WORD-FORMATION THEORIES II

INVITED SPEAKERS

Word Analysis and Word Construction in Children
Eve V. Clark, Stanford University, USA

Children begin to analyze word forms early in acquisition, identifying affixes and demonstrating the ability to remove them in comprehension tasks that elicit glosses of novel combinations. To do this, children have to be able to identify stem and affix in novel combinations and answer questions like What does a roper do? (an agent question) What’s a jumper for? (an instrument question). They also spontaneously coin words, adding affixes to stems as they construct new derived words, and combining stems, without or with affixes, as they construct new compounds. In this talk, I look at the developmental sequence children display in different languages, and the kinds of errors they do – and don’t – make during acquisition.

How lexical is morphology?
On phrasal compounds, reduced phrases and other marginal things
Livio Gaeta, Università di Torino, Italy

Following Aronoff (1994), at least two different senses of the term lexicon must be distinguished. The Bloomfieldian sense of the term generally refers to the set containing any sort of entrenched or idiomatic expressions, while the second sense refers to the infinite “set of potential (regularly derived or compounded) lexemes for any given language”. A theory of lexeme formation makes crucial reference to this second sense and actually should keep it sharply distinct from the first one because it’s only this latter that constitutes its real object of investigation (cf. Gaeta 2015). In this talk, this view will be taken seriously as a vantage point from which the relation between the two senses of the lexicon will be investigated by showing apparent paradoxes given by reduced phrases, phrasal compounds and other marginal phenomena (cf. Meibauer 2007).

References
Aronoff, M. 1994. Morphology by Itself. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gaeta, L. 2015. Lexeme Formation in a Conscious Approach to the Lexicon. In L. Bauer, L. Körtvélyessy, P. Štekauer (eds.), Semantics of Complex Words, Heidelberg: Springer, 115–141.

Meibauer, J. 2007. How marginal are phrasal compounds? Generalized insertion, expressivity, and I/Q-interaction. Morphology 17: 233–259.

Processing English compounds: Investigating compositionality, semantic transparency, and relational structures
Christina L. Gagné & Thomas L. Spalding Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Canada

The competition-among-relations-in-nominals theory of conceptual combination proposes that relational information (e.g., head FOR modifier, head MADE OF modifier) plays a critical role in the processing of novel modifier-noun phrases such as snow slippers (Gagné & Shoben 1997, see also Spalding et al. 2010). According to this theoretical approach, relations compete with each other and, consequently, it is easier to interpret a phrase when the underlying relation is a strong competitor than when the relation is a weaker competitor. Subsequent research that has shown that the processing of known compounds, such as snowball, are also influenced by the availability of relational information (e.g., Gagné & Spalding 2009; Gagné & Spalding 2014).However, not all compound meanings can be derived from the constituents; semantically opaque constituents (e.g., hog and wash) do not contribute to the compound's (hogwash) meaning. We will discuss research suggesting that the ease of processing opaque compounds is affected by relational competition, but that the effect differs for opaque and transparent compounds. Given these findings, the issue of semantic transparency is a relevant factor when considering the role of relational structures. However, semantic transparency has not been systematically explored. It has been described in terms of the degree to which the meaning of the constituent is retained in the meaning of the whole compound, and also in terms of the degree to which the meaning of the compound is predictable from the meaning of the constituents, and has been operationalized in a variety of ways in the psycholinguistic literature (e.g, Libben 2007; Libben et al. 2003; Sandra 1990; Marelli & Luzzatti 2012). We will present a study in which transparency is measured based on: 1) linguistic criteria, 2) participant ratings of how predictable a compound’s meaning was from its parts, as well as the extent that each constituent retains its meaning in the compound, 3) Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) scores for the compound and each constituent. LSA is a method that derives the degree of association and semantic similarity from the use of the words in context (Landauer 2002).

We used these measures to test the claim that meaning retention ratings reflect the semantic similarity between a compound’s meaning and the constituent meaning, whereas the predictability ratings indicate the degree of semantic compositionality of the compound’s concept (see Marelli & Luzzatti 2012). If meaning retention ratings measure the strength of associative links between the constituent and the compound then these ratings and LSA score should be highly correlated and, moreover, the rating should be independent of the LSA score for the other constituent. We examined whether the meaning retention ratings for each constituent can be predicted by the LSA scores for each constituent. For example, is the rating for house in houseboat predictable from the LSA score for house and houseboat and from the LSA score for boat and houseboat? In addition, we examined whether a compound meaning’s predictability is a function of the association of its constituents with the compound (as indicated by the LSA scores). The extent to which the LSA scores account for the predictability rating indicates the degree to which compositionality depends on semantic associations. The results from these various analyses indicate that the various methods of measuring semantic transparency do not reflect the same underlying aspects of semantic transparency.

References
Gagné, C. L., & Shoben, E. J. (1997). Influence of thematic relations on the comprehension of modifier-noun combinations. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 71–87.

Gagné, C. L., & Spalding, T. L. (2009). Constituent integration during the processing of compound words: Does it involve the use of relational structures? Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 20–35.

Gagné, C. L., & Spalding, T. L. (2014). Conceptual composition: The role of relational competition in the comprehension of modifier-noun phrases and noun-noun compounds. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (pp. 97–130). New York: Elsevier.

Landauer, T. K. (2002). On the computational basis of learning and cognition: Arguments from LSA. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 41, 43–84.

Libben, G. (2007). Everything is psycholinguistics. Material and methodological considerations in the study of compound processing. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 50, 267–283.

Libben, G., Gibson, M., Yoon, Y. B., & Sandra, S. (2003). Compound fracture: The role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness. Brain and Language, 84, 50–64.

Marelli, M., & Luzzatti, C. (2012). Frequency effects in the processing of Italian nominal compounds: Modulation of headedness and semantic transparency. Journal of Memory and Language, 66, 644–664.

Sandra, D. (1990). On the representation and processing of compound words: Automatic access to constituent morphemes does not occur. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42A, 529–567.

Spalding, T. L., Gagné, C. L., Mullaly, A. C., & Ji, H. (2010). Relation-based interpretation of noun-noun phrases: A new theoretical approach. In S. Olsen (Ed.), New impulses in wordformation (Linguistische
Berichte, Sonderheft 17) (pp. 283–315). Hamburg: Buske.  

Temperature terms across languages: derivation, lexical stability and lexical universals
Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Stockholm University, Sweden

In this talk I will focus on the cross-linguistic regularities in the origin and development of temperature terms, such as ‘warm’ or ‘cold’, based on the data from about 40 languages in Koptjevskaja-Tamm (ed. 2015). The first question concerns motivational patterns typical for temperature terms, i.e., to what extent and by which word-formation strategies temperature terms are derived from expressions with other meanings. To give a few examples, some of the most frequent sources for ‘hot’ include, not surprisingly, such concepts as ‘burn’, ‘fire’, ‘boil’, ‘cook’, ‘sweat’, while those for ‘cold’ include ‘ice’, ‘shade’, ‘winter’, ‘brr’, ‘to become stiff’. In fact, the close relation between the conventionalised expressions for ‘warm/hot’ and those for ‘fire’ or ‘sweat’ in some languages raises the issue of whether the former do indeed belong to the basic or central temperature terms. In addition, there are many other sources for temperature terms.

A fascinating group of questions related to the origin and development of temperature terms concerns their stability. For instance, do genetically related languages share temperature cognates? If they do, do the cognates have the same or similar meanings? What is the role of language contact in shaping the temperature term systems? It has been suggested in earlier research that central temperature terms are unusually stable, i.e. that they are typically «passed on essentially unchanged and with essentially no vocabulary turn-over across hundreds of generations of grammar&lexicon acquirers for thousands of years» (Plank 2010). However, the answers to the above listed questions differ for different languages, or for groups of languages. For instance, some of the central temperature terms across Indo-European turn out to be extremely stable, but these languages also testify to numerous instances of lexical replacement or addition of new temperature terms. The temperature terms in the two closely related Timor-Alor-Pantar languages Abui and Kamang and across the Nyulnyulan family are, on the contrary, strikingly dissimilar. Significantly, in all these cases, the meanings of cognates and their place in the overall temperature system of a language may be subject to significant variation.

References
Koptjevskaja-Tamm (ed.) 2015. The linguistics of temperature. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins

Plank, Frans 2010. ‘Temperature talk: The basics revisited.’ A talk presented at the Workshop on Temperature in Language and Cognition, Stockholm University, March 2010. 

Are basic lexical units specified for word class or not? It depends.
Frans Plank, University of Konstanz, Germany

It has been assumed that there are two types of languages: languages without a lexical distinction of VERB and NOUN and languages where basic lexical units (“stems” or “words”) are specified as either VERB or NOUN. In the former, basic lexical items (“(pre-categorial) roots”) are grammatically fully flexible and can equally be used as V and N in morphosyntactic constructions (assuming that a morphosyntactic distinction of predicating and referring parts of speech is universal), with no semantic or formal asymmetries between the V and N uses suggesting that one is less basic than the other. For the latter, there are probably subtypes depending on whether there are more basic verbs or more basic nouns, with derivational productively deriving words of the respective opposite word class. N 's derived from a V's and equally V's derived from N's will inherit properties from their respective sources; if directly coming from an unspecified root, there wouldn’t be any such asymmetric inheritances.

My aims here are twofold:
(i) I suggest that classifying entire languages along these lines is too general. It is, rather, particular lexical items that are either specified or un(der)specified for particular word classes, and a language can have basic lexical items of both kinds, unspecified and specified;
(ii) I will explore the idea of a “verby”/noun-deriving vs. “nouny”/verb-deriving typology, also diachrony, and to suggest that, while classifying entire languages as either noun-deriving or verb-deriving is too general, there appear to be asymmetries between co-existing directions of derivation.
 
What’s in a word? Some reflections on its nature and its formation
Paolo Ramat

A good definition of what is a “word” is preliminary to every word-formation theory, and also every analysis of compounds. A short overview of the search for a ‘good’, viable definition of “word” from Ferdinand de Saussure to André Martinet via Edward Sapir. The Construction Grammar approach.

Three possible criteria for a prototypical definition: autonomy, mobility, cohesion. Not all criteria are applicable in the same degree to lexemes and/or constructions, and some counterexamples will be discussed in my talk. Every definition based on the notion of ‘prototype’ entails gradualness of the concerned items. In linguistics, gradualness has important consequences for every word-formation theory. For instance, the absence of water–proof word classes enables speakers to consider suffixes as compound second members and vice versa compound second members as word suffixes.

