Chapter 4 Lexicon Reading and Lecture Notes

LING 650 Class Notes Ch.4 by Angelina Rubina & Laura Redden 1 CHAPTER 4 LEXICON READING AND LECTURE NOTES Lexicon – the language user’s mental dictionary. Do speakers memorize entire complex word-forms (e.g. readable, reads, washable)? their component morphemes (e.g. read, -able, -s, wash)? both? Three major positions on the content of the lexicon: a morpheme lexicon (corresponds to the morpheme-based model) contains simple, monomorphemic elements (i.e. roots and affixes) and idiosyncratic complex words (which are still created by rule); a strict word-form lexicon (consistent with the word-based model) contains all complex word-forms (predictable and idiosyncratic); a moderate word-form lexicon (consistent with the word-based model) potentially contains word-forms, morphemes and derived stems. Criticism of the chapter (according to Stan). Some of the problems set up in the chapter were sort of faux-problems used in order to make an argument and distinguish between derivation and inflection. This questions about the difference was used as a sort of “red herring” to lead you down the authors’ argumentation path. 4.1 A MORPHEME LEXICON Advantages of a morpheme lexicon Parallelism between syntax (sentences consist of words), morphology (words consist of morphemes), phonology (morphemes consist of phonemes). Elegant description of language structure: it is maximally economical because some word-forms follow the same morphological patterns in inflection, e.g. writer, reader + -s; in derivation (e.g. read + -er, -able). Problems for a morpheme lexicon Example Non-compositional (unpredictable) meaning Reader (British academic title) does not mean of some derived lexemes read + -er (as in read-er ‘any person who reads’) LING 650 Class Notes Ch.4 by Angelina Rubina & Laura Redden 2 Lack of morpheme segmentability: base modification German plurals e.g. Mutter (SING) vs. Mütter (PL) ‘mother(s)’ Serbian noun paradigm (cumulative/fused cumulative expression expression of number and case), e.g. ovc-a an affix expresses two different (NOMINATIVE, SINGULAR) morphological meanings Finnish third person singular: zero expression/a zero affix oli-n ‘I was’ morphological meaning corresponds to oli-t ‘you were’ no overt form oli ‘he/she was’ oli-mme ‘we were’ oli-tte ‘you (PL) were’ oli-vat ‘they were’ Lezgian non-absolutive noun paradigm, e.g. empty morphs sew-re-n morphemes that have form but no meanings The morpheme lexicon model is on pg. 61 (Figure 4.1) Syntax (sentence) Morphology (words and parts) Phonology (sounds) Spell out The text says that language users don’t usually memorize complex words, but in the blog, Ruthanne posed a question about idioms and phrasal verbs, or combinations of words that are fixed. An example is “let the cat out of the bag”. You can’t say “let the cat out of the box”. So, is this all storied in our brains. Well, we do have it stored that it cannot be plural (cats), for example, but it could be negated (“let’s not let the cat out of the bag”). This question about units that are larger than words points us towards the need for a word based model. In other words, idioms provide counterexamples to the morpheme based model. 4.2 A STRICT WORD-FORM LEXICON Advantages of a strict word-form lexicon The meaning of a word-form does not have to be compositional. LING 650 Class Notes Ch.4 by Angelina Rubina & Laura Redden 3 Morpheme segmentability becomes a lesser problem because word-forms (not morphemes) are the basic units of the lexicon. Unproductive (not used to create new words) morphological patterns do not pose a problem because such word-forms are listed in the lexicon. It is more cognitively realistic than a morpheme lexicon (the more often speakers encounter word-forms, the more easily these word-forms are remembered). Problems for a strict word-form lexicon Examples Lack of elegant description It lists all words Speakers are unlikely to memorize all word- Turkish forms in agglutinative (rich inflectional) languages Some morphological patterns refer to In Dutch, the allomorphy is conditioned by morpheme-based structures the morphological structure of the base: past participles are marked by the prefix ge- (e.g. spreken ‘speak’, ge-sproken ‘spoken’) unless the verb bears a derivational prefix such as be- (e.g. be-spreken ‘discuss’, be-sproken ‘discussed’, not *ge-be-sproken) Some phonological patterns refer to In Italian, casa ‘house’ is pronounced with [z] morpheme-based structures because the s occurs between vowels vs. asimmetrico pronounced with [s], not [z], because of morpheme boundary 4.3 RECONCILING WORD-FORMS AND MORPHEMES A moderate word-form lexicon – morphological structure is fundamentally word-based, but morphological patterns (that are not restricted to roots and affixes) represent secondary generalizations. Thus, both word-forms (primary role) and morphological patterns (secondary role) are stored in the lexicon. The challenges for a moderate word-form