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Class features as probes
(2008)
In this article, we adress (i) the form and (ii) the function on inflection class features in minimalist grammar. The empirical evidence comes from noun inflection systems involving fusional markers in German, Greek, and Russian. As for (i), we argue (based on instances of transparadigmatic syncretism) that class features are not privative; rather, class information must be decomposed into more abstract, binary features. Concerning (ii), we propose that class features qualify as the very device that brings about fusional infection: They are uninterpretable in syntax and actas probes on stems, with matching inflection markers as goels, and thus trigger morphological Agree operations that merge stem and inflection marker before syntax is reached.
Die vorliegende Arbeit geht unmittelbar vom Konzept der Natürlichen Morphologie aus. Am Datenbereich der dt. Substantivflexion soll die explanative Adäquatheit und Prädiktabilität des Konzepts hinsichtlich des Aufbaus und der Veränderung eines Teilflexionssystems als Ganzes überprüft und auf dieser Basis ein Strukturmodell der dt. Substantivflexion vorgeschlagen werden. Insbesondere bei der Erfassung der Gesamtstruktur des Teilflexionssystems werden dabei Probleme des zugrundegelegten theoretischen Ansatzes deutlich werden. Mit der Diskussion und der Überprüfung theoretischer Annahmen, die diese Probleme lösen können, sowie der detaillierten Analyse des Flexionsverhaltens der dt. Substantive soll ein Beitrag zur weiteren Ausformulierung des in eine allgemeine Präferenztheorie einzuordnenden theoretischen Konzepts der Natürlichen Morphologie wie auch zur germanistischen Forschung geleistet werden.
Conventional wisdom holds that productive morphology is regular morphology. Drawing evidence from French, we argue that the description of many lexeme formation processes is simplified if we hold that a productive rule may give rise to inflectionally irregular lexemes. We argue that the notion of a stem space allows for a straightforward description of this phenomenon: each lexeme comes equipped with a vector of possibly distinct stems, which serve as bases for inflectional form construction. The stem space is structured by default relations which encode the regular pattern of inflection; (partial) irregularities occur when a lexeme specifies a stem space violating the default relations. Derived irregularity is then the effect of a productive lexeme formation rule which specifies an irregular stem space for its output.
This paper presents a general approach to verbal inflection with special emphasis on suppletion phenomena. The paper focuses on French, but the approach is general enough to apply to a wide variety of languages.
In the first part of the paper, we show that suppletion is not erratic: suppletive forms tend to always appear in groups, in definite areas of verbal paradigms. Our analysis is based on the observation of a number of dependency relations between inflectional forms of verbs (somewhat similar to rules of referral (Zwicky 1985, Stump 1993)). We define for each language a stem dependency tree based on these observations, which allows one to predict the whole paradigm of every verb in the language on the basis of a minimal number of idiosyncratic stems. We use the tree to minimize the quantity of redundant phonological information that has to be listed in the lexicon for a given lexeme, assuming that an optimal analysis of inflection should be able to derive all and only intuitively predictable inflectional forms from a single representation.
The second part of the paper attempts to integrate the analysis in an HPSG hierarchical lexicon. Morphological dependency relations are represented directly by mentioning a lexical sign in another sign's lexical entry. The approach to suppletion proposed in the first part is made explicit using a combination of online type construction and default constraints on the phonology of dependent signs.
In this paper we discuss two contrasting views of exponence in inflectional morphology: the atomistic view, where content is associated individually with minimal segmentable morphs, and the holistic view, where the association is made for the whole word between complex content and constellations of morphs. On the basis of data from Estonian and Swahili, we argue that an adequate theory of inflection should be able to accomodate both views. We then show that the framework of Information-based Morphology (Crysmann and Bonami, 2016) is indeed compatible with both views, thanks to relying on realisation rules that associate m units of forms with n units of content.
Eine am Gebrauch orientierte Sprachbeschreibung ist auch in der Grammatik mit sprachlicher Variation und mit Veränderungen des Gebrauchs konfrontiert. Anhand dreier Beispiele aus dem zentralen Bereich der deutschen Grammatik soll gezeigt werden, dass sich in der Variation, die man dort beobachtet, eine funktionale Nutzung des vorhandenen Inventars darstellt. Diese funktionale Nutzung ist dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass seltenere und daher synchron auffälligere Konstruktionen für spezifische Funktionen genutzt werden. Der Genitiv ist tatsächlich aus formalen Gründen seiner Morphologie auffällig. Er ist nicht vom Dativ unterschieden beim Femininum, doppelt markiert bei den starken Maskulina und Neutra und nur beschränkt bildbar im Plural. Diese Eigenheiten beschränken seine Nutzung als normaler Kasus. Gerade aber die auffällige Markierung mit dem Element {-(e)s} hat dazu geführt, dass der Genitiv nun zur Anzeige genereller Abhängigkeit genutzt wird, und zwar als Genitivattribut wie als unmarkierte Form bei einer Gruppe von Präpositionen (wie dank, trotz, wegen, entlang usw.). Beim zweiten Fall, dem Verhältnis von starken und schwachen Verben, zeigt sich, dass der Übergang von der starken zur schwachen Flexion, die erkennbar den Normalfall im morphologischen System darstellt, gerade häufige und in ihrer Bedeutung grundlegende Verben (wie geben, nehmen usw.) nicht betrifft, so dass die starke Flexion als Markierung für solch einen zentralen Status gelten kann. Der dritte Punkt hängt damit zusammen: das Ausgreifen der würde-Form als Konjunktiv II (auch bei gut markierten starken Verben) ist so im größeren Zusammenhang der Nutzung von Klammerformen zu sehen.