Via discussion of appropriate examples it will be shown that “words” appear as disposed along a continuum of more or less wordiness. This situation entails that, typologically speaking, there are two morphosyntactic poles without clear-cut boundaries among the intermediate types. One pole is represented by an ideal totally isolating language where the morpheme-per-word ratio is 1:1, which means that each word contains a single morpheme. At the other end of the continuum we find the fusional, agglutinative and polysynthetic types: all of them make use of concatenative strategies, more or less extensive and extendable.

On the basis of the comparison of the different linguistic types, we may define the prototypical word as a string of sounds that does not have any necessary relation to its semantic content (remember Saussure’s arbitraire du signe) and does not contain any morphological or syntactic relational sign. Consequently, opaqueness and symbolism are characteristic of the prototypical word, whereas iconism and transparency are characteristic of the (poly)synthetic languages, i.e. of the concatenative strategy.

The consequences for a word-formation theory as well as for the word-formation rules (WFRs) are evident: when forming compounds isolating languages will tend to have a simple sequence of words: see Chin. shēng ‘life’/‘to live’/‘to give life’ and shēng wù ‘to live’ + ‘thing’ = ‘living thing’; hence shēngwù tǐ ‘living thing’ + ‘body’ = ‘organism’ and shēngwù céng ‘living thing’ + ‘layer’ = ‘biosphere’, whereas German compounds such as Bundes-kanzler-in still shows transparent morphological markers. The same holds for the WFR of a noun like Stud-ent-in-(n)e.

References

Alfieri, Luca. 2014. ’Qualifying modifier encoding and adjectival typology’. In: R. Simone and Fr. Masini (eds.), Word Classes. Nature, typology and representations. Amsterdam / Philadelphia, Benjamins: 119–138.

Bybee, Joan. 1985. Morphology. A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam / Philadelphia, Benjamins.

Cardona, Giorgio R. 1985. ‘Dall’oralità alla scrittura: la formazione delle lingue standard’. In: A. Moreschini Quattordio (ed.), La formazione delle lingue letterarie. Atti del Convegno della Società Ital. di Glottologia. Pisa, Giardini: 71–80.

Ciancaglini, Claudia and Alfieri, Luca. 2013. ‘Iranian and Greek influence on the Syriac lexicon: the emergence of compound words’, Incontri linguistici 36:109–138.

Comrie, Bernard. 1985. Language Universals and Language Typology.2nd edition, Oxford, Blackwell.

Comrie, Bernard (1985). Language Universals and Language Typology.2nd edition, Oxford, Blackwell.

Coulmas, Florian. 1988. ‘Wörter, Komposita und anaphorische Inseln’, Folia Linguistica 22: 315–336.

Croft, William. 2000. ‘Parts of speech as language universals and as language-particular categories’. In: P.M. Vogel and B. Comrie (eds.), Approaches to the Typology of Word Classes, Berlin and New York, Mouton de Gruyter: 65–101.

Croft, William. (2007. ‘Beyond Aristotle and gradience’, Studies in language 31: 409.

Gaeta, Livio (2014). ‘On decategorization and its relevance in German’. In: R. Simone and Fr. Masini (eds.),
Word Classes. Nature, typology and representations. Amsterdam / Philadelphia, Benjamins: 227–241.

Hengeveld, Kees. 1992. Non verbal predication. Theory, typology, diachrony. Berlin / New York, Mouton de Gruyter.

Ježek, Elisabetta and Ramat, Paolo. 2009. ‘On parts-of-speech transcategorization’, Folia Linguistica 43:391–416.

Klimov, G. A. 1983. Principy kontensivnoj tipologii. Moskva, Nauka.

Klimov, G.A. 1986. ‘On the Notion of Language Type’. In: W.P. Lehmann (ed.), Language Typology 1985. Papers from the linguistic symposium Moscow 1985. Amsterdam / Philadelphia, Benjamins: 105–110.

Martinet, André. 1985. Syntaxe générale. Paris, Colin.

Matras, Yaron and Sakel, Jeannette. 2007. ‘Investigating the mechanism of pattern replication in language convergence’, Studies in Language 31: 829–865.

Nichols, Johanna. 1986. ‘Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar’, Language 62:56–119.

Ramat, Paolo. 1990. ‘Definizione di “parola” e sua tipologia’. In: M. Beretta et al. (eds.), Parallela 3. Morfologia/Morphologie. Atti del V° Incontro Italo-Austriaco della Società di Linguistica Italiana, Bergamo 2–4 ottobre 1989. Narr, Tübingen: 3–15 (repr. with changes in P. Ramat, Pagine linguistiche. Scritti di linguistica storica e tipologica. Bari – Roma, Laterza 2005: 106–121).

Ramat, Paolo. 1992. ‘Thoughts on degrammaticalization’, Linguistics 30: 549–60.

Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language. An introduction to the study of language. New York, Harcourt, Brace and World Inc.

Scalise, Sergio. 1995. ‘La formazione delle parole’. In: L. Renzi / G. Salvi /A. Cardinaletti (eds.) Grande grammatica di consultazione della lingua italiana, vol. III. Il Mulino, Bologna: 471– 514.

Skalička, Vladimír. 1966. ‘Ein „typologischer Konstrukt“’, Travaux linguistiques de Prague, 2: 157–164.

Sornicola, Rosanna (1987). ‘Parola o morfema?’. In: Annali della Fac. di Lett. e Filos., Univ. degli studi della Basilicata: 165–178.

Sornicola, Rosanna (1987). ‘Parola o morfema?’. In: Annali della Fac. di Lett. e Filos., Univ. degli studi della Basilicata: 165–178.

SUBMITTED PAPERS

Exocentric compounds in Akan: A Construction Morphology perspective

Clement Appah, University of Ghana, Ghana

One principal criterion for classifying compounds is the presence of a head constituent in the compound (Bloomfield 1933). By this, we distinguish between endocentric compounds, defined as “compounds which are hyponyms of their head elements” (Bauer 2010: 167) and exocentric compounds, usually defined negatively as the class that is left after endocentric compounds have been removed (cf. Scalise & Guevara 2006: 192). Thus, exocentric compounds are those that fail the hyponymy test (Bauer 2010) and they may fail the hyponymy test in a number of ways: “they may fail to display a head element; they can function as a member of a word class which is not the word class of their head element; they can have a head element of the correct class, but apparently the wrong denotation” (Bauer 2010: 167). Based on this, Bauer (2008, 2010) identifies five types of exocentric compounds.

This paper contributes to the discussion of exocentricity, an area of contemporary linguistic morphology that needs attention, by studying exocentric compounds in Akan. I do two things. First, I present Bauer’s typology of exocentric compounds and apply his criteria to attested Akan compounds, showing which ones are exocentric as well as how they fail the hyponymy test and under which of Bauer’s types they fall. Based on a sample of 443 compounds collected from a variety of written texts, I show that three compound types (a-c) have exocentric subtypes and a fourth type (d) may be analysed as such.

Compound types Example Constituents Gloss
a. [V-N]N da amona [sleep-hole] ‘an animal which dwells in holes
b. [V-V]N gye-di [receive-eat] ‘faith’
c. [N-N]N akɔm-ase [ritual dance-under] ‘location of the ritual dance’
d. [N-V]N aduane-di [food-eat] ‘(act of) eating’

I observe that for a full account of exocentricity, we may have to distinguishing between formal exocentricity and semantic exocentricity, although the hyponymy test is essentially semantic. For the compound in (b), for example, we can tell that the meaning of the whole is derivable from the meanings of the parts, albeit metaphorically. Thus, following Bauer (2008: 53) we must say it is endocentric. However, it is formally exocentric because a noun is derived from two verbs.
Secondly, I present a Construction Morphology (Booij 2010) modelling of the properties of Akan exocentric compounds. I argue that any extra-compositional property may be construed as a constructional property of the compound which may not necessarily be related to the meaning of either constituent of the compound. Such a property may be expressed as an operator over the meaning of a specific constituent or the combined meaning of the constituents.

References
Bauer, L. (2008). Exocentric compounds. Morphology, 18: 51–74.

Bauer, L. (2010). The typology of exocentric compounds. In S. Scalise & I. Vogel (eds.), Cross-disciplinary issues in compounding (pp. 167–175). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Booij, G. E. (2010). Construction morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scalise, S. and E. R. Guevara. (2006). Exocentric compounding in a typological framework. Lingue e linguaggio, 2: 185–206.

On [N N] and phrasal nominal compounds in contemporary Bulgarian

Alexandra Bagasheva, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”

A diverse body of literature concerning the structural characteristics, typology, semantic features, and processing patterns of [N N] sequences is currently available, but little of it reviews the phenomenon of the growing spread of [N N] (e.g. бизнес елит [biznes elit, business elite], кафе пауза [kafe pauza, coffee break], офис техника [ofis tehnika, office equipment], ски писта [ski pista, ski track], уикенд почивка [wikend počivka, weekend rest], семейство и приятели номера [semejstvo i prijateli nomera, family and friends tricks], etc.) and phrasal nominal compounds (e.g. вземи-му-акъла-съвет [vzemi mu akâla sâvet, ‘take his mind away advice’], завърти-му-ума-посрещане [zavârti mu uma posrešane, ‘take his mind away welcoming’], промени-живота-си-предизвикателство [promeni života si predizvikatelstvo, ‘change your life challenge’], etc.) in Bulgarian and its status as structural borrowing from English. The phenomenon is of particular interest for it appears in an inflecting-fusional language in which root compounds and compound verbs are considered an untypical rarity. The phenomenon was recently dubbed an Anglo-Americanism in Slavic syntax (Vakarelyiska and Kapatsinski 2014). The spread of the phenomenon and its interpretation in the relevant literature raise questions on the correlation between borrowing and word-formation (or the mat-pat controversy in the literature on borrowing, (e.g. Matras and Sakel 2007; Sakel 2007)), and on the typological status of the language , what is tolerated and what is rejected by its speakers and the nature of the syntactic and semantic relations between the constituents of the construction.

