Yearbook of Morphology 1993

274 Pages·5.929 MB·English

by  Thomas Becker (auth.), Geert Booij, Jaap Van Marle (eds.)

YEARBOOK OF MORPHOLOGY 1993
Yearb ook of Morphology
Editors: Geert Booij
Jaap van Marie
Consulting Editors: Stephen Anderson (Baltimore)
Mark Aronoff (Stony Brook, N.Y.)
Laurie Bauer (Wellington)
Mark Baker (Montreal)
Rudie Botha (Stellenbosch)
Joan Bybee (Albuquerque, N.M.)
Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy
(Christchurch)
Wolfgang Dressler (Wien)
Jack Hoeksema (Groningen)
Rochelle Lieber (Durham, N.H.)
Peter Matthews (Cambridge, U.K.)
Franz Rainer (Salzburg)
Sergio Scalise (Bologna)
Henk Schultink (Utrecht)
Arnold Zwicky (Columbus, Ohio/
Stanford)
Editorial address: Editors, Yearbook of Morphology
Vakgroep Taalkunde, Vrije Universiteit
De Boelelaan 1105
1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
e-mail: [email protected]
YEARBOOK OF
MORPHOLOGY
1993
Edited by
GEERTBOOIJ
General Linguistics, Free University, Amsterdam/Holland
Institute of generative Linguistics
JAAP VAN MARLE
P.J. Meertens Institute of the Royal Academy of Sciences
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
ISSN 0922-3495
ISBN 978-90-481-4328-3 ISBN 978-94-017-3712-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-3712-8
Printed on acid-free paper
All rights reserved
© 1993 by Springer Science+ Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 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
THOMAS BECKER I Back-formation, cross-formation, and 'bracketing 1
paradoxes' in paradigmatic morphology
GEERT BOOIJ I Against split morphology 27
ROCHELLE LIEBER and HARALD BAAY EN I Verbal prefixes in 51
Dutch: a study in lexical conceptual structure
JOHN J. MCCARTHY and ALAN PRINCE I Generalized Alignment 79
CAROLINE SMITS I Resistance to erosion in American Dutch inflection 155
RICHARD SPROAT and CHILIN SHIH I Why Mandarin morphology 185
is not stratum-ordered
IRENE VOGEL I Verbs in Italian morphology 219
Short notice
JAAP VAN MARLE I Morphological adaptation 255
Book notices
MARK ARONOFF I Peter Matthews, Morphology: An Introduction 267
to Word Structure. Second edition
GEERT BOOIJ I Sergio Scalise (ed.) The Morphology of Compounding 269
MICHAEL HAMMOND I Andrew Spencer, Morphological Theory 269
FRANZ RAINER I Yakov Malkiel, Diachronic Studies in Lexicology, 272
Affixation and Phonology
Back-formation, cross-formation, and
'bracketing paradoxes' in paradigmatic morphology
THOMAS BECKER
1. SYNTAGMATIC AND PARADIGMATIC MORPHOLOGY
On the whole, there are two ways to describe the standard types of word
formation: syntagmatically and paradigmatically (cf. Van Marie 1985:9ff. et
passim). Figures (1a) and (1b) show two syntagmatic or word-syntactic
analyses of the actual English word undeceivable 'incapable of being deceived':
(1) a. b. undeceivable
unde~
I
~
uIn - d eceIl. ve -a bte
The structure in (1a) is a correct analysis of the word, (1b) might describe a
possible word: 'capable of being freed from deception'. It does not describe the
actual word, however, since this is derived from deceivable. From a purely
formal point of view, the adjective undeceivable is in fact related to the verb
undeceive (in the same way as thinkable to think), but not from a semantic point
of view. Semantically, undeceivable is derived from, or 'motivated by',
deceivable.1 This paradigmatic relation can be expressed syntagmatically as in
(1a), where the motivating word is a constituent of the motivated derivative.
In syntagmatic morphology words are described as constructions of
morphemes. It is the dominant doctrine within American Structuralism and
Generative Grammar and refers to the Indian tradition of Pal).ini, whose
precision of description was so appealing that his school almost replaced the
Greek and Roman tradition (cf. Paul 1880, de Saussure 1916), in which
morphology is regarded as the system of paradigmatic relations between words,
new words being formed in analogy to existing ones.2 As a theoretical concept, it
survived primarily in the Netherlands (cf. e.g. Uhlenbeck 1953, Schultink 1962,
Sassen 1971, Van Marie 1985, but cf. also Motsch 1977), apart from its
approximate reinvention by Halle (1973), Jackendoff (1975), and Aronoff (1976).
A paradigmatic description of undeceivable is shown in (2). The sketchy
'Word Formation Rule' in (2a) relates the words deceivable (2b) and
undeceivable (2c) inasmuch as the first word 'satisfies' the input structure of the
rule and the second word the output structure, with the same interpretation ofthe
variables, i.e., the structures 'subsume' the words or can be 'unified' with them.
The fact that deceivable is morphologically complex itself is captured by a
different rule, namely (3):3
1
Geert Booij and Jaap van Marie (eds.). Yearbook of Morpho/ogy/993, 1-25.
© 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
2 Thomas Becker
(2) a. O J
unX
A
'notP'
b. c.
deceivable undeceivable
A A
'capable of being 'not capable of
deceived' being deceived'
X := deceivable, P : = capable of being deceived
(3) a. [ [ ]
Xable
A
'capable of
being P-ed'
b.
deceive deceivable
v A
'deceive' 'capable of
being deceived'
X := deceive, P : = deceive
A Word Formation Rule does not only describe the relations between actual
words, but also the production of new words. If a verb to syntagmatize 'to
describe syntagmatically (of words)' were coined, one could easily form the
adjective syntagmatizable 'capable of being described syntagmatically':
(4) a. b.
syntagmatize syntagmatizable
v A
'to describe 'capable of being
syntagmatically' described
syntagmatically'
The new word syntagmatize (4a) satisfies the input structure of rule (3a) for