In German, non-finite forms of verbs that are traditionally labelled as "nominalized infinitives", but are better categorized as gerunds, can show very unusual features. Although they carry a definitive article and therefore clearly seem to belong to the class of nouns, they still govern objects and adverbials in exactly the same way the verb does. It is therefore argued that in spite of the determiners, these forms are essentially verbal in nature. The syntactic functions they fulfil can be anything from subject or object to adverbial or attributive modifier, i. e. functions that are usually fulfilled by subordinate clauses. Since this is the same kind of behavior that converbs in languages like Turkish show, this leads to the suggestion that they can indeed be considered as a functionally similar to converbs.
The indigenous languages of North America have played a critical role in discussions of the universality of part-of-speech distinctions. In this paper, we show that Oneida does not include a grammatical distinction between nouns and verbs. Rather, Oneida inflecting lexical items are subject to two cross-cutting semantic classifications, one that concerns the sort of entities they describe, the other the sort of semantic relation they include in their content. Labels such as ‘noun' and ‘verb' can still be used for cross-linguistic comparison, as the semantic partition of lexical items corresponds to canonical nouns and verbs according to morphologists and some typologists. But the meta-grammatical status of these labels is quite distinct from the status of corresponding labels in Indo-European languages like English.
In diesem Beitrag geht es darum, Flexion primär über die Abgrenzung zu ihren beiden morphologischen Nachbardomänen, die Derivation und die Klise, zu bestimmen. Aus diesen beiden morphologischen Typen entwickelt sich auch neue Flexion. Mit dem Vergleich von Flexion, Derivation und Klise und mit der Frage nach der Entstehung von Flexion sollen die Ziele und Prinzipien von Flexion sichtbar gemacht werden. Der zweite Schwerpunkt dieses Artikels besteht in einer detaillierten Analyse einer sich anbahnenden Flexivierung via Klitisierung im Deutschen: Mit den Präposition-Artikel-Verschmelzungen (im, ins, zur, au/m, in'n) liegt ein Paradebeispiel derzeit beobachtbarer und sukzessive sich herausbildender Flexion vor. Diese Verbindungen sind zwar noch als Vorstufen der Flexion zu bewerten, doch läßt sich über die Untersuchung dieses komplexen Grammatisierungsprozesses diskutieren, was noch geschehen muß, damit im Deutschen Präpositionalflexion entsteht. Kapitel 1 befaßt sich kurz mit dem Begriff der Flexion, Kapitel 2 mit der Entstehung von Flexion aus Derivation und Klise. Kapitel 3 widmet sich dem Beispiel der deutschen Präposition-Artikel-Verschmelzungen.
Die Flexionsmorphologie befasst sich mit der "Beugung" von Wörtern, d. h. mit der systematischen Kombination von (meist) Lexemen mit bestimmten sog. grammatischen Informationen (auch: Flexionskategorien). So wird die Wortart der Substantive im Deutschen mit den Informationen Kasus und vor allem Numerus (Singular und Plural) versehen.
Based on the notion of a lexicon with default inheritance, I address the problem of how to provide a template for lexical representations that allows us to capture the relatedness between inflected word forms and canonically derived lexemes within a broadly realizational-inferential model of morphology. To achieve this we need to be able to represent a whole host of intermediate types of lexical relatedness that are much less frequently discussed in the literature. These include transpositions such as deverbal participles, in which a word's morphosyntactic class changes (e.g. verb ⇒ adjective) but no semantic predicate is added to the semantic representation and the derived word remains, in an important sense, a "form" of the base lexeme (e.g. the 'present participle form of the verb'). I propose a model in which morphological properties are inherited by default from syntactic properties and syntactic properties are inherited from semantic properties, such as ontological category (the Default Cascade). Relatedness is defined in terms of a Generalized Paradigm Function (perhaps in reality a relation), a generalization of the Paradigm Function of Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump 2001). The GPF has four components which deliver respectively specifications of a morphological form, syntactic properties, semantic representation and a lexemic index (LI) unique to each individuated lexeme in the lexicon. In principle, therefore, the same function delivers derived lexemes as inflected forms. In order to ensure that a newly derived lexeme of a distinct word class can be inflected I assume two additional principles. First, I assume an Inflectional Specifiability Principle, which states that the form component of the GPF (which defines inflected word forms of a lexeme) is dependent on the specification of the lexeme's morpholexical signature, a declaration of the properties that the lexeme is obliged to inflect for (defined by default on the basis of morpholexical class). I then propose a Category Erasure Principle, which states that 'lower' attributes are erased when the GPF introduces a non-trivial change to a 'higher' attribute (e.g. a change to the semantic representation entails erasure of syntactic and morphological information). The required information is then provided by the Default Cascade, unless overridden by specific declarations in the GPF. I show how this model can account for a variety of intermediate types of relatedness which cannot easily be treated as either inflection or derivation, and conclude with a detailed illustration of how the system applies to a particularly interesting type of transposition in the Samoyedic language Sel'kup, in which a noun is transposed to a similitudinal adjective whose form is in paradigmatic opposition to case-marked noun forms, and which is therefore a kind of inflection.
The unusual development of the PDE [present-day English] s-genitive can be historically motivated, if the 's form is supposed to be not a mere leftover of the Old English (henceforth OE) casemarking, but the outcome of the merging of two patterns: the inflectional genitive ending (levelled to -s) and the construction "John his book" (henceforth 'possessive-linked genitive') during the Middle and the Early Modem English phases.
As my corpus analysis will show, the semantic and syntactic constraints ruling the occurrence of the 's pattern in the time interval of the rise of the 's-pattern (1400 - 1650) are the same ones as those ruling the occurrence of the possessive-linked genitive.
This hypothesis is further confirmed by cross-language comparison (with the other West Germanic languages, especially Afrikaans).