Noun noun strings [N N] in English are notorious for their ambiguity of constituting either compound nouns or NPs in which the first noun [N1] is the syntactic premodifier of the second [N2]. According to Payne and Huddleston (2002: 451) precedence should be given to syntactic criteria over non-syntactic ones (i.e. stress, orthography, and semantics). They consider coordination and modification as crucial diagnostic tests. If the two nouns can be coordinated or modified independently of one another, then the construction as a whole is taken as a phrase. Plag (2003) discredits coordination as a reliable criterion since it can apply to various types of complex words. This leaves modification as the single criterion. Both constructions in Bulgarian studied here are unquestionably recognized as compounds along this criterion. Admittedly, in Bulgarian ambiguity between a syntactic phrase and a compound word is not of immediate relevance due to the morphosyntactic rules for gender and number decinence in phrases. At the same time, native [N N] constructions are typically ones with coordinative internal relations (e.g. вагон-ресторант [vagon-restorant, dining car], заместник-директор [zamestnik-direktor, deputy director], страна-членка [strana členka, member country], кандидат-студент [kandidat-student, student applicant], etc.). In that sense [N N] constructions with modifying relations are a novelty in the language and are generally understudied.

In the offered presentation it will be seen how these constructions (and whether these are two separate construction types or are variants of a single one) behave in terms of semantics. As is acknowledged by (Vakarelyiska and Kapatsinski 2014) the same N1 noun can be used with a number of different head nouns (e.g. екшън герой [ekšŭn geroj, action hero], екшън филм [ekšŭn film, action film], екшън актриса [ekšŭn aktrisa, action movie star], etc.) and only certain N2 nouns in the language allow for the [N N] construction, while others tolerate the expression of the intended modifying semantics by native constructions. In relation to these observations one of the immediate goals of the offered analysis, cast in the constructionist framework of interpreting word-formation phenomena and the lexicon, is to establish the semantic domains associated with N1 and to check whether productive constituents tend to realise a single semantic relation in their constituent families as hypothesised by Tarasova (2013). The second aim is to classify the most frequent internal semantic relations in the two constructions. The results of the latter analysis will be used to argue for the role of analogy as a powerful mechanism in word-formation for the rising productivity of the patterns and the recognition of the establishment of a new compound type in Bulgarian, bridging the gap between borrowing (a passive model of insertion L2 material into L1) and word-formation (a creative, active process of building new lexical stock). The question of the relevance of this phenomenon for the typology of word-formation in the language will also be discussed briefly.

References
Matras, Yaron and Jeanette Sakel (2007) Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Payne, John and Rodney Huddleston (2002) Nouns and noun phrases. In Huddlestton, R. And G. Pullum (eds.) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. 323 525. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Plag, Ingo (2003) Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sakel, Jeanette (2007) Types of loan: Matter and pattern. In Yaron Matras & Jeanette Sakel (eds.), Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective. 15–29. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Tarasova, Elizaveta (2013) Some new insights into the semantics of English N+N compounds. PhD manuscript, Victoria University of Wellington.

Vakarelyiska, Cynthia and Vsevolod Kapatsinski (2014) An Anglo-Americanism in Slavic morphosyntax: Productive [N[N]] constructions in Bulgarian. In Folia Linguistica 48/1 (2014), 277–311.

The patterns of complementary polysemy in Polish action nouns

Maria Bloch-Trojnar, The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin

The paper provides an overview of the semantic patterns exhibited by action nouns based on verbs of different situation types/aspect classes in Polish and relates them to relationships holding between the marked and unmarked categories of grammatical aspect. It accounts for the interaction of regular and lexicalised senses by positing two transpositional operations and making recourse to the notions of the lexical conceptual paradigm (lcp) and logical polysemy (Pustejovsky 1995). The analysis of the nominalisation process itself is couched in the Lexeme Morpheme Base Morphology model (Beard 1995).

Traditional accounts, based on formal criteria, make a distinction between nomina verbalia (verbal nouns) and nomina deverbalia (deverbal nouns). Verbal nouns, marked with -anie, -enie and -cie, are perfectly regular and productive. Their distinctive trait is the ability to preserve the aspectual characteristics of the base verb. The other category, i.e. deverbal nouns, involves a plethora of different formal markers, of which paradigmatic derivation and -acja are productive. The domains of the two categories are largely overlapping, which results in multiple derivatives and poses an intriguing theoretical problem, given the existence of the mechanism of blocking (Aronoff 1976).

It is argued that transposition offers two perspectives: nomina verbalia are an exact aspect-preserving mirror image of the verbal stem, whereas nomina deverbalia are a root-based neutralised variant which allows speakers to abstract away from the ongoing/completed distinction, and to foreground the basic verb meaning. The actual semantic interpretation of the aspect-neutral deverbal noun depends on inherent base verb semantics.

Roots which underlie aspectual pairs, or the accomplishment–achievement alternation, e.g. ocen- in ocenićP – oceniaćI ‘evaluate’, budow- in budowaćI – zbudowaćP ‘build’, have three action nominals: two stem-based verbal nominals, which faithfully reflect the constituency of the eventuality and one root based deverbal nominal, which can convey both the process and event reading (ocenianie, ocenienie, ocena and budowanie, zbudowanie, budowa). Semantic readings of nominals based on such roots form a process.event_lcp with three available senses: process, event, process.event.

If base verbs are lexically set to be invariable, they have only one verbal nominal denoting a process or an event for imperfectiva tantum and perfectiva tantum respectively (e.g. płakanie ‘crying’ and ocknięcie ‘awakening’). Perfectiva tantum roots allow no aspect-neutral perspective, and are excluded from the scope of the rule of nomina deverbalia, since the perfective is the semantically marked aspect in Polish. By contrast, imperfectiva tantum verbs may have a corresponding deverbal nominal, which denotes an event, provided that it also has a result/object interpretation. The deverbal noun płacz ‘crying, cry’ fills the slots of a process.result_ lcp. In the appropriate contexts, it can refer to a process, event, or the acoustic result.
The imperfective and perfective verb in the (unitisable) process–semelfactive alternation (e.g. kichaćI – kichnąćP ‘sneeze’) give rise to verbal nouns and behave as if they are derived from an imperfectiva tantum and perfectiva tantum verb respectively, and not like two verbs forming an aspectual pair proper.

References
Aronoff, M. 1976. Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press.

Beard, R. 1995. Lexeme Morpheme Base Morphology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Bloch-Trojnar, M. 2013. The Mechanics of Transposition. A Study of Action Nominalisations in English, Irish and Polish. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.

Pustejovsky, J. 1995. The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Headedness of coordinate compounds in Polish and English

Bożena Cetnarowska, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland

This paper investigates the headednes of several groups of Polish and English Noun+Noun compounds which denote one entity characterized by two properties (as in 1 and 3). Their constituents express a coordinate relationship, as is evidenced by the possibility of joining them with the conjunction i ‘and’, when providing a paraphrase, as in (2).

(1) a. Polish: poeci-tłumacze
b. English: poet-translators
(2) a. Polish: poeci i tłumacze
b. English: poets and translators
(3) a. Polish: kobiety-piloci
b. English: women pilots (i.e. female pilots)

English nominal compounds of this type are referred to as coordinate compounds (Scalise and Bisetto 2009), copulative compounds (Olsen 2004), or appositional compounds (Spencer 1991, Bauer 2004). According to Fabb (1988), both elements of coordinate compounds can be treated as heads since they provide equal contribution to the meaning of the whole unit.

The issue is discussed here which constituents of coordinate compounds (in the two languages) exhibit head-like characteristics, when one considers their semantic interpretation, inflectional properties, reversibility and coordination possibilities. Support is provided (mainly by the data from Polish) for the view expressed by Di Sciullo and Williams (1987) and Scalise and Fábregas (2010), namely the need to recognize distinct types of heads in a compound (i.e. the semantic, morphological and categorial head).
The morphological head in English coordinate compounds in (1b) is the right-hand element , and both constituents in (3b), since they take the inflectional plural ending. The Polish compounds discussed here are not morphological compounds proper but so-called juxtapositions (Polański 1999: 690, Szymanek 2010: 226), whose elements are not linked with an intermorph but are written (and inflected) as independent words. Given the reversibility of the elements of the Polish compound in (3a), the left-hand constituent can be identified as the morphological head which determines the gender class of the whole lexeme.

(4) a. najlepsza kobieta pilot
best.f woman.f pilot.m
b. najlepszy pilot kobieta
best.m pilot.m woman.f

Although non-head constituents are expected to coordinate more easily than heads (cf. Bosque and Picallo 1996, Willim 2001), coordination of morphological heads is attested in (5).

(5) kobiety i mężczyźni piloci
women and men pilots

The reversibility and the possibility of coordination of head constituents in coordinate compounds in both languages is compared to the behaviour of heads of attributive compounds, such as pisarz-widmo ‘ghost-writer’ and kobieta-guma (lit. woman rubber) ‘a female contortonist’, and heads of Polish morphological compounds, such as barmanokelner (lit. bartender-interfix-waiter). The relevance is exemplified of semantic constraints discussed (for English compounds) by Bauer (1998) and Olsen(2004) for the felicity of coordinate structures in Polish.

References
Bauer, Laurie. 1998. When is a sequence of two nouns a compound in English?, English Language and Linguistics , vol. 2, 65–86.

Bauer, Laurie. 2004. A glossary of morphology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Bosque, Ignacio, PICALLO, Carme. 1996. Postnominal adjectives in Spanish DPs, Journal of Linguistics , vol. 32, 349 385.

Di Sciullo, Anna Maria, Williams, Edwin. 1987. On the definition of word. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Fabb, Nigel. 1988. Compounding. In: Zwicky, Arnold, Spencer, Andrew. The Handbook of morphology. Oxford: Blackwell, 66 83.

Olsen, Susan. 2004. Coordination in morphology and syntax: The case of copulative compounds. In: Ter Meulen, Alice, Abraham, Werner. The composition of meaning. From lexeme to discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 17 38.

Polanski, Kazimierz. 1999. Encyklopedia językoznawstwa ogólnego. 2nd ed. Wrocław-Warszawa-Kraków: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich.

Scalise, Sergio, Bisetto, Antonietta. 2009. The classification of compounds. In: Lieber, Rochelle, Štekauer, Pavol. The Oxford handbook of compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 34 53.

Scalise, Sergio, Fábregas, Antonio. 2010. The head in compounding. In: Scalise, Sergio, Vogel, Irene. Cross-disciplinary issues in compounding. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 109 125.

Spencer, Andrew. 1991. Morphological theory: An introduction to word structure in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.

Szymanek, Bogdan. 2010. A panorama of Polish word-formation. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.

