Li6 Phonology and Li6 Phonology and MorphologyMorphology

inflection and derivation

12-3-2007

Today’s topicsToday’s topics

inflection vs derivation why do linguists make this distinction? arguments and evidence for and against the

distinction larger implications of the (non)distinction

Inflection vs DerivationInflection vs Derivationinflection

affixation

morphological constructions derivation

compounding Derivation: relates lexemes to each other (category changing, argument-structure changing morphology)

derive, derivation, derivational, derivationality, derivationally, derivable, derivability govern, government, governor social, socialist, socialism, socialize work, worker, workable sleep, sleepy, sleepiness

Inflection: outfits lexemes with the features they need to occupy their designated position in a syntactic construction (e.g. case, agreement features, tense, mood)

derive, derives, deriving derivation, derivations

Anderson 1982, 1992: Inflection is the morphology that is relevant to the syntax. relevant to the syntax = things like structural syntactic case, or subject-verb agreement

The boundary between these can be fuzzy: Is sleepier (the comparative of sleep) an inflected form of sleep or a different lexeme? Is writing an inflected form of write (the one called for in the syntactic construction “I am ___”) or is it a separate lexeme? How about number of NPs in languages where there is no number agreement, e.g. English I opened the box/boxes?

Yet the categories are still commonly invoked, because of some general correlations:

from Goldberg 2005

Classic differencesClassic differences

inflection derivation

doesn’t change word class changes WC

peripheral central

productive (but Chechen agr in only 30% of vbs) less productive; frequent gaps in family

paradigmatic not paradigmatic

semantically transparent not semantically transparent

connected to syntax not connected to syntax

not replaceable by single word replaceable by single word

can be syncretic (3sg pres -s) generally not syncretic (un-talk-ative)

Generalisations: inflection adds information to a word; derivation changes information. within any given part of speech, those properties required by syntax

(case on nominals; subject or object agreement on nominals and/or verbs; tense on verbs) are always classified as inflection.

from Goldberg 2005

Possible I-D Possible I-D differencesdifferences

Semantic transparencySemantic transparency

Inflection tends to be more semantically regular than derivation: The “meaning” or function of e.g. dative case is consistent across all nouns it

combines with. By contrast, derivational affixation is often subject to semantic irregularity.

dress dresser one who dresses, or specific type of furniture

poke poker one who pokes, or specific fireplace tool

discern discernment property of being discerning

deport deportment behavior, not property of being deported

govern government an institution that governs, not the property of being governing

from Goldberg 2005

Affix orderingAffix ordering

In agglutinating languages, derivation is generally closer to the root than inflection: dogg-ie-s, *dog-s-ie

Problem 1: depantsing, etc. [Problem 2: Rice on Slave] Problem 2: Yiddish and Itelmen (Perlmutter 1988, Bobaljik 2003,

Lowenstamm 2006) xazeyr-im-l-əx ‘little pigs’ : demb-l-əx ‘little oaks’ diminutive only follows plural when the pl is irregular Perlmutter 1988: irregular plurals stored in lexicon, so no ordering dilemma Bobaljik 2003: Itelmen shows same pattern, but with regular plurals

Do we really need the ordering generalisation, or the I-D distinction for that matter? e.g. is the ordering generalisation just a product of history?

• potential problem: Harris and Faarlund on inflection trapping

AcquisitionAcquisition Robust finding for many languages: knowledge of inflectional morphology is

acquired before knowledge of derivational morphology and the morphology of compounds Levin et al. 2001 on Hebrew

• 40 children tested twice (5;11 and 6;5) on two oral tasks – inflecting nouns for possession and deriving denominal adjectives.

• D was found to be harder than I, both on the stem and the suffix level, attributable to its higher semantic opacity.