X:= syntagmatize and P := to describe syntagmatically. Through the
interpretation of the variables, the output structure of (3a) turns into the lexical
entry of syntagmatizable ( 4b ). Thus rule (3a) is a function which maps ( 4a) onto
Back-formation, cross-formation 3
(4b). In the same way unsyntagmatizable 'not capable of being described
syntagmatically' could be derived by rule (2a).
The input structure of a rule restricts the set of words to those the rule can be
applied to. Rule (3a) cannot be applied to adjectives because unification would fail,
due to the second line 'V' of the structure. Phonological and semantic conditions4 can
be stated in a more sophisticated phonological and semantic input structure.
Input and output structures of rules themselves are different types of rules
which might be equated with Bybee and Slobin's (1982) 'schema' (cf. also
Bybee 1988: 134ff.). The output structure of rule (2a) is a 'morphological word
structure'. It defines a set of possible words, namely the words with the prefix
un-. The lexical entries of words like unmusical or unorthodox belong to this set
because they satisfy the structure, i.e. because 1) their phonological form
begins with un, 2) their syntactic category is A, and 3) they have a negative
meaning (with the structure 'not P'). The lexical entries of the words need not
contain any morphological information. In a paradigmatic morphological
theory, words need not have an inherent morphological structure. They have
their structure through their relations to other words: If there were no words
like musical, words like unmusical would not have a prefix. In the words of de
Saussure (1916; 1972: 178f.):
Ainsi defaire serait inanalysable si Jes autres formes con tenant de-ou faire disparaissaient de Ia
langue; il ne serait plus qu'une unite simple et ses deux parties ne saraient plus opposables l'une a
!'autre.
This does not imply that words like uncouth and unflappable do not have the
prefix, as they do not have a base. They have the prefix by satisfying the
morphological word structure in (2a), which is established by other words like
musical/unmusical.
A rule like (3a) has been abstracted from pairs of words like read/readable
and deceive/deceivable, which serve as models for the production of a
neologism like syntagmatizable. This formation can be taken as the solution of
the equation (5):
(5) deceive deceivable
= syntagmatize X ( = syntagmatizable)
The formation of the adjective syntagmatizable would be an application of the
'rule of three' or of proportional analogy. The models deceive/deceivable etc.
represent rule (3a) in the same way as the paradigm amo, amas, amat etc.
represents the first conjugation of the Latin verb in a traditional description.
The majority of morphological relations between words can be described
both syntagmatically and paradigmatically, i.e. the normal cases of prefixing
and suffixing derivation, and of compounding. 5
Structuralist morphology offered zero-morphemes, replacive, or subtractive
morphemes for the less handy cases (cf. Nida 1949), cf. the subtractive relation
between the data in (6):
4 Thomas Becker
(6) Papago, Uta-Aztecan, cf. Hale (1965: 300f.); Q retroflex,
~'
phonemic representations:
incompletive completive
/hu<;luni/ /hu<;lu/ 'to descend'
/ki-.<;liwa/ /ki-.<;li/ 'to shell [corn]'
/ta:pana/ /ta:pa/ 'to split'
/bidima/ /bidi/ 'to turn around'
/daga~apa/ /daga~a/ 'to press with hand'
/ma:ka/ /rna:/ 'to give'
To describe subtraction, Mel'cuk (1991: 288f.) adopts a subtractive suffix,
a sign whose signified is quite additive: 'completive', but whose signifier is a truncation and
therefore subtractive. The sign as a whole, i.e., the marker of the completive, is also additive: it is
added, or applied, to an incompletive form.
This might be accepted as a 'technical' solution but actually it reduces a basic
tenet of item-and-arrangement morphology to absurdity, namely that all
morphological relations are relations between constituents. However, signs
can be related without the differences between them being signs themselves.
This is the crucial point of morphology: Whereas syntax describes how atomic
signs connect to form complex signs, morphology describes the regular
relations between atomic signs. One should not be misled by the fact that there
are words which can also be described syntactically. Those who understand that
there is a diachronic transition between syntactic and morphological structures
will expect to find an overlap, i.e., structures that can be described both ways.
This overlap, however, does not even cover the whole of compositional
morphology. Only those compounds that are neither back- nor cross
formations can be described syntagmatically. Let us turn to back-formations
first.
2. BACK-FORMATION
Many linguists regard back-formation as a diachronic process. The noun
operation is synchronically derived from the verb to operate. On the other
hand, the back-formation of the verb to orientate, which replaced the older to
orient in many of its former uses, was the formation of "the 'base form' of a
synchronic derivation" (Hock 1986:204). In the opinion of Hock and many
others a back-formation like orientate is the abductive formation of a base form
from which the form orientation is derived. To give another example, the
German compound noun Kleinstadt 'small +town' is younger than the adjective
kleinstiidtisch 'small+town+ish', 'pertaining to a small town, provincial'. This
fact, which is surprising to contemporary speakers of German, has been
ascertained by diachronic research and is .'irrelevant' to a synchronic