Willim, Ewa. 2001. On NP-internal agreement: A study of some adjectival and nominal modifiers in Polish. In: Zybatow, Gerhild, Junghanns, Uwe, Mehlhorn, Grit, Szucsich, Luka. Current issues in Formal Slavic Linguistics. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 80 95.

Preference for Compounding and Derivation Word Formation Strategies Depends on Input Language: The Results of a Study Conducted in Poland and the United States

Denise Davidson1, Ewa Haman2, Elizabeth Hilvert,1 Karolina Krysiak2 Ieva Misiunaite1
and Katarzyna Grabiec1
1Loyola University Chicago 2University of Warsaw

In understanding the processes involved in children’s word formation, it is imperative to recognize that languages differ significantly in the extent to which they exploit word formation in general, and word-formation devices in particular (Clark, 1998; Haman, Zevenbergen, Andrus, & Chmielewska, 2009). For example, English, which is thought to have a somewhat limited productive word-formation system, prefers compounding (the forming of new words by linking two base words or two free morphemes into one word) to create new words, e.g., backpack (Lieber, 2005). In contrast, Polish, a Western Slavic language, favors derivation, (the forming of new words by adding an affix to a root), e.g. plecak [bacpack] (Szymanek, 2010).

Although the number of cross-linguistic studies exploring young children’s use of compounding and derivation devices is limited, findings suggest that the prevalence of compounding and derivation in a given language affects children’s word formation processes. Analyzing mother-child spontaneous speech, Schipke and Kauschke (2011) found that English-speaking toddlers lagged behind German-speaking toddlers in their simultaneous use of compounding and derivation forms. Additionally, Haman et al. (2009) showed that Polish-speaking monolinguals favored derivation devices. Such findings raise a number of important questions for research on the development of the lexicon, and the rules governing that lexicon, in children. Specifically, why do children use certain word formation devices? How does the child’s input language affect these processes? When two languages use word formation devices to differing degrees, how does this affect bilingual children’s use of these devices within and across languages?

To answer these questions, we tested 41 monolingual English-speaking children, 29 monolingual Polish-speaking children, and 37 bilingual English-Polish speaking children from Chicago, IL (USA) or Płońsk, Poland (MageSample = 7.85; SD = .41). Receptive vocabulary was measured in English and when appropriate, in a translated version in Polish (PPVT-4; Dunn & Dunn, 2007). For the experimental task, children were shown pictures of real or nonce objects and were asked to come up with a new word to identify each. The results of a repeated measures ANOVA showed that language of input affected children’s use of compounding and derivation as word formation devices: bilingual children tested in English and monolingual English-speaking children used compounding as a word formation device significantly more often than derivative formation, whereas children tested in Polish (monolinguals and bilinguals) used each method equally often. Additional findings with regard to type of object (real, nonce), type of language structure (e.g., noun), and language proficiency on the use of compounding and derivation word formation devices will be discussed.

Historically, the manner in which children use word formation devices was thought to follow the principle of transparency and the principle of simplicity of form (Clark, 1993). Both principles predict that compounding is easier to use than derivation, and should be used more often when the option to use it occurs. We will discuss how input language also affects these processes, how additional principles may address this problem (productivity) and offer an alternative theory with regard to compounding and derivation as word formation devices.

References
Clark, E. V. (1993). The lexicon in acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clark, E. V. (1998). The acquisition of morphology. In A. J. Spencer & A,. M. Zwicky (Eds.), The Handbook of morphology (pp. 374–389). Oxford, England: Blackwell.

Dunn, L. M., & Dunn, D. M. (2007). Peabody picture vocabulary test, fourth edition: Manual. Minneapolis, MN: Pearson Assessments

Haman, E., Zevenbergen, A., Andrus, M., & Chmielewska, M. (2009). Coining compounds and derivations: A Crosslinguisitc elicitation study of word-formation abilities of preschool children and adults in Polish and English. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 40, 176–192.doi: 10.2478/s10059–009–0013–3

Lieber, R. (2005). English word-formation processes: Observations, issues, and thoughts on future research. In P. Stekauer & R. Lieber (Eds.), handbook of English word-formation (pp. 375–427). Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer Verlag.

Schipke, C. S., & Kauschke, C. (2011). Early word formation in German language acquisition: A study on word formation growth during the second and third years. First language, 31, 67–82. doi:10.1177/014272370935940

Szymanek, B. (2010). A panorama of Polish word-formation. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.

The Arabic Comparative and the Nature of Template Mapping in Arabic Morphology

Stuart Davis, Indiana University, USA

A major issue in Arabic linguistics concerns whether Arabic morphology is root-based or stem-(or word-)based. McCarthy (1981) presents an analysis of Arabic nonconcatenative verbal morphology that is root-based. As a specific example, katab ‚wrote‘ has the reciprocal form kaatab ‚corresponded‘. The reciprocal is formed on the basis of a template, CVVCVC, associated with reciprocal meaning. In McCarthy's analysis, the consonantal root of kaatab consists of k-t-b (providing the meaning of 'write), with the root consonants being represented on its own morphemic tier. In the derivation of kaatab the root consonants map onto the C-slots of the CVVCVC template. Benmamoun (1999) argues against this root-based view of Arabic verbal morphology. He provides strong evidence that Arabic verb formation processes are based on a CCVC stem and not an independent consonantal root. (It should be noted that in some subsequent work, McCarthy takes a stem-based approach to Arabic verbal morphology–e.g. McCarthy 1993). Thus, an alternative viewpoint in the literature is that Arabic verbal morphology is stem- or word-based, and not based on a consonantal root (Ratcliffe 2013).

While Arabic verbal morphology has been much discussed, there is much less discussion on the templatic morphology characterizing Arabic nonverbal morphology. One exception is the analysis of the Arabic broken plural in McCarthy and Prince (1990) who convincingly show that the Arabic broken plural is templatic (having an iambic template) and that the plural word-formation process is word-based; this is because the consonants that map onto the iambic template of the broken plural are the consonants that appear in the corresponding singular word (including prefixal consonants, not underlying root consonants). One case of Arabic templatic morphology that has not been discussed in the linguistics literature is the comparative. In most dialects of Arabic the comparative of an adjective is formed by taking the base adjective and matching it to the templatic shape aCCaC where the C-slots represent the three root consonants that comprise many Arabic words. For example, the adjective [kibiir] ‚big‘ has the comparative form [akbar], [sahl] ‚easy‘ has the comparative [ashal], and [wisix] ‚dirty‘ has the comparative [awsax]. However, when one considers adjectives with affixal elements such as [mu-naasib] ‚appropriate‘ (comparative [ansab]) where the first consonant of the base is a prefix) or [kasl-aan] (comparative [aksal] where the last consonant of the base is a suffix), we observe that affixal elements are ignored in the template mapping. That is, only root consonants of the base word map. Moreover, when we consider adjectives whose base has undergone phonological change affecting a root consonant, as with the adjective [mu-fiid] ‚beneficial‘ from underlying /mu-fyid/, where the root /y/ becomes [i] before [i] by regular rule, the underlying root consonant resurfaces in the comparative form [afyad]. Thus, there is strong evidence that the comparative in Arabic is based on the underlying root consonants and thus constitutes a word-formation process that is root-based. We conclude by briefly comparing the comparative to other instances of template mapping in Arabic nonverbal morphology.

References
Benmamoun, Elabbas (1999). Arabic morphology: The central role of the imperfective. Lingua 108:175–201.

McCarthy, John (1981). A prosodic theory of non-concatenatve morphology. Linguistic Inquiry 12:373–418.

McCarthy, John (1993). Templatic form in prosodic morphology. Proceedings of the Formal Linguistic Society of Mid-America 3:187–218.

McCarthy John and Alan Prince (1990). Root and word in prosodic morphology: The Arabic broken plural. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8:209–283.

Ratcliffe, Robert (2013). Morphology. In Jonathan Owens (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 71–91.
 

On reflexive resultatives

Alexis Dimitriadis and Martin Everaert, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

The Dutch reflexive zich, like similar reflexives in many languages, appears in a range of non-reflexive constructions. We will focus on one of them, and discuss this construction in detail. In doing so we will be better able to investigate whether this construction is cross-linguistically well-established. The construction is in itself an interesting case of a morphology-syntax interface phenomenon comparable to comparatives/superlatives in English.
We examine a type of so-called “inherent/intrinsic reflexive” compound verbs, like the following:

(1) Hij over-eet zich.
3sg EXC-eat SELF
‘He eats too much’

We show that such verbs belong to a subclass of so-called “reflexive resultatives” in Dutch, with the following special properties: They are obligatorily a reflexive (or rather: reflexive-like); the result state is an adverse consequence (generally unintended) of the main event; and the resulting state is necessarily reached (cf. Everaert 1986). Other examples include:

(2) Hij rent zich rot
he runs SELF DEAD
‘He runs himself to the ground’

We analyse examples like (1) as an incorporated counterpart to the above case, and analyse all of them as instances of secondary predication.

While ordinary resultatives involve an event or action which places its theme (or similar internal argument) in a certain state, reflexive resultatives (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2004) describe an action that results in placing its initiator in the result state. Dutch reflexive resultatives are obligatorily construed with zich (and not zichzelf ). They are part of a constellation of non-reflexive uses of zich, with verbs that don’t otherwise select for it.

We show that their semantics is correctly captured by treating them as instances of full secondary predication. The subject of the main predicate and the undergoer of the secondary predicate are identified through a reflexivization-like operation, which we treat as the “bundling” of two theta roles into a single, compound one (Reinhart and Siloni 2005).
We must be careful to distinguish the above from superficially similar constructions, including reflexive resultatives like (3), which is neither necessarily reflexive nor adversative: the result state is the goal of the activity, not a by-product.

(3) Hij loopt zich/Karel in.
he walks SELF/Karel in
‘He walks (so that Karell) to warm up’

Example (3b) is also compatible with the progressive, while the core examples are not. In accordance with the familiar “imperfective paradox”, the result state is not necessarily reached; in the others, it must be reached.

We analyse such constructions as resultative secondary predicates, and interpret an example like (2) as:

(4) (X runs) CAUSES (X worn-out)

The result state can be temporally and aspectually distinct from the event described by the main verb. A preliminary sketch of the analysis follows:

(5) Reflexive resultative construction:

1. Demote the theme, if any. Like the demoted subject of passives, it cannot be projected as direct object.
2. Add a small clause resultative complement.
3. Bundle the main verb’s Agent and the resultative Theme into one complex role (assigned to a single argument.)

