One of Anderson's many contributions to morphological theory is the claim that morphology is ... more One of Anderson's many contributions to morphological theory is the claim that morphology is split between syntactically mediated inflection and lexically mediated derivation. In Minimalist morphosyntax all morphology is syntax. This means that the split morphology proposal is not meaningful for that model. In lexicalist models, however, the split morphology hypothesis manifests itself as a distinction between direct accessibility to syntactic representations (inflection proper) and lack of accessibility. However, there are construction types which bring the inflection-derivation distinction into question. One of these is the transposition, as illustrated by the ubiquitous deverbal participle. This is a mixed category, being at once a form of a verb yet having the external syntax of an adjective. It is thus unclear which side of the split participles fall. Similarly, participles seem to be an embarrassment for the Word-and-Paradigm models of inflection which have become dominant...
This article reviews two important recent contributions to the theory of morphology, which take s... more This article reviews two important recent contributions to the theory of morphology, which take significantly different approaches to the subject. Both are centrally concerned with questions of morphotactics. Rice argues that morpheme order in Athapaskan is largely the consequence of universal principles of semantic scope (coded as syntactic structure). Stump argues for a conception of inflection based on the paradigm. There is virtually no overlap between the two books, yet each raises questions that are of great significance for the other. In this review I briefly evaluate each book and then sketch the possibility of a synthesis.
Russian adjectives, especially participles, can be used as nouns denoting people, e.g. bol′noj/bo... more Russian adjectives, especially participles, can be used as nouns denoting people, e.g. bol′noj/bol′naja ‘(male/female) patient’ from bol′noj ‘sick’, učaščijsja/učaščajasja ‘(boy/girl) pupil’, participle from the verb učit′sja ‘to learn, study’. These are unusual in that they formally reflect the sex of their referent by means of inflectional morphology. Moreover, many surnames inflect like adjectives and they, too, inflect for gender: Mr. Puškin, Čexov, Tolstoj, Dostoevskij but Ms. Puškina, Čexova, Tolstaja, Dostoevskaja. Lexemes such as ‘patient, pupil’ are genuine nouns and not just adjectives modifying null nouns. The latter type do exist and have different properties from converted nouns. Converted nouns and adjectival surnames thus form systematic gender pairs which are forms of a single lexeme. However, gender is not conventionally regarded as an inflection category of the kind which induces word forms of lexemes in this way, rather it is an inherent ‘classificatory’ property ...
... Pp. xiii+245. Reviewed by ANDREW SPENCER, University of Essex ... Papers by Edwin Hutchins &a... more ... Pp. xiii+245. Reviewed by ANDREW SPENCER, University of Essex ... Papers by Edwin Hutchins & Brian Hazlehurst (chapter 13) and Takashi Hashimoto (chapter 14) together make up part VI: 'Auto-organization and dynamic factors'. ...
The Oxford Handbook of Compounding surveys a variety of theoretical and descriptive issues, prese... more 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, in particular, the notion of attributive modification in noun-headed compounds. I focus on two issues. The first is the semantic relation between the head noun and its nominal modifier. Several authors repeat the argument that there is a small(-ish) fixed number of general semantic relations in noun–noun compounds (‘Lees's solution’), but I argue that the correct way to look at such compounds is what I call ‘Downing's solution’, in which we assume that the relation is specified pragmatically, and hence could be any relation at all. The second issue is the way that adjectives modify nouns inside compounds. Although there are langua...
There is a widespread assumption within the Government–Binding theory as it has developed from th... more There is a widespread assumption within the Government–Binding theory as it has developed from the Barriers model (Chomsky 1986) that functional categories, that is, categories which play a role in establishing dependencies between parts of a sentence, as opposed to lexical categories, should be represented as heads projecting X-bar phrases. I shall refer to this as the Full Functional Projection Hypothesis (FFPH), stated informally in (1). (i) Full Functional Projection Hypothesis Any morphophonosyntactic formative which corresponds to a functional category in a given language is syntactically the head of a maximal projection.
In the spirit of Gandour (1981) a reanalysis is presented of the speech of a 6-yr-old language de... more In the spirit of Gandour (1981) a reanalysis is presented of the speech of a 6-yr-old language delayed child, Rosey, whose phonologic disorder has been discussed by Grunwell (1982). A revealing account of the data can be given by adopting a nonlinear framework; specifically, recent amendments to Goldsmith's (1976) theory of autosegmental phonology. This analysis borrows from autosegmental accounts of Arabic morphology, reduplication, and Kikuyu tone shift (all of which are briefly described). The processes postulated to explain the "deviant" pattern of data, hence, are all well motivated from the grammars of other languages. The analysis is contrasted with a "classical" (SPE) generative analysis and, thus, provides indirect evidence in favor of autosegmental theory over the classical theory. At the same time, the position of such phonologic analyses in psycholinguistic models of acquisition is briefly discussed.
Selkup (Uralic) has a great variety of morphological devices for creating transpositions from one... more Selkup (Uralic) has a great variety of morphological devices for creating transpositions from one lexical category to another without necessarily changing the lexical meaning at all. Kuznecova et al. (1980) explicitly demarcate this aspect of the grammar in their description under the ...
... A variety of specialists have an interest in morphology and I hope this book will therefore p... more ... A variety of specialists have an interest in morphology and I hope this book will therefore prove useful to phonologists, syntacticians, historical linguists, descriptive linguists and others whose main interests lie outside morphological theory as such. ... imperative imperf. ...
