Yearbook of Morphology 1992

295 Pages·8.008 MB·English

by  Harald Clahsen, Monika Rothweiler (auth.), Geert Booij, Jaap van Marle (eds.)

YEARBOOK OF MORPHOLOGY 1992
Yearbook of Morphology
Editors: Geert Booij
Jaap van Marle
Consulting Editors: Stephen Anderson (Baltimore)
Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook, N.Y.)
Laurie Bauer (Wellington)
Rudie Botha (Stellenbosch)
Joan Bybee (Albuquerque, New Mexico)
Wolfgang Dressler (Wien)
Jack Hoeksema (Groningen)
Rochelle Lieber (Durham, N.H.)
Peter Matthews (Cambridge, U.K.)
Franz Rainer (Salzburg)
Thomas Roeper (Amherst, MA)
Sergio Scalise (Bologna)
Henk Schultink (Utrecht)
Jindrich Toman (Ann Arbor, MI)
Wolfgang Wurzel (Berlin)
Editorial address: Editors, Yearhook of Morphology
Vakgroep Taalkunde, Vrije Universiteit
De Boelelaan 1 lOS
1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
YEARBOOK OF
MORPHOLOGY
1992
Edited by
GEERT BOOIJ
General Linguistics, Free University,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
] AAP VAN MARLE
P.l. Meertens Institute of the
Royal Netherlands Academy ofA rts and Sciences
...
"
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
ISSN 0922-3495
ISBN 978-90-481-4197-5 ISBN 978-94-017-3710-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-3710-4
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1993 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1993
Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1993
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be
reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from
the copyright owner.
Table of contents
HARALD CLAHSEN and MONIKA ROTHWEILER / Inflectional
rules in children's grammars: evidence from German participles 1
AIDAN DOYLE / Suffixal Rivalry: a case study in Irish nominalisa-
tions 35
AD NEE LEMAN and JOLEEN SCHIPPER / Verbal prefixation in
Dutch: thematic evidence for conversion 57
JOEL A. NEVIS and BRIAN D. JOSEPH / Wackernagel affixes:
evidence from Balto-Slavic 93
FRANZ RAINER / Head-operations in Spanish morphology 113
GREGORY T. STUMP / Position classes and morphological theory 129
Discussion
HARALD BAA YEN / On frequency, transparency and productivity 181
Review articles
ANDREW CARSTAIRS-McCARTHY / Morphology without word
internal constituents: a review of Stephen R. Anderson's A-
Morphous Morphology 209
RICHARD SPROAT / Morphological non-separation revisited: a
review of R. Lieber's Deconstructing Morphology 235
Book reviews
HARALD BAA YEN / Hartmut Gunther (ed.), Experimentelle Studien
zur deutschen Flexionsmorphologie 259
LAURIE BAUER / Thomas Becker, Analogie und morphologische
Theorie 264
v
VI Table of contents
JOACHIM MUG DAN / John T. Jensen, Morphology: Word Structure
in Generative Grammar 268
ANDREW SPENCER / Mark Aronoff (ed.), Morphology Now 282
Book notices
LAURIE BAUER / Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Bernd Heine
(cds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization 285
GEERT BOO!] / J. G. H. Combrink, Afrikaanse moifologie 286
FRANZ RAINER / Maria G. Lo Duca, Creativita e regole. Studio
sllll'acquisizione della moifologia derivativa dell'italiano 287
GEERT BOO!] / D. Corbin (ed.), La formation des mots; structures
et intelJm~tations 290
PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED 290
NOTES TO CONTRIBUTORS 293
Inflectional rules in children's grammars:
evidence from German participles*
HARALD CLAHSEN AND MONIKA ROTHWEILER
1. INTRODUCTION
In recent studies on the acquisition of inflectional morphology in English
much debate has centred around the question whether children's overregu
larization errors, such as goed instead of went result from a morphological
rule or from a connectionist network such as the one suggested by Rumelhart
and McClelland (1986). Pinker and Prince (1992) and Marcus et al. (1992)
have argued that the -ed affix has the status of a symbolic rule in the children's
grammars which is qualitatively distinct from an associative memory for
irregulars. However, researchers such as Marchman and Bates (1991) and
MacWhinney and Leinbach (1992) have disputed the existence of such
symbolic rules and suggested that overregularizations are effects of associa
tive networks: In English, the -ed affix has much higher type frequencies than
the irregular past tense forms, and is therefore preferred in children's inflec
tional errors.