(6) Interpretation: Compare
a. Reflexive VP: wast zich
λxλe wash(e) & Agent(e, x) & Theme (e, x)
b. Resultative VP: rent zich rot
λxλe1 run(e1)& ∃e2 : worn-out (e2) & CAUSES(e1;e2) & Agent (e1;x) & Theme (e2;x)

References
Everaert, Martin. 1986. The syntax of reflexivization. Dordrecht: Foris.

Levin, Beth, and Malka Rappaport Hovav. 2004. The semantic determinants of argument expression: A view from the English resultative construction. In The syntax of time, ed. Jacqueline Guéron and Jacqueline Lecarme, 477–494. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Reinhart, Tanya, and Tal Siloni. 2005. The lexicon-syntax parameter: Reflexivization and other arity operations. Linguistic Inquiry 36:389–436.

How much non-concatenative morphology can speakers copy with?

Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, University of Cologne, Germany

Non-concatenative morphology in an African context not only involves tone, but also consonantal and vocalic alternation in lexical roots and stems. In my presentation, I would like to discuss the consequences of this type of morphology for the lexicon as well as the grammar. On the basis of data mainly from the Nilo-Saharan family, I will try to argue that an increase in compounding devices is one of the consequences for lexical strategies. Grammatically, extensive vertical morphology may have consequences for the rigidity of constituent order as well as relative clause strategies in languages.
 

On the polysemy of the Modern Greek prefix para-

Angeliki Efthymiou, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece

This paper aims at exploring the polysemy of the Modern Greek prepositional prefix para-, which is used to create adjectives (e.g. para-kratikós ‘extra-governmental’), nouns (e.g. par-onímio ‘byname’), adjectival (e.g. para-zalizménos ‘bedazzled’) and adverbial participles (para-pléondas ‘sailing by’), verbs (e.g. para-káno ‘to overdo’) and adverbs (e.g. para-ékso ‘further out’). Para- mainly derives from the Ancient Greek preposition pará ‘close to (but falling short of)’ (Bortone 2010, 291), but, in the course of its grammaticalization into a prefix, it has also developed some additional non-locational meanings (e.g. parallelism: pará-δromos ‘side road’, violation or divergence: par-erminévo ‘to misread’, excess: para-cimáme ‘to oversleep’; cf. Schwyzer 1950; Anastassiadi-Symeonidi 1986; Ralli 2004; Poulopoulou 2002; Markopoulou 2014). In what regards the semantics of para-, as shown in the corpus-based study of Efthymiou, Fragaki and Markos (2014), the prefix exhibits extensive polysemy, expressing both locational and non-locational meanings such as (a) proximity (e.g. para-θalásios ‘seaside’), (b) beyond spatial boundary (e.g. para-páno ‘above, further up’), © temporal continuity or duration (e.g. para-méno ‘to stay on, to remain’), (d) transmittal (e.g. para-δíδo ‘to deliver’), (e) resemblance (e.g. para-frázo ‘to paraphrase’), (f) parallel, subsidiary or accessory role (e.g. pará-δromos ‘side road’), (g) divergence, error or violation (e.g. par-erminévo ‘to misread’), (h) excess (e.g. para-cimáme ‘to oversleep’), (j) reinforcement (e.g. par-efθís ‘straight away’), and (k) periphrastic reinforcement (e.g. íksere ce para-íksere ‘he knew and he knew very well’). Furthermore, as found in Efthymiou, Fragaki and Markos (2014), the most productive of these meanings are excess and divergence, error or violation, followed by proximity. In this paper, we will explore para- within Lieber’s (2004, 2007) semantic framework, trying shed some light on the problematic issue of its polysemy. More specifically, following and also applying some modifications on Lieber’s account of the English prefix over-, it will be proposed that para- has a single skeleton, but also displays variation in its body characteristics. Furthermore, the semantics of para- will be compared to that of the Modern Greek prefix iper-, which also denotes both locational and intensifying meanings: e.g. iper- ipér-jios ‘aboveground’, iper-aγorá ‘supermarket’, iper-plíris ‘super full’, iper-foroloγó ‘to overtax’, iper-esioδoksó ‘to be over-optimistic’. The comparison to iper- seems to be of particular interest, since in their intensifying meaning para- and iper- are both related to the sense of a limit (Efthymiou 2003, Gavriilidou 2013).

References
Anastassiadi-Symeonidi, Anna. 1986. Η νεολογία στην Κοινή Νεοελληνική [Neology in Modern Greek]. Thessaloniki.

Bortone, P. 2010. Greek Prepositions. From Antiquity to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Efthymiou, Angeliki. 2003. Προθήματα ή α΄ συνθετικά που δηλώνουν επίταση στη Ν.Ε. [Prefixes and first constituents denoting intensity in Modern Greek]. Studies in Greek Linguistics 23. 519‒528.

Efthymiou, A., Fragaki, G. & Markos, A. 2014. Exploring the meaning and productivity of a polysemous prefix. The case of the Modern Greek prepositional prefix para-. Paper presented at the 16th International Morphology Meeting, Budapest, Hungary, 29 May 29–1 June, 2014.

Gavriilidou, Zoe. 2013. Όψεις επίτασης στη Νέα Ελληνική. [Aspects of intensity in Modern Greek]. Thessaloniki: Kiriakidis.

Lieber R. 2004. Morphology and Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lieber, R. 2007. The category of roots and the roots of categories: what we learn from selection in derivation. Morphology 16 (2): 247‒272.

Markopoulou, Despina. 2014. Γραμματικοποίηση και λεξικοποίηση: Αναψηλαφώντας μια αμφισβητούμενη σχέση [Grammaticalization and lexicalization: Reconsidering a controversial relation]. In Gavriilidou, Z. and A. Revithiadou (eds) Μελέτες αφιερωμένες στην Ομότιμη Καθηγήτρια Α.Π.Θ. Άννα Αναστασιάδη-Συμεωνίδη [Studies dedicated to Anna Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, Emeritus Professor of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki]. Kavala: Saita, 179‒192.

Poulopoulou, Maria. 2002. Από τις τοπικές στις μη τοπικές σχέσεις: Η περίπτωση των παρά, αντί, εκτός/έξω. [From locational to non-locational relations: The case of pará, andí, ektós/ékso]. PhD Dissertation. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Ralli, Angeliki. 2004. Stem-based versus word-based morphological configurations: The case of Modern Greek preverbs. Lingue e Linguaggio 2004 (2): 241–275.

Schwyzer, Eduard. 1950. Griechische Grammatik. 2. Syntax und Syntaktische Stilistik. München: Beck.

The Lexical Representation of Idioms and the Morphology-Syntax Interface

Martin Everaert, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

The proper division between morphology and syntax has been a long-standing issue in generative grammar. The Lexicalist Hypothesis (cf. Chomsky 1970) offered a straightforward answer: (i) Syntax cannot affect or refer to parts of words (= morphological objects), (ii) Morphology cannot affect or refer to parts of phrases (= syntactic objects)

Much work, however, has shown that several of the subsystems of principles designed for syntax may very well be used to describe phenomena belonging to morphology, and the other way around (early work like Baker 1988, Lieber 1983, Muysken 1982; see Scalise & Guevara 2005, Ackema 2005 for discussion). Consequently, the rigid distinction between the morphological component and the syntactic component has. I will argue that the domain of idioms gives further evidence for giving up this rigid division, but in a different way than envisaged in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993)

Di Sciullo & Williams (1987), as representatives of the strict lexicalist position, argue that syntax and morphology have, in principle, distinct vocabularies of atoms, rules and conditions and go so far as to say that morphology and syntax have different objects of research. One of their central claims is that in principle morphology and syntax might interact where these modules have a shared vocabulary. They state that this shared vocabulary contains notions as `parts of speech', `argument structure' and certain features (such as `tensed'). Through this shared vocabulary syntax and morphology communicate. But the interaction is severely restricted by the assumption that syntax has only access to the categorial, thematic and other such properties of a morphological object as far as they are encoded on the top-node of that object. In the core cases this means that only the properties of the head of a morphological object are `visible' for syntax.

Suppose one would accept Di Sciullo & Williams' assumption that idioms are both listemes – because part of their syntax and semantics does not follow from the regular rules of grammar – and syntactic objects – because at least part of their syntax follows from the rules of grammar. What I will show is that idioms indeed are subject to the rules and principles of morphology, and thus in a way behave like morphological objects. The topics that I will discuss are:

• Bound Atoms: We will show that idioms and words share bound atoms, i.e, that is that in some case morphemes are both bound words and bound morphemes.
• Argument Structure Changes. It is a well-known characteristic of affixation that it may result in a different mapping of the arguments onto syntactic representations, i.e. bring about changes in theta structure. Similar effects seem to be at work in (verbal) idioms.
• Subcategorization. We will show that selectional restrictions (in the broad sense of the word) and headedness don’t go hand-in-hand, both in the case of morphology and idioms.

References
Ackema, P. (1995) Syntax below zero, OTS publications, University of Utrecht.

Baker, M. (1988a) Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Di Sciullo, A.-M. and E. Williams (1987) On the Definition of Word, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz. 1993. ‚Distributed Morphology and the Pieces of Inflection.‘ In The View from Building 20, ed. Kenneth Hale and S. Jay Keyser. MIT Press, Cambridge, 111–176.

Lieber, R. (1980) On the Organization of the Lexicon, Doctoral dissertation MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Muysken, P. (1982) „Parametrizing the notion head“, Journal of Linguistic Research 2, 57–76.

Scalise, S., E. Guevara (2005) The Lexicalist Approach to Word-Formation and the Notion of the Lexicon, in P. Stekauer & R.Lieber, Handbook of Word-formation, Amsterdam, Kluwer, 2005,1–40.

When does a word-formation process stop being productive?

Jesús Fernández-Domínguez, IULMA-Universitat de València, Spain

The term available is used in word-formation studies in reference to those morphological processes which can be employed to create new words at a given time. Availability is often depicted together with profitability (the number of lexemes that a process can coin), and together they embody the hyperonym productivity. Availability is in this context portrayed as the qualitative side of productivity, with profitability representing its quantitative side. This explicit division of productivity into availability and profitability was not made until Corbin (1987), and the former still stands as a slippery concept.