Green et al. 2003 on English• I and D forms within narratives written by 247 3rd and 4th graders• majority of such students use I consistently and accurately• fewer used derived forms, and significantly more 4th graders than 3rd graders used

them accurately• generalisation for both speaking and writing: I mastered by 9-10, but D continues to

develop into middle childhood

AphasiaAphasia

evidence for I and D as autonomous subcomponents (Miceli and Caramazza 1988)

Badecker and Caramazza 1989 Marangolo et al. 2003

much documentation of selective deficits in I no prior evidence for selective deficits in D Report on 2 patients with R-hemisphere lesions and selective D deficits

• Specific deficit: producing nouns derived from verbs• one produced past participles, the other gerunds

• spostato ‘displaced’ instead of spostamento ‘displacement’• digerendo ‘digesting’ instead of digestione ‘digestion’

Problem: observed differences can be explained without recourse to differences within the grammar

• R brain accesses broader range of related meanings

Eye trackingEye tracking Niswander, Pollatsek, and Rayner 2000

encoding of suffixed words (both I and D) assessed by monitoring eye movements during reading English sentences

scheme: lower frequency, longer fixation root frequency (R) and whole-word frequency (W) independently

manipulated in target words D words: R affected processing earlier than W regular I words:

• W affected processing beginning with first fixation

• R affected processing beginning with first fixation for plural nouns but not for inflected verbs

Potentially interesting results:• evidence for morphological decomposition

• counter to prediction of theory that D = stored, I = rule-based Problem: I and D stimuli not controlled for word length

Signed languagesSigned languages

Aronoff, Meir, and Sandler 2005 morphology is generally simultaneous the few cases of sequential morphology are all derivational

(rest state) whq WHO ARRIVE ‘who arrived?’

from Conlin, Hagstrom, and Neidle 2003from Conlin, Hagstrom, and Neidle 2003

Signed languagesSigned languages

Arguments for suffixhood rather than wordhood it must occur after, never before, its stem. This is significant in light of the fact

that word order in ASL is relatively free, and that the related independent word can indeed occur before or after verbs.

Two of the five consultants who use the suffix attach it to a limited set of verbs (including SEE, HEAR, LEARN, FEEL, SAY, EAT, TOUCH, SMELL, UNDERSTAND, USE, SLEEP, TASTE). For these consultants, the verb and suffix tend to fuse phonologically in the following ways: nonmanual markers such as facial expressions or head positions tend to span both the verb and the suffix; the path movements of both the verb and the suffix either are shortened or coalesce, depending on the underlying form of the stem; some of the meanings of the suffixed words are idiosyncratic. Examples of the last characteristic are SAME-ZERO ‘can’t find one like yours’, SAY-ZERO ‘not mention’, and TOUCH-ZERO ‘not use’.

There is a phonological constraint on the occurrence of the suffix: it can occur only with one-handed stems.

• ASL words are either one-handed or two-handed throughout. The fewdisyllabic monomorphemicwords that exist in the language are two-handed in both syllables. Furthermore, lexicalized compounds tend to spread two-handedness from one member of the compound to the other (Liddell & Johnson 1986, Sandler 1989, 1993c, van der Hulst 1996). If there is a constraint on number of hands within a word, it is not surprising that the one-handed negative element under discussion occurs only with other one-handed forms: it is a suffix, and the resulting word must satisfy the constraint on handedness, whose domain is the word. The way in which negative suffixed forms satisfy this constraint is different from the way compounds do. The suffix avoids two-handed stems, while the compounds involve spreading of two-handedness to the one-handed member.

Larger implications of Larger implications of the I-D (non-) the I-D (non-) distinctiondistinction

Traditional approaches to I-DTraditional approaches to I-D

brute forcemorphemes pre-classified as D or I; properties are

predetermined stratification (e.g. Anderson, LPM)

derivation done in the lexiconinflection done in the syntax

syntactic (Lieber, Selkirk, Travis, DM)single domain of word-formation where both I and D applyproperties of morphemes derived from structural

configuration and relative position

Problems 1Problems 1

I D

participles productive compositional

class-changing when used as Adj (broken string)

can be non-compositional (drunken)

diminutives Yiddish/Itelmen order R adds -ša (f declension) to

stressed syll (Pável Paša, Natál’a Taša)

change base meaning R adjectives agree with gender of

base, not -ša (ruskij/ruskaja Saša ‘Russian Alexander/Alexandra’)

aspect R (im)perfective aspect marked by presence or absence of prefix for many verbs