lexicon: 1) the need to decide how established a word must be to be memorized by speakers; 2) the need to account for how speakers recall words stored in the lexicon. Two types of lexical access (ways to recall a word): decomposition route – by breaking up a word into morphemes (e.g. in-, sane); direct route – by retrieving a complex word-form directly (e.g. insane). LING 650 Class Notes Ch.4 by Angelina Rubina & Laura Redden 4 Some students asked about how we access the lexicon if we are non-native speakers of a language when we are learning the language. Do non-native speakers use a decomposition route or a direct route more frequently? Stan responded that this is probably individualistic, but implied that non-native speakers may be more likely to use the decomposition route and break up a word into morphemes, while a native speaker might have a larger lexicon and just store the words directly. This would depend on speaker competence and the size of her or his lexicon. Speakers try both routes simultaneously. The factors determining which route ‘wins’: Factors Direction of influence relative token frequency of word-form more frequent word-form storage segmentability less segmentable word-form storage allomorphy more effect on base word-form storage individual speaker differences depends? non-native speaker more decomposition route Neologisms – attested novel lexemes that were not observed before. Occasionalisms (or nonce formations) – neologisms that do not really catch on. In the discussion of neologisms and occadionalisms, we considered the word “breathatarian”. This is a completely believable and understandable word, but it is a neologism because it has not been used before. It comes from the word “vegetarian” and “breath” is substituted for “veg.” In neologisms that are neologized with a derivational morpheme, it must be understood where the word came from. For example, “alcoholic” becoming “shopoholic” and “chocoholic”. It is interesting, because the “holic” is not a morpheme, but “alcohol” and “ic” are. Here the “holic” was taken and used to form neologisms, even though the morphmes are not broken up like that. CONCLUSIONS the structure of the lexicon is an active area of research; there is increasing evidence for a moderate word-form lexicon (with the balance in favor of word-based storage); morphology is fundamentally word-based. LING 650 Class Notes Ch.4 by Angelina Rubina & Laura Redden 5 CHAPTER 4 LEXICON LECTURE NOTES Review of Word Based vs. Morpheme Based Models. There was a presentation of Ch 3 CE 4 by Dennis on Tagalog in which he used a word based analysis to analyze Tagalog and explain a morphophonological problem in which the sound and stress indicated a change in word form. If you were to use a morpheme based model, you would need to apply an auto-segmental analysis. Stan explained how question formation with subject-aux inversion realizes itself as a prosodic pattern lying over the whole sentence. “An autosegmental reflex” The wh-word or rising intonation at the end of the sentence. An example is the pitch shift for imperatives in Northern Italian. Stan encouraged us to check out the additional paper that he had posted which analyzes two suffixes, one for passives and one for statives. Examples were given in this article to show that derivational morphology is needed to understand some suffixation, while inflectional morphology is needed to understand the other. This article was provided as a complement to the chapter, because the chapter appears to break apart the two concepts as sort of black and white, either/or issues for the sake of an argument, but examples from the real world shows that it is more nuanced and complicated. We discussed these words: “striped” (one syllable) versus “strip/ed” (two syllables) In Keiko’s language variety (Appalacian?), the two syllable form is grammatical, but most classmates favored the single syllable forms. In fact, the two syllable form comes from history. In English, we have several words in which we use both (“learned” versus “learn-ed”). We would use learned as past tense of learn (inflected), but then learn-ed as a sort of adjective to describe a person (derived). In addition, we have “mark-ed-ness,” and it seems that we tend to add a syllable when we use these words as adjectives. In addition, we discussed the difference between “blessed” and “bless-ed” and thought that it was mostly contextual. The two syllable form appears to come from an older form of English, and is used in more religious contexts. According to Stan, inflectional forms are not supposed to be stored independently. Zero-affix were discussed, as Laura predicted they were more common in third person singular across world languages. Scott and Micheal agreed based on historical linguistics background, and Stan explained why the third person singular was the least marked and therefore made sense as the most likely zero-affix for world languages.

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