Andrew Spencer

University of Essex · Department of Language and Linguistics

In this paper, we survey some of the inflected and periphrastic volitional mood paradigms in South Slavic with a focus on Bulgarian data. Our review confirms typological observations in the literature that volitional mood paradigms tend to ‘fracture’, in that the cross-categorisation with different person/number features leads to systematic associa...

Cambridge Core - Grammar and Syntax - Mixed Categories - by Irina Nikolaeva

Note: This article was originally available as a free download from the EUP website as a 'featured publication' (https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/word/12/2) Abstract: A critical review article which discusses serious empirical and conceptual flaws in Embick 2015 The Morpheme. I locate the principal problems with the Distributed Morphology framewo...

Pre-publication proofs of review article on Giegerich 2015 Lexical Structures, EUP.

This chapter describes the manipulations of the morphophonological shape of roots, stems and words which are found in morphological systems. It will be first and foremost a typological survey, but I will also argue for a particular view of the place of allomorphy in the grammar. I shall adopt the perspective that morphophonological operations of va...

Examples such as these raise the question of how participants which are entailed by the lexical meaning of predicates are made explicit in the morpho‐ syntactic representation, and whether and under what conditions they may remain implicit: that is, issues of valency. In addition, they raise the question of alternations: that is, where two morpholo...

I analyse the Russian participle system within Generalized Paradigm Function Morphology. The participles have the inflectional paradigm and the external syntax of an adjective, and yet they are part of the verb's inflectional paradigm (the 'paradigm-within-a-paradigm' problem). I use the feature REPR(ESENTATION) to trigger participle formation as p...

Many languages have morphological devices to turn a noun into an adjective. Often this morphology is genuinely derivational in that it adds semantic content such as ‘similar-to-N’ (similitudinal), ‘located-on/in’ (locational) and so on. In other cases the denominal adjective expresses no more than a pragmatically determined relationship, as in prep...

This chapter examines the different structures that words exhibit and the morphological relationships they bear to each other, and the nature of the morpheme. It begins with a discussion of lexical integrity and the notion of “word”. It is common to distinguish inflection, in which word forms of lexemes such as the plural or past tense are created,...

I propose an analysis of deverbal participles and relative clauses headed by them under which the category of the participle is defined in terms of complex semantic function roles at argument structure (following Spencer 1999, 2013). I further argue that SF roles, simplex and complex, along with other selectional etc. properties, are sufficient to...

This paper addresses the issue of phonologically null elements in HPSG by providing an analysis of the construction exemplified by NPs such as ˋthe rich', ˋthe beautiful', ˋthe unemployed', which lack an overt noun. The properties of this construction are explored in detail, and a number of approaches described: in particular approaches which posit...

In order to establish a typological picture of periphrastic negation, this chapter begins from the criteria for periphrasis established by Ackerman and Stump. These are feature intersection, non-compositionality, and distributed exponence. It is argued that while the first two work well for defining periphrasis, the third criterion is not sufficien...

Bulgarian has several relevant verbal constructions, and this chapter concentrates on those where one instance of periphrasis is embedded within another. For example, the (periphrastic) future perfect has a periphrastic form of the verb 'be' as one component, giving a construction with embedded periphrasis. The formal account proposed for these nes...

Hungarian nouns take some seventeen or so suffixal case inflections, e.g. ház ‘house (nominative)’ ∼ ház-ban ‘in a house (inessive)’. Personal pronouns have corresponding case-marked forms but these are not formed by means of suffixal case inflections. Instead, postposition-like stems expressing the individual cases are inflected for each pronoun’s...

Andrew Spencer and Ana Luís propose a characterization of the notion of canonical clitic based on the idea that clitics fall between canonical function words and canonical affixes. The authors first propose a set of putative canonical properties for affix and for function words. They then propose a set of criteria for clitics based on standard char...

The chapter addresses a set of semantic, syntactic, and categorial criteria for canonical attributive modification and canonical inalienable possession. Canonical attributive modification is expressed by a dedicated word class (adjective) denoting a property concept, while canonical possession is inalienable possession of a relation noun (kin term,...

