Farrell Ackerman

University of California, San Diego | UCSD · Department of Linguistics/Human Developmental Sciences Program

Construction theoretic morphology and periphrasis

IMM20 Workshop on the Imperfectablity of Morphology

Morphological structures interact dynamically with lexical processing and storage, with the parameters of morphological typology being partly dependent on cognitive pathways for processing, storage and generalization of word structure, and vice versa. Bringing together a team of well-known scholars, this book examines the relationship between lingu...

Large typological databases have permitted new ways of studying cross-linguistic morphological variation. Recently, computational modelers with typological interests have begun to turn to broad multilingual text databases. In this paper, we will focus particularly on the UniMorph database, a collection of morphological paradigms, mostly gathered au...

It is a conceptual and formal treatment of synthetic and periphrastic encodings of recurrent morphosyntactic construction types.

It is a conceptual and formal treatment of synthetic and periphrastic encodings of recurrent morphosyntactic construction types.

Previous work demonstrates that a word's status as morphologically-simple or complex may be reflected in its phonetic realisation. One possible source for these effects is phonetic paradigm uniformity, in which an intended word's phonetic realisation is influenced by its morphological relatives. For example, the realisation of the inflected word fr...

Q1: What happens if we follow an explanatory strategy from evolutionary biology where neutral explanations are the default, and adaptive explanations have the burden of proof? Q2: Can we account for (more) complex morphology in esoteric situations and simplifications in exoteric ones w/o assuming adaptation to e.g., learning capacities of L1 and L2...

In this article, we argue that insights concerning the word-based nature of morphology, especially the hypothesis that periphrastic expressions are cross-linguistically common exponents of lexical relations, permit a novel lexical constructional analysis of periphrastic predicates that preserves the restriction of morphosyntactic mapping operations...

The 40-odd years since the publication of Matthews' (1972) Inflectional Morphology have witnessed a broad resurgence of interest in word-based approaches and a particular rehabilitation of classical 'word and paradigm' (WP) approaches as general models of analysis. WP models have shown themselves well adapted to the description and analysis of infl...

This paper examines the syntactic and semantic behavior of object arguments in Moro, a Kordofanian language spoken in central Sudan. In particular, we focus on multiple object constructions (ditransitives, applicatives, and causatives) and show that these objects exhibit symmetrical syntactic behavior; e.g., any object can passivize or be realized...

The chapter examines classes of grammatical markers that can serve more than one function, polyfunctional markers, spoiling the one-to-one form and function relation which is what morphology tends to do. There are areas of the grammar more prone to this behaviour suggesting that there may be at work principles of morphological organization that lie...

Recent developments in the Word and Pattern approach to complex morphology have argued that words and the patterned relations between words are primary objects of morphological analysis. The primacy of words has two part/whole dimensions: the nature of their internal structure and the nature of their external relations to one another. Words consist...

‘In order to understand what another person is saying you must assume it is true, and try to imagine what it might be true of.’ As will be familiar to a Language audience, many of the central questions of language study were identified by luminaries of language—Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hermann Paul, Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikołaj Kruszewski, William D...

To appear in the Journal of Linguistics 2017

Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory J. Audring and F. Masini eds.

To appear in A. Hippisley and N. Gisborne eds. Defaults in Morphological Theory

To appear in Gregory Stump and Raphael Finkel eds, Cambridge Handbook of Morphology

Greenberg's (1963) Universal 34 states that "No language has a trial number unless it has a dual. No language has a dual unless it has a plural." We present an associative model of the acquisition of grammatical number based on the Rescorla-Wagner learning theory (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) that predicts this generalization. Number as a real-world ca...

PROCEEDINGS OF THE FORTIETH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE BERKELEY LINGUISTICS SOCIETY February 7-9, 2014 General Session Special Session Approaches to the Syntax-Phonology Interface Parasessions Semantic Theory in Underdescribed Languages Language, Inequality, and Globalization Editors Herman Leung Zachary O’Hagan Sarah Bakst Auburn Lutzross Jonathan Mank...

Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session Dedicated to the Contributions of Charles J. Fillmore (1994)

This paper addresses the formation of wh-questions in Thetogovela Moro, a Kordofanian language spoken in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. Moro has both in-situ and ex-situ wh-questions, but exhibits a subject/non-subject asymmetry: while non-subjects may employ either construction, subjects must appear in the ex-situ form. Ex-situ wh-questions are anal...

Descriptive grammarians and typologists often encounter unusual constructions or unfamiliar variants of otherwise familiar construction types. Many of these phenomena are puzzling from the perspective of linguistic theories: they neither predict nor, arguably, provide the tools to insightfully describe them. This book analyzes an unusual type of re...

Cross-linguistically, inflectional morphology exhibits a spectacular range of complexity in both the structure of individual words and the organization of systems that words participate in. We distinguish two dimensions in the analysis of morphological complexity. Enumerative complexity (E-complexity) reflects the number of morphosyntactic distinct...

This paper examines the syntactic and semantic behavior of object arguments in Moro, a Kordofanian language spoken in central Sudan. In particular, we focus on multiple object constructions (ditransitives, applicatives, and causatives) and show that these objects exhibit symmetrical syntactic behavior; e.g., any object can passivize or be realized...

Learners acquire grammatical constraints (e.g., the knowledge that giggle's use in The joke giggled me is ungrammatical) in part through statistical learning. The entrenchment and preemption hypotheses claim that correlated statistics are relevant. This makes it difficult to find unambiguous evidence in favor of one or the other. The present work c...

IntroductionA Taxonomy of Lexicalist Approaches to PeriphrasisInflectional Periphrasis: Compound TensesDerivational Periphrasis: Phrasal PredicatesConclusions References

Humans show an amazing ability to produce novel words based on previous experience. What analogical processes are at work in this process, and how do analogical generalizations emerge from complex morphological systems? This chapter addresses these questions with new quantitative measures. Words are construed as recombinant gestalts. The predictive...

Humans show an amazing ability to produce novel words based on previous experience. What analogical processes are at work in this process, and how do analogical generalizations emerge from complex morphological systems? This chapter addresses these questions with new quantitative measures. Words are construed as recombinant gestalts. The predictive...

Tapani Salminen is docent and lecturer in the Department of Finno-Ugrian Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He studied Finno-Ugrian language studies and general linguistics at Helsinki, focusing on morphology, lexicography, and the status of indigenous languages, and specializing in the Nenets languages. He has authored two books, his...

Workshop on Analogy in Grammar: Form and Acquisition Department of Linguistics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Leipzig, Germany 22–23 September 2006

The morphological paradigm as a theoretical construct has a central role in explaining inflectional word formation, particularly in Word & Paradigm approaches to morphology. In contrast, research into the role of paradigm in derivation has been programmatic as well as fragmentary. In this paper I investigate the extent to which patterns of relation...

Eastern and Western Armenian possess non-subject participial prenominal relative clause constructions which contrast with respect to the surface expression of the pronominal subject of the embedded verb. This argument is expressed as a person/number affix on the participle (and optional independent pronoun) in Eastern Armenian. In Western Armenian,...

This paper focuses on predicate formation operations which affect the value and determination of lexical properties associated with Hungarian phrasal periphrastic predicates and, hence, on lexeme-formation (Aronoff 1994). Recent work, following the word and paradigm morphological models of Robins (1959), Matthews (1972), among others, has argued th...

Many languages have morphological means for distinguishing between atelic/telic aspectual contrasts associated with related transitive predicates1. For example, it is well-known that the lexicons of Slavic languages contain pervasive patterns of paired predicates. This is exemplified by Russian in (1): (1) a. Včera ja kosil travu yesterday I cut.pa...

The existence of OBLIGATORY ADJUNCTS in both predication and modification constructions is best understood as following from general conversational pragmatics, rather than from grammatical factors. In the case of clausal predication, adjuncts are used to satisfy the often-cited requirement that every utterance have a focus that serves to convey new...

This book develops a theory of semantically induced argument encodings based on the proto-property argument selection proposal of David Dowty. Such a theory is designed to cover much of the empirical terrain of mapping/linking theories in identifying the principles of correspondence between the lexical semantics of predicates and the grammatical fu...