The system of German past participle inflection provides an interesting
test case to this controversy, because in contrast to past tense marking in
English, the default participle affix (= -t) does not vastly outnumber the
irregular one (= -n). Thus, study of German participle affixes allows us to
tease apart the role of (type) frequency in the acquisition of inflectional
systems. In this way, the present paper sheds light on an important aspect
of the general debate between symbolic and connectionist approaches to
language.
We will present acquisition data from two sources demonstrating that
German-speaking children develop a regular default participle affix which is
qualitatively different from the irregular affix. The first source are spon
taneous speech samples from 3 language-unimpaired children studied longi
tudinally over more than two years. The second source are spontaneous
speech samples from 19 language-impaired German-speaking children studied
longitudinally over a period of one year. Our most important finding is that
only the participle affix -t is overregularized by the children, whereas the -n
affix is not overextended. A parallel (asymmetrical) distribution can be
observed in the stem errors. In all the data, there are no participles in which
an irregular stem pattern has been extended to a weak verb. Rather, the only
kind of stem error we found are regular stems replacing irregular ones, e.g.
*gebind instead of gebunden 'bounded', *gewinn instead of gewonnen 'won'.
These two findings hold for the language-impaired children as well as for the
normal controls. We will conclude that children's grammars involve a qualita-
Geert Rooij and Jaap vall Marie (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1')92,1-34.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 Harald Clahsen and Monika Rothweiler
tive distinction between regular and irregular inflection which is not reduc
ible to frequency differences.
2. PREVIOUS ACQUISITION STUDIES
The acqUlsltlon of participles has not been systematically investigated in
previous studies on the acquisition of German. There are only a few observa
tions made by Mills (1985: 168f.) based on data from the early diary studies
on German. Mills observed that the prefix ge- is 'often' left out before the age
of 3;0, and she quotes some examples of children's participles indicating that
around age 3;0 there is 'frequent' overgeneralization of the weak form of
participles, i.e. present tense stems and the suffix -to However, Mills does not
mention any figures as to how frequently such errors occur and how past
participles develop in German child language.
Most of the empirical evidence and theoretical approaches on the acquisi
tion of inflection come from the study of English. In the following, we will
therefore briefly summarize some findings from these studies. However, we
cannot directly compare the acquisition of past participles in English and
German, because in English the past participle is used much less frequently
than it is in German. This has to do with a difference in tense marking
between the two languages: in German, events in the past are expressed
through the so-called present perfect (consisting of an auxiliary plus past
participle), whereas English uses simple past tense in such cases. The closest
equivalent to German past participle development is a comparison with the
acquisition of English past tense formation.
Traditional models of the acquisition of English past tense formation posit
that the child creates an inflectional rule, add -ed, to generate regular past
tense forms (e.g. walk - walked), while irregular past tense forms are stored
in a list (d. Menyuk 1963, Ervin & Miller 1963, Cazden 1968). For
example, Berko (1958) showed that five- and six-year-old children con
sistently added the appropriate regular past tense affix -ed to new words they
had never heard before. This ability was taken to indicate that children
construct inflectional rules.
As opposed to the traditional model, Rumelhart and McClelland (1986)
conducted a connectionist simulation of the acquisition of the English past
tense system. In their computer model, Rumelhart and McClelland tried to
mimic aspects of the child's acquisition of the English past tense system.
After brief training of 10 verbs and their past tense forms, their model was
able to overgeneralize, i.e. to create appropriate past tense forms for words
that were not part of the training set. Rumelhart and McClelland's model
contains a pattern associator that directly takes a simplified quasi-phono
logical representation (= 'Wickelfeatures') of the stem as input and computes
a corresponding phonological representation of the past tense form as
output. Correlations among pairs of features in the stem and the past are
Participles in German Child Language 3
stored, and based on the strength of the association between the stem
features and various output features in the training set, the model generalizes
to new verbs.