R: same prefixes can change base meaning of verbs (pisat’ ‘write’ : s pisat’ ‘copy’)

cpv & suprlv E -er & -est functionally inflectional

can be suppletive (worse…) Sp constructions are derivational or

lexical

gender Sp gallo negro ‘black rooster’ vs. gallina negra ‘black hen’

Sp gallo negro ‘black rooster’ vs. gallina negra ‘black hen’

Problems 2Problems 2

Raveh and Rueckl 2000 Previous studies of long-term morphological priming have obtained a

mixed pattern of results: Although some studies have found larger effects of inflected primes than of derived primes, others have found that inflections and derivations have equivalent effects.

We reexamined this issue in four experiments in which the inflected and derived primes were paired with the same target words (e.g., believe, believed, believer) and were equated in terms of their orthographic similarity to the targets. Across these experiments, inflections and derivations consistently produced equivalent levels of priming.

Larger implications of the Larger implications of the I-D (non-)distinctionI-D (non-)distinction

relevant to theories that organise inflection (but not derivation) in terms of paradigms Beard McCarthy, Optimal Paradigms

• traditional generalisations: • inflection is paradigmatic, derivation isn’t• derivatives have obvious bases, inflected forms don’t

• McCarthy: derivational paradigms always refer to privileged bases, but inflectional paradigms never do

• Albright argues that inflectional paradigms also have bases

• BV: all such cases may involve opportunistic selection, not derivational architecture

relevant to “syntactic” theories of morphology Distributed Morphology Selkirk

ConclusionsConclusions

Problems with observed I-D differences:may have historical rather than synchronic causesmay have extra-linguistic causes

ReferencesReferencesAronoff, Mark, Irit Meir, and Wendy Sandler. 2005. The paradox of sign language morphology. Language 81.2:301-344. Badecker, W., & Caramazza, A. (1989). A lexical distinction between inflection and derivation. Linguistic Inquiry, 20, 108-116. Burani, C., & Alfonso Caramazza. 1987. Representation and processing of derived words. Language & Cognitive Processes 2:217-

227. Caramazza, A., Laudanna, A., & Romani, C. (1988). Lexical access and inflectional morphology. Cognition, 28, 297-332. Conlin, Frances, Paul Hagstrom, and Carol Neidle. 2003. A particle of indefiniteness in American Sign Language. Linguistic

Discovery 2.1. Available online at http://journals.dartmouth.edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/2/xmlpage/1/article/142?htmlOnce=yes

Goldberg, Adele. 2005. Inflectional vs derivational morphology. Handout, UC Berkeley.Green, Laura, Deborah Schwiebert McCutchen, Catherine Quinlan, Tom Eva-Wood, and Amy Juelis. 2003. Morphological

development in children’s writing. Journal of Educational Psychology 95.4:752-761.Laudanna, A., W. Badecker, and Alfonso Caramazza. 1992. Processing inflectional and derivational morphology. Journal of Memory

& Language 31:333-348. Levin, Iris, Dorit Ravid, and Sharon Rapaport. 2001. Morphology and spelling among Hebrew-speaking children: from kindergarten

to first grade. Journal of Child Language 28:741-772.Marangolo, Paola, Chiara Incoccia, Luigi Pizzamiglio, Umberto Sabatini, Alessandro Castriota-Scanderbeg, and Cristina Burani.

2003. The Right Hemisphere Involvement in the Processing of Morphologically Derived Words. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 15.3:364–371.

Miceli, G., & Caramazza, A. (1988). Dissociation of inflectional and derivational morphology. Brain & Language 35:24-65.Niswander, Elizabeth, Alexander Pollatsek, and Keith Rayner. 2000. The processing of derived and inflected suffixed words during

reading. Language and Cognitive Processes 15.4/5:389-420.Raveh, M. and G. Rueckl. 2000. Equivalent Effects of Inflected and Derived Primes: Long-Term Morphological Priming in Fragment

Completion and Lexical Decision. Journal of Memory and Language 42.1:103-119.