The Oxford Handbook of Case provides a comprehensive account of research on case and the morphological and syntactic phenomena associated with it. The semantic roles and grammatical relations indicated by case are fundamental to the whole system of language and have long been a central concern of descriptive and theoretical linguistics. The book op...

In most languages we find 'little words' which resemble a full word, but which cannot stand on their own. Instead they have to 'lean on' a neighbouring word, like the 'd, 've and unstressed 'em of Kim'd've helped'em ('Kim would have helped them'). These are clitics, and they are found in most of the world's languages. In English the clitic forms ap...

Written by a team based at one of the world's leading centres for linguistic teaching and research, the second edition of this highly successful textbook offers a unified approach to language, viewed from a range of perspectives essential for students' understanding of the subject. Using clear explanations throughout, the book is divided into three...

We examine the notion of ‘(inflectional) periphrasis’ within the framework of Canonical Typology, and argue that the canonical approach allows us to define a logically coherent notion of periphrasis. We propose a set of canonical criteria for inflectional morphology and a set of canonical criteria for functional syntax, that is, syntactic construct...

Programmatic proposals are presented for identifying the boundary between stem and affix in morphologically complex words. This is part of the wider, largely unresearched, problem of segmenting words into morphs. Two principles are proposed for expediting stem segmentation: the Strictly Morphomic Stem Hypothesis (‘all stems are morphomic’) and the...

The German noun phrase generally reflects a straightforward four-way case distinction (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), but this is most clearly realized on the determiner. Nouns show a depleted case system: genitive is only marked specifically on masculine/neuter nouns in the singular. There are several contexts which require genitive ca...

In most modern approaches to grammar, the term 'case' is systematically ambiguous between '(inflected) form of a nominal word' and 'property of a noun phrase (determiner phrase)'. In a typical, well-behaved system we find that the lexical head noun of a phrase is, say, 'in the accusative' and this means that the phrase itself bears accusative case....

The sizes of case systems vary dramatically, from the minimal (two case) systems, to the large inventories exemplified by Daghestanian. An interesting question is whether there are any constraints on the types of possible case systems in the sense that availability of one case implies availability of another. The most concrete proposal of this kind...

The Oxford Handbook of Compounding surveys a variety of theoretical and descriptive issues, presenting overviews of compounding in a number of frameworks and sketches of compounding in a number of languages. Much of the book deals with Germanic noun–noun compounding. I take up some of the theoretical questions raised surrounding such constructions,...

Paradigm-based (realizational-inferential) models of morphology are defined over a no-tion of 'lexeme'. Inflectional morphology defines the set of word forms which realize various morphosyntactic properties sets (MSPSs) for a given lexeme (e.g. from PRINT, {print, prints, printing, printed}. By contrast, a derivational process, say, Subject Nominal...

This paper investigates the theoretical implications of the negative inflected forms of verbs in Japanese. Japanese verbs and adjectives overlap considerably in their morphology and syntax, but there is strong evidence that they constitute distinct morpholexical classes. Verbs and adjectives realize negative polarity, but in verbs this is realized...

IntroductionThe Morpheme Concept and Agglutinating MorphologyThe Structure of the LexemeConclusions

This book, the first of a series edited by Dixon and Aikhenvald devoted to typology, is a collection of fifteen chapters, with separate author, language, and subject indices. Thirteen chapters are descriptive essays based on presentations to a conference in 2002 at La Trobe University. They are followed, by way of conclusion, by an overview chapter...

I argue that case markers in Hungarian are best thought of as 'fused postpositions' . There is no need to set up a separate syntactic or morphological [Case] attribute as such. Rather, we just need a morphological principle stating that nominals (including pronouns) have a special form, the traditional case form. In this respect Hungarian is crucia...

This chapter discusses a number of types of mismatch that do not fit neatly into more traditional schemas. Most of these are considered mismatches that occur when a word of one morpholexical category inflects, as if it were a member of a different morpholexical category. It provides a rough preliminary typology of mismatches that is based on four p...