The challenge of this model is that the entire past tense system including
its acquisition is represented in a unitary associative architecture without any
recourse to morphological rules of inflection. In empirical studies, it has been
observed, for example, that the child's earliest past tense forms are mostly
correct and that overgeneralizations (go ed, etc.) occur later in development,
before the correct adult system is acquired; this is referred to as the
U-shaped curve of the development of inflection (d. e.g. Slobin 1973). In
order to explain the U-shaped development of inflection and the occurrence
of overgeneralizations, Rumelhart and McClelland assumed that before the
first overgeneralizations are used, the child shows 'explosive' vocabulary
growth, which would result in a sudden acquisition of a large number of new
regular verbs. In their computer model, this has the desired results, because
as a consequence of the vocabulary growth, the features defining the -ed
ending are strengthened by the pattern associator, and in this way overgener
alizations are created. Later, when the discrepancies between the correct
irregulars that continue to appear in the input and the overgeneralized forms
will be registered, the crucial irregular features will be strengthened and the
overgeneralizations will vanish over time. In this way, Rumelhart and
McClelland successfully duplicated the U-curve of the development of
English past tense inflection. Strikingly, this was possible within a model that
had no explicit representation of words, rules, and no distinction between
regular and irregular inflection.
However, Pinker and Prince (1988) and Marcus et al. (1992) pointed out
several deficiencies of Rumelhart and McClelland's model. For example, the
pattern associator can learn arbitrary input/output mappings, even those that
are linguistically impossible ones, e.g. string reversals. Since there is no
morphological representation separate from the phonological content, the
overall similarity between stems and past tense forms appears to be acci
dental. Marcus et al. (1992) examined Rumelhart and McClelland's assump
tions about vocabulary development in children. They found no support for
the hypothesis that overgeneralization errors are triggered by a sudden
increase in the number of regular verbs: regular verb tokens remain roughly
constant over time, and the proportion of regular verb types increases, but
does not correlate positively with the children's tendency to overregularize.
Marcus et al. conclude that something endogenous must cause the child to
overregularize, and not a change in their environments or their vocabulary.
Pinker and Prince (1992) and Marcus et al. (1992) developed an alterna
tive model of past tense acquisition in English in which they suggested that
children (like adults) have two qualitatively different psychological mecha
nisms for inflection: regular inflection which is based on symbolic rules, and
irregular inflection which is based on associative processes of stored items.
Support for this distinction comes from studies on the acquisition and
4 Harald Clahsen and Monika Rothweiler
processing of the English past tense system. First, Marcus et al. (1992) found
that of the various types of potential errors, only one type is productive in
children's past tense forms: over-applications of the regular past tense affix
-ed to irregular stems (*go-ed, etc.). In contrast to that, over-applications of
irregular patterns are extremely rare (Xu and Pinker 1992). Second, Pinker
and his colleagues found frequency effects for irregulars, but not for regulars.
For example, Marcus et al. observed that children overregularize more often
for verbs which are rare in the input. Third, Marcus et al. observed effects of
similarity in the distribution of overregularizations: children make fewer over
regularization errors for verbs that fall into families with more numerous and
higher-frequency members (see also Bybee & Siobin 1982). These results
were taken to indicate that irregular inflection is based on memory-based
retrieval processes and that regular inflection is based on symbolic rules.
The major controversy between these approaches is whether the regular/
irregular distinction is considered to be real and fundamental in children's
grammars or whether it is treated as a secondary effect of peripheral factors,
e.g. frequency differences in the input. Cross-linguistic comparisons may
contribute to decide this issue. Consider, for example, that in past tense
errors, English-speaking children preferably overregularize with the -ed
suffix. In English the default status of the -ed suffix is confounded with its
high frequency: regular forms clearly outnumber irregular ones.' In fact,
Bybee (1991: 86f.) recently argued that in the acquisition of inflection in
general, there is no cutoff point between regular and irregular inflection, and
that the observed differences are due to type frequency, i.e. the number of
distinct lexical items involved. Thus, according to Bybee, English-speaking
children overregularize with the -ed suffix, because they have heard it used
with so many different English verbs, and they rarely over-apply irregular
patterns, simply because irregular verbs are rare in the input. This view is
opposed to Marcus et al.'s model of the acquisition of inflection. Evidence
from languages with different vocabulary statistics than English is necessary
to tease apart the qualitative and quantitative differences between regular and
irregular systems. The acquisition data on German provide such evidence.
3. PARTICIPLES IN GERMAN
In traditional grammars three patterns of participle inflection are distin
guished: weak inflection, strong inflection and mixed inflection. In (1),
rhyme-scheme like abbreviations are used to illustrate the various root/stem
preterite-participle patterns. Weak inflection involves -t affixation without
stem/root changes (la); strong inflection involves -n affixation plus root!
stem changes (1 b, I d, 1e ) and mixed inflection -t affixation plus stem/root
changes (IcV Similar to English, ablaut and other changes of the verbal
root/stem occur in both simple past tense forms and in past participles. Only
weak verbs never involve root/stem changes, cf. (la). There are about 160