LOT Winter School 2010 course
description
Course Titel
Morphology - The state-of-the-art.
Teacher
Jan Don
E-mail: j.don@uva.nl
Postal Address:
Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA)
Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB Amsterdam
Homepage: http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/j.don/
Course Level:
Introductory
Course Description
In this course I will try to sketch some of the main
issues and basic questions that determine today’s research agenda of
morphologists. Before we get to that, we will first introduce basic notions,
such as the difference between inflection and derivation, affixation,
compounding, the relation between morphology and other components of the
grammar, and some of the important insights that previous research has given
us. The focus in this course is on the empirical phenomena, rather than on
theoretical detail. Nevertheless, in discussion a wide range of data (students
are encouraged to bring in any data from their native language), we will also
come across many different theoretical frameworks, such as Anderson’s
‘Amorphous morphology’, Halle’s ‘Distributed Morphology’, Beard’s
Lexeme-Morpheme base Morphology, Stump’s ‘Paradigm Function Morphology’, Borer’s
Exo-skeletal approach and different versions of
Lexical Morphology.
Day-to-day Program
Monday:
We will start out by defining the some of the
basic notions of morphology. What is word-formation? We will review different
types of word-formation, and discuss the difference between derivation and
inflection. Also, we will go into issues related to the notion productivity.
Finally, we will look into some typical idiosyncrasies that often accompany
word-formation.
Tuesday:
If we look into different word-formation processes, we soon discover that
there are certain types of affixes depending on their phonological behavior.
What does this tell us about the relation between morphology and phonology? If
time permits this is the place to have a look into reduplication phenomena.
Keywords: class I vs. class II affixation;
affix-ordering; level-ordering.
Wednesday:
Inflectional patterns show interesting properties that deviate from what
we may expect as naïve ‘reversed engineers’; we will look into patterns of syncretisms that often are ‘meta-paradigmatic’. What does
this tell us about the organization of inflection in the grammar? Keywords:
inflectional classes; syncretism; contextual and absolute neutralization, underspecification.
Thursday:
Mismatches: Word-formation processes often are not fully compositional in
the sense that all affixation is done ‘at the outside’ of the base that the
affix attaches to. Some processes involve so-called ‘head operations’.
Furthermore, there are many word-formation operations of which the output
receives an idiosyncratic interpretation. Are all morphological constructs
prone to ‘lexicalization’? Keywords: head operation, compositionality of
interpretation, bracketing paradoxes.
Friday:
Nominalizations
have been at the heart of many discussions on the proper division of labor
between morphology and syntax. Today we will look at some recent theories on
nominalizations (Marantz, Borer) and see what
consequences this has for morphological theory. Keywords: nominalization,
lexical category, root, zero-derivation, conversion.
Background and preparatory readings:
Any
Introduction in morphology will do.
Course readings:
Monday: You can choose from several introductions in
morphology. I list a few: Booij The Grammar of
Words, Aronoff and Fudeman
What is Morphology?, or (if you prefer something a
little more theoretical: Spencer, Andrew (1993) Morphological Theory).
Tuesday: - Scalise, Sergio
and Emiliano Guevara 2005 “ The
lexicalist approach to word-formation and the notion
of the lexicon”, in: Stekauer, Pavol
and Rochelle Lieber (eds.) Handbook of
Word-formation, p. 147- 188.
- Giegerich, H. (1999) Lexical
strata in English: morphological causes, phonological effects ( Cambridge Studies in Linguistics: 89).
Wednesday: - Noyer, Rolf. 1997. Features, Positions and Affixes in
Autonomous Morphological Structure.
-Williams, Edwin (1994) ‘Remarks on Lexical
Knowledge’, Lingua 92, p.7-34.
Thursday: - Stump, Greg 2005 “Word-formation and
inflectional morphology”, in: Stekauer, Pavol and Rochelle Lieber (eds.)
Handbook of Word-formation, p. 49-72.
Friday: - Borer, Hagit
(2003) “Exo-skeletal vs. Endo-skeletal Explanations:
Syntactic Projections and the Lexicon”, in: Moore, John and Maria Polinsky (eds.) The Nature of Explanation in Linguistic Theory, CSLI Publications. P. 31-67.
Further readings:
Anderson, Steven R. (1982)
‘Where’s Morphology?’ Linguistic Inquiry 13, p. 571-612.
Beard, Robert (1995) Lexeme-Morpheme
Base Morphology,
Booij, Geert
(2002) The Morphology of Dutch,
Borer, Hagit
(2003) “Exo-skeletal vs. Endo-skeletal Explanations: Syntactioc Projections and the Lexicon”, in: Moore, John
and Maria Polinsky (eds.) The Nature of Explanation in Linguistic Theory, CSLI Publications.
P. 31-67.
Chomsky, N. (1972) ‘Remarks on
Nominalization’, in: N. Chomsky, Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar,
Clark, E. V. and H. H. Clark
(1979) ‘When Nouns Surface as Verbs’, Language 55, p. 767-811.
Di Sciullo,
Anna-Maria & Edwin Williams (1987) On the Definition of Word, MIT
Press:
Folli, Rafaella
and Heidi Harley (2007) ‘Causation, Obligation, and Argument Structure: On the
Nature of Little v’, Linguistic Inquiry 38 (2), p. 197-238
Giegerich, Heinz
(1999), Lexical Strata in English. Morphological Causes, Phonological Effects,
Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz (1993) “Distributed Morphology and the Pieces of
Inflection”, in: Hale & Keyser (eds.) The View from Building 20, Essays
in Linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachussetts.
p.111-176.
Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz (1994) “Some key features of Distributed Morphology”in: Carnie, A. and H. Harley (eds.) Papers on
Phonology and Morphology, MITWPL 21, p. 275-288.
Harley, Heidi and Rolf Noyer (1999) ‘State-of-the-article: Distributed
Morphology’, GLOT International 4, p. 3-9.
Lieber, Rochelle
(1981) On the Organization of the Lexicon, PhD diss.
???
Lieber, Rochelle
(1992) Deconstructing Morphology,
Marantz, Alec
(1997) ‘No Escape from Syntax: Don’t try morphological analysis in the privacy
of your own lexicon’, in: Dimitriadis, A. et al.
(eds.)
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium: Penn Working
Papers in Linguistics 4, p. 201-225.
Marantz, Alec (2001) ‘Words’,
paper presented at West Coast Conference of Formal Linguistics, UCLA.
Noyer, Rolf (1992) Features,
Positions and affixes in autonomous morphological structure. Doct. diss. MIT. distributed by MIT
Working papers in Lingusitics.
Williams, Edwin (1981) On the notions ‘lexically related’ and ‘head of a word’, Linguistic
Inquiry 12, p. 245-274.
Wunderlich, Dieter & Ray Fabri
(1995) ‘Minimalist Morphology: An Approach to
Inflection’, Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 14, p.
236-294.
Wunderlich, Dieter
(1997) ‘A Minimalist Model of Inflectional Morphology’, in:
Wilder, Chris, Hans-Martin Gärtner and Manfred Bierwisch The role of economy principles in
linguistic theory. Berlin: Akademie verlag.