Introduction On the construct 'Predicate' The Structure of Signs Morphology The Lexical-Functional Structure of Predicates With and Without Particles Modification Passive Causatives Middles References.

this paper I will explore the hypotheses that certain analytically expressed predicates conveying agreement, tense, and polarity information should be:

Gilles Fauconnier & Eve Sweetser (eds.),Space, worlds, and grammar. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 355 Pp. Masayoshi Shibatani & Sandra Thompson (eds.),Grammatical constructions: their form and meaning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+345. Several years ago a volume of articles appeared called The view from Building 20...

This paper will examine a class of morphosemantic alternations, where the semantic contrast is in terms of TELICITY, and the encoding alternation is realized on the object argument in affirmative clauses containing personal verb forms.

In this paper we examine the topicalization paradigm for ten different verbal constructions in German. We argue that a uniform explanation for the observed behaviors follows from the interpretation of the relevant expressions as (parts of) lexical representations. To this end we motivate a revision of Functional Uncertainty as proposed in Kaplan an...

This paper focuses on two aspects of prenominal non-subject relative constructions (hereafter NSR) typified by W. Armenian and Dagur in (1) and (2): this type of relative, to the best of my knowledge, has been overlooked in descriptive typological studies, despite being one prevalent pattern of person/number marking for NSRs within the Uralic and A...

this paper, we examine certain distributions of deverbal adjectives based on past participles and used attributively, (hereafter, APPs). These distributions, although widely recognized, have not been sufficiently explained in the rather substantial literature on the subject of APPs (e.g., Lakoff 1965, Hirtle 1971, Wasow 1977, Bresnan 1982, Levin &...

There have been essentially two types of theoretical approaches to account for the grammatical relations associated with the causee argument of causative constructions. Ignoring the specifics of particular theories, there are transitivity based approaches in which the causee is a direct object when the embedded clause is intransitive, and an indire...

Lexicalism is a theory of information associated with words and what exactly a word is. The authors propose a different idea of what can be contained in words. Lexicalism is first and foremost a hypothesis about functional-semantic information and secondarily a hypothesis about the formal expression of this information. Grammar rules cannot change...

In this paper we explore some of the issues central to modeling a fragment of a complex nominal inflection system based on an idealization of the Finnish nominal inflection system. The basic problem we address concerns the partitioning of nominals into what is known as declensional classes. That is, in certain languages all nominals are categorized...

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1. Goals ¾ Explore a proposal for MORPHOSYNTACTIC LEXICAL OPERATIONS which combines LEXICAL MAPPING THEORY and Dowtyian ARGUMENT SELECTION. ¾ Demonstrate that the modest domain over which Dowtyian argument selection was originally formulated can be extended for wider empirical coverage, contra claims by Davis and Koenig (2000). 2. Challenges posed...

Several other chapters in this book analyze grammatical phenomena according to the architectural assumptions and constraint-based representational apparatus of lexicalist theories of grammar; in the present chapter, we ask some fundamental questions concerning what it means for a theory to be lexicalist. While critically assessing some consensus be...

nderson 1992,Aronoff 1994, Zwicky 1990, Stump 1993, to appear) be embedded in these lexicalistframeworks? (see Ackerman & Webelhuth 1998, Blevins 2000, Borjars et. al. 1997, Koenig1999, Orgun 1997, Riehemann 2000, Spencer 2000, Spencer and Sadler 2000, among others.)# In LFG: How can multi-word realizations of lexical representations contribute rel...

The past few years have witnessed increased attention within lexicalist frameworks such as Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) and Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) to the analysis of predicates expressed by syntactically independent pieces. The recognition of such phenomena, primarily represented in the literature by analytic or periphrasti...

Our intention in this paper is to deve lop an explanatory account of the special characteristics of periphrastic expressions by refining the traditional notion of PARADIGM employed within inferential-realizational approaches to morphology (Anderson 1992, Aronoff 1994, Zwicky 1990, Stump 1993, 2001). Our proposal draws on this notion in order to dev...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Linguistics)--University of California, Berkeley, May 1987. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 375-388).