Unambiguous as the above may seem, the definition of availability is in itself challenging for various reasons. One of them is its widespread denominative overlap with the label productive, which makes it often difficult to discern different uses of the term. Nonetheless, the notion of availability gets particularly problematic when we turn to diachronic word-formation because the fact that a morphological process proves to be available at a given time in the history of a language does not ensure that it will be available at a later stage. This involves not only that “statements of availability are temporally limited” (Bauer 2001: 205; see Bauer et al. 2013: 32), but also that there must exist a locus for the transition from availability to unavailability (and vice versa). If, as is widely agreed, availability is a non-gradable concept, research on word-formation should be able to detect that hinge and describe its nature. This need is perceived as growing if we consider accounts like Bauer et al.’s (2013: 198–201), who report on morphological processes that allegedly stopped being productive in the past but where lexical activity seems to have revived (for example, -ment or -th).

With the above in mind, this paper studies changes in the availability/unavailability divide from Early Modern English by resorting to the OED and to diachronic corpus data. In the specialized literature different methods have been tested to measure productivity over time and expounded their pros and cons (Plag 1999, Cowie & Dalton-Puffer 2002, Palmer 2015, Säily 2014). In this case, the morphological activity of various processes is pinned down in the OED and subsequently tracked in the Helsinki Corpus, which allows detecting similarities and differences between the two methods. Morphological productivity is here explored in a number of time frames starting in Early Modern English, thus making it possible to observe changes in a process’s historical behavior.

This analysis evidences, among other things, that the figures obtained for low productivity differ depending on the perspective and methods adopted for the investigation. Likewise, the comparison of dictionary and corpus data allows describing and contrasting the fluctuations in the efficiency of processes whose productive status has been described as uncertain, for example, derivation by -ment (Bauer et al. 2013: 198–201, Palmer 2015). This study lastly facilitates an assessment of the creative power of such processes and questions how the transition from and to unavailability may be empirically determined.

References
Bauer, L. 2001. Morphological productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bauer, L., R. Lieber & I. Plag. 2013. The Oxford reference guide to English morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cowie, C. & C. Dalton-Puffer. 2002. Diachronic word-formation and studying changes in productivity over time: Theoretical and methodological considerations. In Javier E. Diaz Vera (ed.), A changing world of words. Amsterdam & New York, NY: Rodopi, 410–437.

Oxford English Dictionary Online. http://www.oed.com.

Palmer, C. C. 2015. Measuring productivity diachronically: Nominal suffixes in English letters, 1400–1600. English Language and Linguistics 19(1): 107–129.

Plag, I. 1999. Morphological productivity: Structural constraints in English derivation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Säily, T. 2014. Sociolinguistic variation in English derivational productivity: Studies and methods in diachronic corpus linguistics. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.

The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts (1991). Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki. Compiled by Matti Rissanen (Project leader), Merja Kytö (Project secretary); Leena Kahlas-Tarkka, Matti Kilpiö (Old English); Saara Nevanlinna, Irma Taavitsainen (Middle English); Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg (Early Modern English).
 

Lexical institutionalization reconsidered: GUI, cyborg, cred, pay-per-view, cyber- and techno-

Prof. Dr. Roswitha Fischer, Regensburg University, Germany

At the end of the 20th century, the study of neologisms and their institutionalization was made possible through large electronic text corpora for the first time. Fischer (1998) traced the way of English creative neologisms into the common vocabulary of a speech community. The study broke new grounds of research by considering large stores of data and applying innovative methods of analysis through digital text storage. In the early 1990s large electronic text data had started to become widely available, for instance through the yearly publication of national daily newspapers on CD-ROM. Because earlier corpora like the Brown or the LOB corpus were far too small to investigate new words, these new large text corpora facilitated a thorough and comprehensive study of the institutionalization of neologisms.

After having examined a wide range of novel formations in the London Guardian from 1990 until 1996, Fischer (1998) established a model of the institutionalization process. She took the following five main factors into account: (1) existing synonyms and other alternative forms, (2) meaning cues given in the respective texts, (3) frequency and range of occurrence as a reflection of topicality, (4) motivation and transparency, and (5) productivity (Fischer 1998: 171–82). Acronyms, blends and clippings as well as lexical phrases were discussed and analyzed in particular.

Since then, a lot of research has been carried out. At present, two questions arise: (1) what can linguistic studies of neologisms undertaken in the meantime contribute to the results and conclusions in Fischer (1998) in particular?, and (2) what can an examination of the lexical items beyond the time span of 1990–1996 further conduce to an understanding of the institutionalization process?

Regarding the first question, a lot has happened in the scholarly landscape from 1990 onwards. First, we will present relevant research in cognitive linguistics, because the cognitive viewpoint was not considered in Fischer’s study at all. Furthermore, we will discuss various corpus-based studies on neologisms which have been published since then. With regard to the second question, we selected a range of lexical items also investigated in Fischer (1998) and searched for them in the London Guardian in its electronic version from the 1980s until 2012. In addition, and in analogy to Fischer (1998), we also measured and compared the productivity of the combining forms techno- and cyber-, this time for the years 1991–2001 and 2002–2012.
On the basis of the new findings, a re-evaluation of the institutionalization process is in order. The institutionalization process emerges as a complex process, in which socio-pragmatic, cognitive and structural factors are closely entwined. It will be shown that the main factor involved in lexical institutionalization is topicality. The second main factor is transparency, which is closely related to form-meaning isomorphy. Less important factors are the existence of possible alternative forms and productivity, which may tip the balance towards or against institutionalization, if topicality and transparency are not so influential.

References
Fischer, R. 1998. Lexical Change in Present-day English. A Corpus-based Study of the Motivation, Institutionalization, and Productivity of Creative Neologisms. Tübingen: Narr.

Renouf, A. 2013. A finer definition of neology in English: the life-cycle of a word. In Corpus Perspectives on Patterns of Lexis, H. Hasselgård, J. Ebeling & S. Oksefjell Ebeling (eds.), 177–207. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Schmid, H.-J. 2008. New words in the mind: Concept-formation and entrenchment of neologisms. Anglia 126: 1–36.

On the Formation and Semantics of New Phrasal Verbs

Hans Götzsche, Aalborg University, Denmark

In Modern Danish it has become customary to extend verb phrases by means of one or more particles that were not previously found in their contexts. Some of them are obviously of English origin (either American or British English):

starte ud med ‘start out with’
tjekke det ud ‘check it out’
ende op med ‘end up with’ (in Danish often as ende ud med ‘end out with’ from start out with)

Whereas some may not be calques from English:

kommentere på ‘comment on’

because we have

analysere på ‘analyse on’
tolke på ‘interpret on’

Furthermore, going back to, at least, the 1980s, in Danish we have had

støtte op om/omkring (noget) ‘support up on/around (something)’ < støtte (noget) ‘support (something)’
spørge ind til ‘ask into’ < spørge til ‘ask to ( = ask about)’

Another phenomenon, which may, in the context, appear counterintuitive, make intransitive verbs become transitive by means of, actually, deleting a preposition functioning as a particle, often found in questions:

hvad tænker du på? ‘what think you on’ > hvad tænker du? ‘what think you?’

But also in indicative constructions with embedded subclauses:

jeg tænker, det er er ret farligt ‘I think it is rather dangerous’

While tolke på ‘interpret on’ may be understood as an aspectual expression, the fact that it is spreading and apparently substituting tolke [+object] ‘interpret [+object]’ indicates that this is not the relevant process. I will suggest that it is (i) partly a matter of reduction of phonetic substance in Danish pronunciation, (ii) partly a matter of subcultural usage, and (iii) partly a matter of the perceived semantics of the expressions. I will present some exploratory analyses of the phenomena, and comparisons with Swedish.

References
Götzsche, Hans (2013): Deviational Syntactic Structures, in the series Bloombury Studies in Theoretical Linguistics. London, New Delhi, New York, Sydney: Bloombury Academic.

Götzsche, Hans (2015 in print): 138. Danish, in (eds.) Peter O. Müller, Ingeborg Ohnheiser, Susan Olsen, Franz Rainer, Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft / Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK): Volume Word-Formation. Berlin / New York: de Gruyter Mouton.

Libben, Gary and Gonua Jarema (2006): The representation and Processing of Compound Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Partee, B. Hall (1978): Fundamentals of Mathematics for Linguistics. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Prestell, Alexander & Charles N. Delzell (2005) Mathematical Logic and Model Theory. A Brief Introduction. London: Springer-Verlag.

Štekauer, Pavol (2005): Onomasiological Approach to Word-Formation, in Štekauer, Pavol & Rochelle Lieber, 2005, Handbook of Word-Formation. Dordrecht: Springer. Studies in Natural language & Linguistic Theory.

Position class neutralization to inhibit conflicting aspect values in Cherokee

Marcia Haag, University of Oklahoma, USA

The very large and baroquely complicated Cherokee (Iroquoian) verb has been analyzed as being minimally comprised of pronominal prefixes, a lexical root, which, together with an aspectual suffix forms the conjugation stem, and a tense marker, to form a series of position classes (King 1975, Feeling & Pulte 1975, Spencer 1991, Feeling et. al. 2003, Montgomery-Anderson 2008). A large array of other affixes termed derivational, modal, and others, contribute to both lexical and inflectional interpretation. But empirically, the linguistic verbal property aspect (Comrie 1976) is not limited to a single position class, generally termed the “aspect” position on the verb stem. The Cherokee verbal conjugation system is based on 5 stems (comprised of 28 conjugation classes, generally phonologically triggered). Despite their classification as denoting “aspect,” the 5 stems in fact distinguish 3 aspects, 1 fused aspect/tense, and 1 mood. Meanwhile, the “tense” category, with 7 forms, distinguishes one aspect, one tense, and fusions of 2 aspects, 3 moods, 2 evidentials, and 2 tenses. The optional “derivational” affixes, with 9 forms, mark 7 aspects and 2 valences. This level of complication requires coordination among the categories that mark aspect, compatibility among types of aspect, and selective neutralization of aspect.

This system is comprehensible because the aspects marked in the stems (Position 1 (notional content)+ Position 2 (“aspect”)) – perfective, imperfective, and punctual – permit the attachment of compatible obligatory Position 4 (“tense”) markers. But, the many aspects marked by the optional Position 3 (“derivational” ) affixes would require matching the content of three positions (2, 3, 4). For all types of Position 3 affixes, aspectual or other, a single stem (Position 1 + Position 2), the perfective, is used as a purely morphological device – perfective aspect itself is neutralized (ex. 2). The position 3 affixes then select their own semantically active aspectual forms to license the obligatory Position 4 tense/aspect markers. This would be an example of Aronoff’s (1994) morphome, a purely morphological formative that neutralizes putative semantic-to-form mapping.

