Advances in Morphology

217 Pages·1997·5.936 MB·English

by  Wolfgang U. Dressler, Martin Prinzhorn, John R. Rennison (eds.)

Advances in Morphology
W
DE
G
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs 97
Editor
Werner Winter
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Advances in Morphology
Edited by
Wolfgang U. Dressier
Martin Prinzhorn
John R. Rennison
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 1997
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.
© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines
of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Advances in morphology / edited by Wolfgang U. Dressier,
Martin Prinzhorn, John R. Rennison.
p. cm. - (Trends in linguistics. Studies and mono-
graphs ; 97)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 3-11-014853-6 (alk. paper)
1. Grammar, Comparative and general - Morphology.
I. Dressier, Wolfgang U., 1939- II. Prinzhorn, Mar-
tin. III. Rennison, John R. IV. Series.
P241.A37 1996
415-dc20 96-42275
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - Cataloging-in-Publication-Data
Advances in morphology / ed. by Wolfgang U. Dressier .... -
Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1997
(Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs ; 97)
ISBN 3-11-014853-6 Gb.
© Copyright 1997 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechan-
ical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, with-
out permission in writing from the publisher.
Typesetting and printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin.
Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin.
Printed in Germany.
Contents
Introduction
Wolfgang U. Dressier — Martin Prinzhorn — John Rennison 1
The morphology-syntax interface: A study of autonomy
Hagit Borer 5
Inflectional morphology and functional heads
Andrew Spencer 31
Cluster morphology
Aaron Halpern 51
Dutch prefixes and prepositions in complex verbs
Wiecher Zwanenburg 63
Selection and derivational affixes
Anna-Maria Di Sciullo 79
Morphologie derivationnelle et analyse semantique des mots
construits: Les voies de la reference ne sont pas impenetrates
Georgette Dal — Martine Temple 97
One (more) reason why we need morphology
Kersti Börjars 111
Grammatical cases, basic verbal construction, and voice in Maasai:
Towards a better analysis of the concepts
Igor Mel'cuk 131
On the morphological category of gender in Catalan and in Spanish
Maria-Rosa Lloret — Joaquim Viaplana 171
Markedness and productivity
Harald Baayen 189
Subject index 201

