitrarias desde el punto de vista morfosintáctico o semántico (SG+3PL, 1SG+3, PL+1SG etc.), se encuentran presentes en lenguas independientes, es decir, no emparentadas ni relacionadas arealmente. Esto supone una novedad con respecto a la literatura anterior.La tesis concluye reiterando en el Capítulo 6 los resultados principales de la investigación y explorando sus implicaciones en relación a nuestro conocimiento de los morfomas en particular y del campo de la tipología y la morfología en general

A typological approach to the morphome

407 p.Esta tesis constituye la primera monografía de orientación eminentemente tipológica sobre morfomas. Este término denota estructuras morfológicas sistemáticas cuya extensión paradigmática no se corresponde con distinciones semánticas o morfosintácticas como 'plural', 'genitivo singular' etc.El Capítulo 1 presenta y discute la literatura previa y cuestiones terminológicas, y el Capítulo 2 clarifica cuestiones relativas a la definición e identificación de los morfomas en casos concretos. La discusión se traslada a continuación a un plano más empírico. El Capítulo 3 discute las nociones de 'clase natural' y 'economía', y explora la relación entre morfomicidad y otras desviaciones morfológicas. La diacronía se convierte en protagonista en el Capítulo 4, donde se presentan y discuten las diferentes maneras en que pueden surgir, cambiar o desaparecer los morfomas en las lenguas.El Capítulo 5 es el central de la tesis y presenta 110 morfomas identificados por el autor en lenguas de todo el mundo. Todas estas estructuras son presentadas detalladamente junto con su historia en muchos casos. En base a la variedad observada entre morfomas, se ha definido una docena de variables independientes en torno a las cuales se estructura dicha variación. Tras operacionalizar dichas variables y establecer su valor en los 110 morfomas mencionados, se explora estadísticamente su correlación.Otro resultado derivado de esta base de datos sincrónica se refiere a la recurrencia cross-lingüística de morfomas concretos. Algunas estructuras, arbitrarias desde el punto de vista morfosintáctico o semántico (SG+3PL, 1SG+3, PL+1SG etc.), se encuentran presentes en lenguas independientes, es decir, no emparentadas ni relacionadas arealmente. Esto supone una novedad con respecto a la literatura anterior.La tesis concluye reiterando en el Capítulo 6 los resultados principales de la investigación y explorando sus implicaciones en relación a nuestro conocimiento de los morfomas en particular y del campo de la tipología y la morfología en general

VeLeRo: an inflected verbal lexicon of standard Romanian and a quantitative analysis of morphological predictability

This paper presents VeLeRo, an inflected lexicon of Standard Romanian which contains the full paradigm of 7297 verbs in phonological form. We explain the process by which the resource was compiled, and how stress, diphthongs and hiatus, consonant palatalization, and other relevant issues were handled in phonemization. On the basis of the most token-frequent verbs in VeLeRo, we also perform a quantitative analysis of morphological predictability in Romanian verbs, whose complexity patterns are presented within the broader Romance context

The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations

Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged, while their autonomously morphological nature has never been tested quantitatively or experimentally. This is the purpose of the present study. We use context-based embeddings to explore the semantic profile of Spanish verb stem alternations. At the paradigmatic level, our findings suggest that Spanish morphomes’ cells are characterized by significantly above-chance distributional-semantic similarity. At the lexical level, similarly, verbs that show more similar patterns of alternation have also been found to be closer in meaning. Both of these findings suggest that these structures may have an extramorphological function. Using gradient distributional-semantic similarity offers a way to objectively assess the degree of (un)naturalness of a set of forms and meanings, something which has been lacking from most discussions on the structure of features and the architecture of paradigms

Measuring variation in Central Pame vowels

Central Pame (cent2145), also known by its endonym Xi’iui, is a threatened Otomanguean language spoken in central Mexico. An earlier impressionistic account described Central Pame as having an asymmetric 5-vowel system with one more front than back vowels. This study examines a set of monophthongal, oral vowels in the language. We explore the acoustic phonetic characteristics in different speakers who are bilingual (with Spanish). Results confirm that five vowel qualities can be determined acoustically. Results show three front /i, e, ɛ/, one central vowel /ɐ/ and one back vowel /o/. We find that the realisations of the front vowel /e/ differ between speakers, with young female speakers showing a more fronted vowel. The evidence suggests a vowel chain shift is taking place in front vowels

Short vs long stem alternations in Romance verbal inflection: the S-morphome

Some verbs in Romance (e.g. the reflexes of faciō 'do', dīcō 'say', habeō 'have', sapiō 'know', possum 'be able', and volō 'want') display alternations between a short (e.g. It. f-are, f-a, d-ire) and a long (e.g. It. fac-evo, dic-e, dic-evo) stem. This paper contains an exploration of the lexical and paradigmatic distribution of these stem alternations across Romance varieties to trace when they emerged, how, and why. The results suggest a comparatively early emergence as a result of the interaction between preexisting morphological predictability relations within the paradigm and an evolutionary preference for shorter forms in high-frequency word forms and lexemes