One of Anderson's many contributions to morphological theory is the claim that morphology is ... more One of Anderson's many contributions to morphological theory is the claim that morphology is split between syntactically mediated inflection and lexically mediated derivation. In Minimalist morphosyntax all morphology is syntax. This means that the split morphology proposal is not meaningful for that model. In lexicalist models, however, the split morphology hypothesis manifests itself as a distinction between direct accessibility to syntactic representations (inflection proper) and lack of accessibility. However, there are construction types which bring the inflection-derivation distinction into question. One of these is the transposition, as illustrated by the ubiquitous deverbal participle. This is a mixed category, being at once a form of a verb yet having the external syntax of an adjective. It is thus unclear which side of the split participles fall. Similarly, participles seem to be an embarrassment for the Word-and-Paradigm models of inflection which have become dominant...
This article reviews two important recent contributions to the theory of morphology, which take s... more This article reviews two important recent contributions to the theory of morphology, which take significantly different approaches to the subject. Both are centrally concerned with questions of morphotactics. Rice argues that morpheme order in Athapaskan is largely the consequence of universal principles of semantic scope (coded as syntactic structure). Stump argues for a conception of inflection based on the paradigm. There is virtually no overlap between the two books, yet each raises questions that are of great significance for the other. In this review I briefly evaluate each book and then sketch the possibility of a synthesis.
Russian adjectives, especially participles, can be used as nouns denoting people, e.g. bol′noj/bo... more Russian adjectives, especially participles, can be used as nouns denoting people, e.g. bol′noj/bol′naja ‘(male/female) patient’ from bol′noj ‘sick’, učaščijsja/učaščajasja ‘(boy/girl) pupil’, participle from the verb učit′sja ‘to learn, study’. These are unusual in that they formally reflect the sex of their referent by means of inflectional morphology. Moreover, many surnames inflect like adjectives and they, too, inflect for gender: Mr. Puškin, Čexov, Tolstoj, Dostoevskij but Ms. Puškina, Čexova, Tolstaja, Dostoevskaja. Lexemes such as ‘patient, pupil’ are genuine nouns and not just adjectives modifying null nouns. The latter type do exist and have different properties from converted nouns. Converted nouns and adjectival surnames thus form systematic gender pairs which are forms of a single lexeme. However, gender is not conventionally regarded as an inflection category of the kind which induces word forms of lexemes in this way, rather it is an inherent ‘classificatory’ property ...
... Pp. xiii+245. Reviewed by ANDREW SPENCER, University of Essex ... Papers by Edwin Hutchins &a... more ... Pp. xiii+245. Reviewed by ANDREW SPENCER, University of Essex ... Papers by Edwin Hutchins & Brian Hazlehurst (chapter 13) and Takashi Hashimoto (chapter 14) together make up part VI: 'Auto-organization and dynamic factors'. ...
The Oxford Handbook of Compounding surveys a variety of theoretical and descriptive issues, prese... more 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, in particular, the notion of attributive modification in noun-headed compounds. I focus on two issues. The first is the semantic relation between the head noun and its nominal modifier. Several authors repeat the argument that there is a small(-ish) fixed number of general semantic relations in noun–noun compounds (‘Lees's solution’), but I argue that the correct way to look at such compounds is what I call ‘Downing's solution’, in which we assume that the relation is specified pragmatically, and hence could be any relation at all. The second issue is the way that adjectives modify nouns inside compounds. Although there are langua...
There is a widespread assumption within the Government–Binding theory as it has developed from th... more There is a widespread assumption within the Government–Binding theory as it has developed from the Barriers model (Chomsky 1986) that functional categories, that is, categories which play a role in establishing dependencies between parts of a sentence, as opposed to lexical categories, should be represented as heads projecting X-bar phrases. I shall refer to this as the Full Functional Projection Hypothesis (FFPH), stated informally in (1). (i) Full Functional Projection Hypothesis Any morphophonosyntactic formative which corresponds to a functional category in a given language is syntactically the head of a maximal projection.
In the spirit of Gandour (1981) a reanalysis is presented of the speech of a 6-yr-old language de... more In the spirit of Gandour (1981) a reanalysis is presented of the speech of a 6-yr-old language delayed child, Rosey, whose phonologic disorder has been discussed by Grunwell (1982). A revealing account of the data can be given by adopting a nonlinear framework; specifically, recent amendments to Goldsmith's (1976) theory of autosegmental phonology. This analysis borrows from autosegmental accounts of Arabic morphology, reduplication, and Kikuyu tone shift (all of which are briefly described). The processes postulated to explain the "deviant" pattern of data, hence, are all well motivated from the grammars of other languages. The analysis is contrasted with a "classical" (SPE) generative analysis and, thus, provides indirect evidence in favor of autosegmental theory over the classical theory. At the same time, the position of such phonologic analyses in psycholinguistic models of acquisition is briefly discussed.
Selkup (Uralic) has a great variety of morphological devices for creating transpositions from one... more Selkup (Uralic) has a great variety of morphological devices for creating transpositions from one lexical category to another without necessarily changing the lexical meaning at all. Kuznecova et al. (1980) explicitly demarcate this aspect of the grammar in their description under the ...
... A variety of specialists have an interest in morphology and I hope this book will therefore p... more ... A variety of specialists have an interest in morphology and I hope this book will therefore prove useful to phonologists, syntacticians, historical linguists, descriptive linguists and others whose main interests lie outside morphological theory as such. ... imperative imperf. ...
I propose an analysis of deverbal participles and relative clauses headed by them under which the... more 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 characterize those distributional properties normally defined in terms of lexical or c-structure categories (N, V, A, P). It is difficult to know how to label mixed categories. Given the framework proposed here, there are *no* 'capital letter' lexical categories in the first place and the category mixing effects are handled by appeal to fine-grained aspects of lexical representation.
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Papers by Andrew Spencer