Introduction
Wolfgang U. Dressier - Martin Prinzhorn — John Rennison
The Fifth International Morphology Meeting was held in Krems, Austria
from 7th to 9th of July 1992, partially overlapping with the Seventh In-
ternational Phonology Meeting. The talks covered such different areas of
morphological research as morphosyntax, morphopragmatics, morpho-
(pho)nology, computational morphology, diachronic morphology,
psycho- and patholinguistic aspects of morphology. On the empirical
side, non-Indoeuropean languages were prominently represented. This
volume presents a selection of papers actually given at the meeting.*
The first papers in this volume address the position of morphology
vis ä vis syntax. Building on some of her previous work, Hagit Borer
defends an autonomous status of morphology in grammar. The view pre-
sented in this paper does not refer to autonomy in a derivational sense
(i.e., morphology "before" syntax) but rather to a set of conditions ap-
plying parallel to other modules of grammar. The main goal of the paper
is to define a notion of morphological relatedness, which does not assume
a derivational relation between two forms. Based on the discussion of
result nominals vs. process nominals in English and Hebrew, a model is
defended which allows for the parallel assignment of both syntactic and
morphological structures. On the morphological level both types of no-
minals are argued to have the same structure and the presence or absence
of a syntactic structure will determine the process or resultative character
of the nominal.
Andrew Spencer's paper critically examines the implicit subsumption
of inflectional morphology under a complex structure of functional heads
in recent generative literature. His starting point is the analysis of dia-
chronic development of inflectional morphology. The "functional-heads
approach to inflection" forces a view of a very strong parallelism between
syntactic and morphological change. Based on a discussion of the histori-
cal change of the Chukotko-Kamachatkan tense/aspect system, Spencer
chows that the model can not capture morphosemantic reinterpretation,
since syntactic structure plays no role in a formation of, for example, a
present tense from an existing adjectival construction. Another problem
2 Wolfgang U. Dressler — Martin Prinzhorn — John Rennison
for the functional-heads approach are repeated formatives, since there is
no obvious way how the mapping of several morphemes to one syntactic
head should work. A particularly significant case in question are Ice-
landic postpositive articles discussed in the paper.
The problem of the mapping between morphemes and constituents is
also at the center of Aaron Halpern's paper "Cluster morphology". It is
proposed that a set of bound morphemes can select for one morphologi-
cal cluster. Based on the complex inflectional system of the Athabaskan
language Sekani, Halpern argues that the class of conjunct morphemes
forms a morphological constituent by subcategorizing one another and
by subcategorizing (at a later point) a common syntactic host. This analy-
sis is extended to clitic clusters on the basis of their morphological beha-
vior. Morphological ordering seems to be needed and a purely syntactic
account of affix ordering is rejected.
Wiecher Zwanenburg's paper discusses the X-bar status of verbal pre-
fixes in Dutch. These verb-forming prefixes pose a serious problem for
Williams' right-hand head rule. In the paper a treatment of the prefixes
as non-heads is proposed on the grounds of the functional parallelism
between prefixes and prepositions. Both can function as left-handed non-
heads and they can select an argument position, which, in the case of the
complex verb, can be saturated word-externally. One conceptual advan-
tage of this view is that the category Ρ does not remain the only lexical
category which is only involved in compounding but not in derivation.
Also prefixes are not treated as categoryless items but as Ps. On a com-
parative view, systematic differences between French and Dutch are re-
lated to the obligatory non-headedness of prefixes in Dutch.
Anna-Maria Di Sciullo's paper "Selection and derivational affixes" ar-
gues against a purely categorial selection in derivational morphology.
Following recent work on the need of a more refined argument structure
in syntax, she shows that in derivational morphology, too, semantic and
conceptual information has to be available for selection and therefore
encoded in a complex argument structure. A derivational affix selects a
predicate on the basis of the configurational properties of the argument
structure. The distributional properties of the suffix -able are presented
in detail, and it is argued that this suffix selects a predicate with an
e(vent)-place, thereby excluding auxiliaries, modals, Stative verbs and in-
dividual level predicates. The restrictions that a derivational affix imposes
on the argument structure include conceptual, aspectual and categorial
information.
"Morphologie derivationelle et analyse semantique des mots constru-
its: les voies de la reference ne sont par impenetrables" by Georgette Dal
Introduction 3
and Martine Temple explores the referential properties of derived nouns
like viennoiserie. The derivation of such words in -erie is explained on a
formal and semantic level in the framework of Corbin's model of deriva-
tional associative morphology and for lexicographic purposes. The au-
thors study the interplay between derivationally constructed meaning
(word-formation meaning) and lexical reference (word meaning on the
four levels of the input, of the output of the derivation, in its word mean-
ing and in its reference. Contextual information is encoded in order to
make the analysis usable for a computer lexicon.
The grammatical status of postnominal definiteness markers in the
Scandinavian languages and in various Balkan languages is explored in
Kersti Börjars' paper "One (more) reason why we need morphology".
Recent syntactic analyses suggest that incorporated definite determiners
(as in Rom. om-ul'the man') are derived by syntactic incorporation into
a functional head. After applying several tests wtih respect to the distinc-
tion between clitics and affixes, Börjars shows that there are not only
cases of morphological affixes and syntactic clitics but also mixed cases
where the elements behave partly like clitics and partly like affixes. In
order to capture all those variants, a purely syntactic analysis is rejected
and an analysis based on Sadock's Auto-Lexical Syntax is suggested
which can not only capture the gradual distinctions but also the common
characteristics of definiteness markers.
Igor Mel'cuk's article deals with three grammatical phenomena in
Maasai, an Eastern Nilotic language. Case and voice are analyzed in a
close relation: case marks different surface-syntactic roles in NPs,
whereas voice of the verb determines which NP plays which surface-syn-
tactic role. The predicative construction as the basic verbal construction
of the language is derived from properties of voice. Case and syntactic
role are kept distinct, a given syntactic role can be realized by several
cases and a given case can mark several syntactic roles. If case is defined
in such a way, a less typologically marked analysis of the language be-
comes possible. The basic verbal construction can then by analyzed as
ergative, a conclusion which is supported by diachronic considerations.
In the appendix, a calculus of possible grammatical voices is presented.
Based on a comparative analysis of the morphological category gender
in Catalan and Spanish, Maria-Rosa Lloret and Joaquim Viaplana dis-
cuss the traditional view of gender as consisting of two categories, mascu-
line and feminine, and the generative view of gender being a binary fea-
ture [+/— fem]. Since in Catalan, schwa is the only overt gender marker
for feminine, gender is argued to be a privative category in this language.