In (1), an imperfective stem matches the tense/aspect marker present continuous.

(1) hi-akahtháàstiih-a
2SG-wink:imperf-PRES.CONT
‘You are winking.’ (adapted from Montgomery-Anderson 2008)

In (2), addition of the applicative marker –an- , an optional Position 3 affix, requires attachment to the form of the perfective stem, even though the semantic aspect of the verb is imperfective (present continuous). The imperfective form –eéh- is then used to license attachment by the present continuous tense/aspect marker –a.

(2) ski-akahtáàsth -an- -eéh-a
1/2-wink:PERF- APPLIC – IMPERF- PRES.CONT
`You are winking at me.’ (Montgomery-Anderson 2008)

References
Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Feeling, Durbin, and William Pulte. 1975. Cherokee-English Dictionary. Tahlequah, Oklahoma: Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.

Feeling, Durbin, Craig Kopris, Jordan Lachler, and Charles van Tuyl. 2003. A Handbook of the Cherokee Verb. Tahlequah, Oklahoma: Cherokee Heritage Center.

King, Duane. 1975. A Grammar and Dictionary of the Cherokee Language. PhD dissertation, University of Georgia.

Montgomery-Anderson, Brad. 2008. A Reference Grammar of Oklahoma Cherokee. PhD dissertation, University of Kansas.

Spencer, Andrew. 1991. Morphological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
 

Compound worlds and affixoid landscapes: Emergent productivity in compounding constructions

Stefan Hartmann, University of Mainz, Germany

The concept of ‘affixoids’ has been subject to considerable debate in linguistic morphology (cf. e.g. Schmidt 1987; Ascoop 2005; Stevens 2005). According to Booij (2010: 57), affixoids are “not yet affixes because they correspond to lexemes […], but their meaning differs from that when used as independent lexemes.” In a diachronic perspective, some affixoids tend to develop into full-fledged affixes, while others fall out of use (cf. e.g. the discussion of English dom and ræden in Traugott & Trousdale 2013).

As the boundaries between ‘lexemes’, ‘affixoids’, and ‘affixes’ are necessarily blurred, the heuristic value of the notion of ‘affixoid’ has been questioned (e.g. Schmidt 1987). In Construction Grammar, the gradual development of free lexemes into bound morphemes can be recast in terms of constructionalization (Traugott & Trousdale 2013). Specific instantiations of compounding constructions develop into partially filled constructions, i.e. non-compositional pairings of form and meaning, in their own right. While previous studies such as Traugott & Trousdale (2013) and Hüning & Booij (2014) are more qualitatively-oriented, the present paper discusses the question which insights can be gained from the quantitative investigation of emergent compounding constructions. As an example, I discuss German compounds with the second constituents welt(en) ‘world(s)’ and landschaft(en) ‘landscape(s)’, e.g. Hochschullandschaft ‘university landscape’, Lebenswelt ‘life-world’. While the status of these constituents as affixoids is at least debatable (as is the case for other constituents that have been discussed as affixoids in German, e.g. telefon ‘hotline’, cf. Schu 1997), a diachronic analysis of data from the German Text Archive (Deutsches Textarchiv, DTA) and the Core Corpus of the Digital German Dictionary (Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, DWDS) shows that over the past century, these items have been combined with ever more first constituents, expanding their semantic scope from literal to highly metaphoric uses.

From a constructionist and usage-based perspective, two more questions are particularly relevant:

1. Is there a particularly frequent word-formation product with each of the two items under discussion as second constituent which serves as a starting point for analogical formations and thus, for the productive use of these constituents in their metaphorical sense?
2. How do the compound constructions relate to competing, quasi-synonymous patterns, e.g. die Welt des Films ‘the world of film’ vs. die Filmwelt ‘the film world’? Are they used in different senses, in different context, with different meaning nuances?

In line with Hilpert (2013), who demonstrates that quantitative corpus studies can be used to identify the right level of abstraction at which constructions (as independently stored units) can be posited, I will argue that statistical methods, combined with careful qualitative analysis, can also give valuable clues to the degree of ‘bondedness’ (Lehmann 1995) of a morphological construction. This in turn is highly relevant for word-formation theory in general, as it allows for coming to terms with the notoriously difficult phenomenon of gradualness in word-formation by anchoring linguistic description in a bottom-up analysis of empirical data rather than drawing arbitrary boundaries between different types of linguistic units such as ‘lexemes’, ‘affixoids’, and ‘affixes’.

References
Ascoop, Kristin (2005): Affixoidhungrig? Skitbra! Status und Gebrauch von Affixoiden im Deutschen und Schwedischen. In: Germanistische Mitteilungen 62, 17–28.

Booij, Geert E. (2010): Construction Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hilpert, Martin (2014): Construction Grammar and its Application to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Hüning, Matthias & Geert Booij (2014): From Compounding to Derivation. The Emergence of Derivational Affixes Through ‚Constructionalization‘. In: Folia Linguistica 48 (2), 579–604.

Lehmann, Christian (1995): Thoughts on Grammaticalization. München: LINCOM.

Schmidt, Günter Dietrich (1987): Das Affixoid. Zur Notwendigkeit und Brauchbarkeit eines beliebten Zwischenbegriffs der Wortbildung. In: Gabriele Hoppe, Alan Kirkness, Elisabeth Link, Isolde Nortmeyer, Wolfgang Rettig & Günter Dietrich Schmidt (eds.): Deutsche Lehnwortbildung. Beiträge zur Erforschung der Wortbildung mit entlehnten Wortbildungseinheiten im Deutschen. Tübingen: Narr, 53–101.

Schu, Josef (1997): -telefon. Lexikalischer Wandel durch Wortbildung. In: Deutsche Sprache 25, 54–82.

Stevens, Christopher (2005): Revisiting the Affixoid Debate. On the Grammaticalization of the Word. In: Torsten Leuschner, Tanja Mortelmans & Sarah Groodt (eds.): Grammatikalisierung im Deutschen. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 71–84.

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Graeme Trousdale (2013): Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 

Moving along the compositionality and analyzability clines: A Cognitive Grammar perspective on nonce-words, blends and acronymic formations.

Henryk Kardela, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland

Drawing on the insights of cognitive grammar (cf. Langacker (1991a, 1991b, 2008)), according to which lexicon and grammar form a continuum of linguistic units, the paper provides a cognitive grammar perspective on nonce-words, blends and acronyms in English. It is claimed that these formations
(i) display prototype effects;
(ii) they exhibit the varying degrees of so-called compositionality and analyzability potentials; and
(iii) the interpretation of these categories involves the speaker/hearer’s world knowledge, structured by the Current Discourse Space—CDS in the sense of Langacker (2008).
The paper proposes compositionality- and analyzability potential scales for these formations.

References
Bauer, Laurie, 1983 English Word-Formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bauer, Laurie, 2001. Morphological Productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bybee, Joan, 2010. Language, Usage and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew, 2006 Affixation, in: K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier. 2nd edition, 83–88.

Cyran, Eugeniusz, Henryk Kardela, Bogdan Szymanek (eds.) Sound, Structure and Sense. Studies in Memory of Edmund Gussmann. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL.

Downing, Pamela, 1977. On the creation and use of English compound nouns. Language 53: 810–842.

Dirven, René and Marjolijn Verspoor, 2004. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Fauconnier, Gilles, Turner, Mark, 2002. The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.

Guz, Wojciech, 2012. Are nonce words really deviant, context dependent, and unlexicalizable? In E. Cyran, H. Kardela, B. Szymanek (eds).

Hohenhaus, Peter, 1998. Non lexicalizability as characteristic feature of nonce-word formation in English and German. Lexicology 4/2: 237280.

Hohenhaus, Peter, 2005. Lexicalization and Institutionalization. In Pavol Štekauer and Rochelle Lieber (eds.) Handbook of Word Formation. Dordrecht: Springer, 353–373.

Kardela, Henryk, 2012. Non-Concatenative Morphological Formations: A Cognitive Grammar Analysis of Blends and Acronyms. In E. Cyran, H. Kardela, B. Szymanek (eds.).

Kastovsky, Dieter, 1982. Word Formation. A Functional View. Folia Linguistica. 16, 181–198.

Kastovsky, Dieter, 2009. English word formation, combining forms and neoclassical compounds: a reassessment. In Current Issues in Unity and Diversity of Languages. Collection of the Papers Selected from the CIUL 18, Held at Korea University in Seoul, on July 23–26, 2008: 724–734. Published by The linguistic Society of Korea.

Kemmer, Susan, 2003. Schemas and Lexical Blends. In: H. Cuyckens, T. Berg, R. Dirvén, K-U Panther (eds.) Motivation in Language. Studies in Honor of Günter Radden. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Langacker, Ronald, 1991a Concept, Image and Symbol. The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Langacker, Ronald, 1991b Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. 2. Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald, 2008. Cognitive Grammar. A Basic Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lipka, Leonhard, 2002. English Lexicology: Lexical Structure and Word- Formation. Tübingen: Narr.

Mattiello, Elisa. 2013. Extragrammatical Morphology in English. Mouton de Gruyter.

Marchand, Hans, 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-Day English Word-Formation. A Synchronic-Diachronic Approach. München: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

Štekauer, Pavol. 2005. Meaning Predictability in Word Formation. Novel, Context Free Naming Units. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Szymanek, Bogdan, 1989. Introduction to Morphological Analysis. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

Meaning construal through interplay of affix, base and context − a Construction Morphology account of adjectival derivation

Luise Kempf, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Germany

The emergence of meaning in derivation has been a major topic in word-formation research for some time. The question can be addressed by attempting to model the meaning of derivational affixes. One particularly prominent contribution in this field is LIEBER (2004).

However, there are systematic gaps in this research: It tends to focus on nominal and verbal affixes, such as er and ee for forming agent or patient nouns respectively, ize and ify for forming causative verbs. The formation of adjectives is not given equal attention − it is often treated only in passing, if mentioned at all.