The history of morphology in grammatical theory is somewhat checkered. For the American structuralist tradition, morphology was central. In the Chomskyan generative tradition, syntax is central and morphology has been either relegated to phonology and syntax or expelled from linguistics altogether. There is thus a good deal of controversy about the...

This chapter examines the notion of case, establishing the extent to which such a feature is needed in the grammars of individual languages. Case systems represent an advanced stage in the grammaticalization of lexical concepts, in which lexical meaning is lost and the cases function as exponents or signals of other grammatical categories such as g...

Ellen Brandner & Heike Zinsmeister (eds.),New perspectives on case theory (CSLI Lecture Notes 156). Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2003. Pp. ix+373. - - Volume 41 Issue 2 - ANDREW SPENCER

In this paper we motivate a revision to the Paradigm Function Morphology model of Stump (2001) on the basis of the pronominal clitic system of European Portuguese. 1 As is general in Romance languages the clitic cluster can appear either post-verbally or pre-verbally. However, European Portuguese is unusual in that in post-verbal position the clust...

L'A. examine deux contributions sur la theorie en morphologie, dont les approches sont significativement differentes, a savoir les ouvrages de K.Rice Morpheme order and semantic scope: word formation in the Athapaskan verb (2000) et de G.T.Stump Inflectional morphology: a theory of paradigm structure (2001). Les deux recherches se concentrent sur l...

A particular set of Slavic auxiliary-participle constructions (based on the ‘l-participle’) exhibit a number of characteristic ‘deviations from agglutination’ of a type commonly found in inflectional morphology, such as cumulation, extended exponence and zero exponence. The participle itself cannot be given a unitary meaning. I present an analysis...

Russian adjectives, especially participles, can be used as nouns denoting people, e.g. bol′noj/bol′naja ‘(male/female) patient’ from bol′noj ‘sick’, ucašcijsja/ucašcajasja ‘(boy/girl) pupil’, participle from the verb ucit′sja ‘to learn, study’. These are unusual in that they formally reflect the sex of their referent by means of inflectional morp...

Plag states in his introduction that his study has two aims, the empirical aim of providing a properly detailed account of certain English derivational suffixes and the theoretical aim of demonstrating that constraints on productivity of a given derivational process are due principally to individual constraints on that process and not to general co...

The notion of lexeme is central to realizational theoriesof morphology and to the notion of morphology by itself. Itis generally assumed that inherent inflections such as Pluralor Past Tense impart a meaning to the inflected word. However, this runs counterto the usual understanding of the notion lexeme, which is supposedto have a single constant m...

Christopher Lyons,Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xx+380. - - Volume 36 Issue 1 - Andrew Spencer

We examine the periphrastic passive construction in Latin, in which a part of the verb paradigm is expressed by an auxiliary/copular verb `to be' with the perfective passive participle, having the syntax of a predicative adjective construction. We show that an analysis of this construction offered by Brjars, Vincent and Chapman 1997 within the LFG...

I argue for an extension of Clahsen's psycholinguistic paradigm to well-known languages with more complex morphological systems. This would help to address conceptual questions such as the nature of defaults and the way in which syncretisms are coded in the brain.

this paper is organized as follows. We first provide a brief introduction to relevant aspects of Russian morphology and nominalization. We then turn to the question of the argument structure of deverbal nominals, providing a short summary of Grimshaw's analysis of English nominalizations. The following sections focus on the Russian data and the dat...

In this paper I argue that the familiar lexical category labels, N, V, A, P or equivalently the features such as [±N, ±V] are redundant in a theory which admits a level of argument structure. I modify Zwart's (1992) conception of a-structure by arguing that major class members always include a 'referential role': for nouns, (for 'eventuality') for...

Considerable attention has been devoted in the recent literature to the morphosyntax of deverbal action nominalizations (Comrie and Thompson 1985; Grimshaw 1990; Rozwadowska 1997; Zubizarreta 1987; see Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1993 for a typological survey), especially those that give rise to so-called ‘mixed categories’ (Lefebvre and Muysken 1988), in wh...