This six-volume collection draws together the most significant contributions to morphological theory and analysis which all serious students of morphology should be aware of. By comparing the stances taken by the different schools about the important issues, the reader will be able to judge the merits of each, with the benefit of evidence rather than prejudice.
This six-volume collection draws together the most significant contributions to morphological theory and analysis which all serious students of morphology should be aware of. By comparing the stances taken by the different schools about the important issues, the reader will be able to judge the merits of each, with the benefit of evidence rather than prejudice.
Sometimes dismissed as linguistically epiphenomenal, inflectional paradigms are, in reality, the interface of a language's morphology with its syntax and semantics. Drawing on abundant evidence from a wide range of languages (French, Hua, Hungarian, Kashmiri, Latin, Nepali, Noon, Old Norse, Sanskrit, Turkish, Twi and others), Stump examines a variety of mismatches between words' content and form, including morphomic patterns, defectiveness, overabundance, syncretism, suppletion, deponency and polyfunctionality. He demonstrates that such mismatches motivate a new grammatical architecture in which two kinds of paradigms are distinguished: content paradigms, which determine word forms' syntactic distribution and semantic interpretation, and form paradigms, which determine their inflectional realization. In this framework, the often nontrivial linkage between a lexeme's content paradigm and its stems' form paradigm is the nexus at which incongruities of content and form are resolved. Stump presents clear and precise analyses of a range of morphological phenomena in support of this theoretical innovation.
Processing French presents a groundbreaking empirical study of the processing of morphologically simple and complex French words. Peter Golato's research offers an insightful account of the lexical storage and retrieval of isolated words and words within sentences. Processing French investigates the native-language processing of French, a language for which findings have not definitively supported a dual-mechanism account of morphological processing. Through word- and sentence-level studies, the book accomplishes two goals. First, it offers behavioral evidence in support of a dual-mechanism processing account at the word level. In contrast to English, however, the evidence with French does not turn upon a contrast in inflectional regularity among verbs but instead hinges upon a diachronic contrast, with synchronic relevance, in the productivity of derivational suffixes among nouns. Second, by incorporating the findings of the word-level studies into sentence-level studies, the book offers a window onto the morphological processing of displaced sentential elements, specifically morphologically simple and complex wh-moved nouns and raised lexical verbs. Peter Golato is assistant professor of French at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Processing French is decidedly original, and it is equally and decidedly sound. This book makes a superb shelf reference for anybody working in psycholinguistics, first- and second-language acquisition, and the syntactic study of French...and draws some fascinating conclusions about what might really be at play in human language acquisition." -Fred Davidson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This volume brings together cutting-edge research on the semantic properties of derived words and the processes by which these words are derived. To this day, many of these processes remain under-researched and the nature of meaning in derivational morphology remains ill-understood. All eight articles have an empirical focus and rely on carefully collected sets of data. At the same time, the contributions represent a broad variety of approaches. Several contributions deal with specific problems of the pairing of form and meaning, such as the rivalry between nominalizing suffixes or the semantic categories encoded by conversion pairs. Other articles tackle the more general question of how meaning is organized, e.g. whether there is evidence for the paradigmatic organization of derived words or the reality of the inflection-derivation dichotomy. The contributions feature innovative methodologies, such as representing lexical meaning as word distribution or predicting semantic properties by means of analogical algorithms. This volume offers new and highly interesting insights into how complex words mean, and offers directions for future research in an oft-neglected field.
The present special issue is the third volume produced by a group of researchers who convene every two years to discuss the role of morphology in word recognition. It includes thirteen experimental papers, all devoted to morphological processing. The volume explores a variety of languages such as Arabic, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish. The methods of investigations include single-word recognition, masked, cross-modal, and long-term priming, the monitoring of eye movements, or the use of computer simulations, with both the processing of speech and print being explored. The present volume, being the third consecutive one on morphology, provides a longitudinal perspective on the theoretical issues currently under debate in the field of morphological processing, and also sets the scene for future work in this domain.
How does knowledge of a first or second language develop, and how is that knowledge used in real time comprehension and production of one or two languages? Language development and processing are the central topics that this book explores, initially in terms of first language(s) and then in terms of additional languages. Human growth and development necessarily involve the passage of time, implicating this orthogonal factor and leading to the observation that capacities may vary across the lifespan. Two theoretical frameworks have historically attributed explanations for knowledge and use of language, nature versus nurture approaches: the former credits biogenetic intrinsic characteristics, while the latter ascribes environmental extrinsic experiences as the causes of developmental change. The evidence examined throughout this book offers a more nuanced and complex view, eschewing dichotomy and favoring a hybrid approach that takes into account a range of internal and external influences.
The question of how morphologically complex words (assign-ment, listen-ed) are represented and processed in the brain has been one of the most hotly debated topics in the cognitive neuroscience of language. Do complex words engage cortical representations and processes equivalent to single lexical objects or are they processed as sequences of separate morpheme-like units? Research on morphological processing has suggested that adults make efficient use of both lexical (i.e., whole word) storage and retrieval, as well as combinatorial computation in processing morphologically complex words. Psycholinguistic studies have demonstrated that processing of complex words can be affected both by properties of the morphemes and the whole words, such as their frequency, transparency, and regularity. Furthermore, this research has been informative about the time-course of complex word recognition and production, and the role of morphological structure in these processes. At the neural level, left-hemisphere inferior frontal and superior temporal areas, and negative-going event-related potentials, have been consistently associated with morphological processing. While most previous research has been done on the recognition of morphologically complex words in adult native speakers, much less is known about neurocognitive processes involved in the on-line production of morphologically complex words, and even less on morphological processing in children and non-native speakers. Moreover, we have limited understanding of how linguistically distinct morphological processes, e.g. inflectional (listen-ed) versus derivational (assign-ment), are handled by the cortical language networks. This e-book provides an up-to-date overview of the questions currently addressed in the field of morphological processing. It highlights the significance of morphological information in language processing, both written and spoken, as assessed by a variety of methods and approaches. It also provides a comprehensive range of research and development tools for the development of new technologies.