When scrutinizing adjectival word formation patterns, we find that the semantics of derived adjectives arise in a number of heterogeneous ways:
a. Some suffixes bear a clear semantic profile, e.g. en (wooden), able (downloadable), less (frameless).
b. In other cases, the arising meaning is dependent on the semantic class of the base word; e.g. German ig (cognate of English y) forms ornative adjectives when combined with bases denoting substances (öl-ig ‘oily’, dreck-ig ‘dirty’, staub-ig ‘dusty’), but comparative adjectives when deriving animal designations (kauz-ig ‘quirky’ (lit. “owl-y”), bull-ig ‘massive’ (lit. “bull-y”)).
c. In other cases still, the meaning of a derived adjective only crystallizes in connection with its context (primarily the noun that it specifies), consider stony soil ‘soil with stones’ vs. stony heart ‘heart like a stone’, or German väter-lich-er Freund ‘father-like friend’ vs. das väter-lich-e Haus ‘the house of [their] father’.

The ambiguity displayed by type © constructions is an epiphenomenon of adjectives’ role as inherently dependent parts of speech: They generally occur in conjunction with the noun they modify − thus it suffices for their meaning to solidify in connection with the collocator. Trivial though this may seem empirically, the range illustrated by (a) through © constitutes a challenge to theory building.

• If we want to capture the emergence of meaning by modelling the meaning of derivational affixes, type © cases become problematic; with type (b) cases, we would have to assume several lexical entries for one suffix, or explain how the various meanings of the suffix can be accommodated in one entry.
• If we assume that word-formation meaning is largely determined by the semantics of base and context, type (a) cases don’t fit into the picture. As for type (b), we could argue that e.g. animal designations give rise to comparative adjectives on pragmatic grounds, but we would have to account for why this very suffix is selected.

In the talk, I will argue, that a Construction Grammar approach lends itself to modelling the construal of meaning in adjectival derivation, because it takes into account the constructions the affix occurs in. This includes word-sized constructions as well as larger, syntactic units. Drawing on the work of RIEHEMANN (1998, 2001) and BOOIJ (2007, 2010, 2013), I will show how Construction Morphology can be expanded to encompass the word-formation types (a) through ©.

References
Booij, Geert (2007): Construction Morphology and the Lexicon. In: Fabio Montermini, Gilles Boyé & Nabil Hathout (eds.): Selected Proceedings of the 5th Décembrettes. Morpholoy in Toulouse. Somerville (MA), 33–44.

Booij, Geert (2010): Construction Morphology. Oxford.

Booij, Geert (2013): Morphology in Construction Grammar. In: Thomas Hoffmann & Graeme Trous¬dale (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar. Oxford, 255–273.

Lieber, Rochelle (2004): Morphology and lexical semantics. Cambridge.

Riehemann, Susanne Z. (1998): Type-based derivational morphology. In: The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics 2 (1), 49–77.

Riehemann, Susanne Z. (2001): A constructional approach to idioms and word formation. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.

Polysemy of verbal prefixes and particles expressing the relation OVER in English, Polish and Italian

Ewa Konieczna, University of Rzeszów, Poland

This paper is an attempt at a cognitive-semantic study of polysemy of verbal prefixes and particles, expressing the relation OVER in three typologically different languages: English, representing the Germanic branch, Polish, belonging to the Slavic branch and Italian, being a representative of the Romance branch. The relation OVER is realised in English by the particle over, as in hang over, or run over, in Polish by the prefix nad-, as in nadjechać ‘arrive, drive up’, or nadłamać ‘break off a bit’, while in Italian both by the prefixes sopra-/sovra and sor-, as in sopravvivere ‘experience’, sovrapporre ‘superimpose’ and sorpassare ‘overtake, surpass’, and particles sopra and su, as in pensare sopra ‘think over’ and guarda su ‘look up’.
The analysis will focus on conceptualising this relation and its metaphorical and metonymical extensions in Polish, English and Italian with a view to discovering both universal tendencies and cross-linguistic differences, resulting from distinct typological features of these three languages. The discussion will adopt a cognitive approach to polysemy, treating this phenomenon as a kind of categorization: related word meanings form categories and are linked with one another through family resemblances. According to Lakoff (1987), polysemy is brought about by the transformations of the image schema, creating extensions from the prototype. The notion of an image schema is basic for this analysis, as according to Johnson (1987), image schemas are grounded in everyday experience and play an essential role in structuring our mental world. Schemas provide basis for projecting physical experience metaphorically to other conceptual domains.
The prototypical basic sense encoded by the English particle over and its Polish and Italian equivalents is based on the VERTICALITY image schema: one concrete entity is situated above another concrete entity and the two entities do not remain in contact with each other. The aim pursued here will be to investigate the way in which this schema has been transformed in each language, generating a radial category of interrelated senses.

References
Dąbrowska, E. 1996. ‘The spatial structuring of events. A study of Polish perfectivising prefixes’ [in:] M.Putz, R. Dirven (eds) The construal of space in language and thought. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 467–490.

Johnson, M. 1987. The body in the mind. The bodily basis of meaning, imagination and reason. Chicago, London: the University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, fire and dangerous things. What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago, London: the University of Chicago Press.

Lindner, S. 1983. A lexico-semantic analysis of English verb particle constructions with out and up. Bloomington: The Indiana University Linguistic Club.

Rudzka-Ostyn, B. 1988. Topics in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Talmy, L. 1983. ‘How language structures space? [in:] H.L. Pick L.P. Acredolo (eds) Spatial Orientation. Theory, research and application. New York, London: Plenum Press. 225–282.
 

Saturation-based analysis of word-formation in European languages

Lívia Körtvélyessy and Pavol Štekauer, P.J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovak Republic

Typological research in the field of word-formation is, in principle, an untilled area. Very little has been done here in comparison to other areas of linguistics. This entails a number of methodological problems, including problems with collecting reliable data on languages of the world and the related issue of sampling; relevance and compatibility of existing data due to the fuzzy boundary betweewn inflectional and derivational morphologies, the non-existence of the ‘classical’ division of word-stock into word-classes in some languages, diversity of word-formation categories; identification of a parameter suitable for cross-linguistic evaluation and comparison of languages, etc.

It is the last point that will be discussed in our paper. In particular, we introduce the parameter of saturation value and justify its relevance for cross-linguistic research into word-formation. This parameter is different from productivity in representing the structural richness of word-formation systems of examined languages. While the use of productivity as a basis for comparison of word-formation processes in large-scale cross-linguistic research is impossible for both theoretical and practical reasons, the saturation value parameter takes into consideration all word-formation processes, types and subtypes which can be synchronically used for the formation of new complex words. This parameter can underlie comparison of a sample of languages by individual word-formation processes, types and subtypes, as well as comparison of word –formation processes, types and subtypes by individual languages, language genera and language families.

Its advantages are manifested by an analysis of a sample of 14 Slavic languages on the basis of 95 word-formation features.

References
Körtvélyessy, Lívia. 2015. Evaluative Morphology from Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Štekauer, P., Valera, S., Körtvélyessy, L. 2012. Word-Formation in the World’s Languages. A Typological Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Old Church Slavonic as a language with the middle voice morphology

Anna Malicka-Kleparska, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland

The aim of this analysis has been to investigate the properties and distribution of the morphological exponent sę in Old Church Slavonic, which we argue to be a postfix (see Szymanek 2010), realizing a particular voice type system of Old Church Slavonic. The conception of voice systems and the general theoretical framework has been adopted from Alexiadou (2010), and Alexiadou and Doron’s (2012). Old Church Slavonic is a language which represents a two voice system, with the active voice and middle voice expressed by strictly morphological (synthetic) means, while passive (analytic) structures play only a marginal function.

In OCS the middle voice semantics is realized by the structures with sę, (probably continuing the PIE pronominal element *s(u)e-, see Cennamo 1993: 278), i.e. by the constructions which, from the perspective of their morphological build-up, look like reflexive structures (see Vaillant 1948/2002, Gorković-Major 2009, Savčenko 1974, Madariaga 2010), but which in fact are middle voice options derived with the use of a postfix, and not with a pronominal element. The fact that OCS morphology represents the middle voice projection is first of all supported by the fact that all the reflexive-like structures possess the common semantics focusing on the internal argument, while the external argument is systematically treated as unimportant/non-existent.

The structures morphologically marked as middle voice, semantically realize anticausatives, reflexives, reciprocals, and reflexive impersonals. The middle character of all these structures is supported by the lack of possibilities to spell-out the external argument, either as an implicit argument or in the form of an adjunct introduced by a prepositional phrase.

The middle status of these structures in OCS hinges on the non-argumental status of the postfix sę. Were sę a pronominal argument (see e.g. Madariage 2010), we would expect it to be inflected in a language which has a relatively rich inflectional system, with pronouns showing distinct word-forms for number, person, gender and case. Sę has a single form, while sebe (see Lunt 2001), its full variant, does not appear with middle structures at all. The non-argumental status of sę is supported by its appearance with mono-argumental (stative) verbs, apart from their overt subjects. The pronominal status of sę is undermined by its position in a sentence as well: it does not appear in Wackernagel’s position in a clause (cf. Madariaga 2010), as could be expected of Slavic pronouns, but occurs post-verbally, much like Russian reflexive suffixes. Sę does not cluster with other pronominal elements to form pronominal clitic clusters and it is not deleted where anaphoric deletion could obtain, were it not a morphological element. Consequently, it behaves as a word formational element (Postal 1969), and not as a pronoun.

If sę gets lost in the course of language development, the resulting cognates, e.g. in Polish, preserve the valency value of the OCS verb, instead of accepting a reduced number of arguments.
Thus the reflexive element is perceived here as a morphological formant (see e.g. Krzek to appear for a similar suggestion for Polish) responsible for the formation of the middle voice projection in a verbal structure and, consequently, OCS looks like a language with two-voice system morphology.

References
Alexiadou, Artemis (2010). On the morpho-syntax of (anti)causative verbs. In: Rappaport Hovav, M., E. Doron, and I. Sichel (eds.), Lexical semantics, syntax, and event structure, 177–203. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Alexiadou, Artemis and Edit Doron (2012). The syntactic construction of two non-active voices: passive and middle. Journal of Linguistics 48 (01). 1–34.

Gorković-Major, Jasmina (2009). The role of syntactic transitivity in the development of Slavic syntactic structures. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Sonderband 74, 63–74.

Krzek, Małgorzata (to appear) Impersonal się constructions in Polish.

Lunt, Horace G. (2001). Old Church Slavonic Grammar. Mouton de Gruyter Berlin. New York.

Madariaga, Nerea (2010). The development of Indo-European Middle-Passive Verbs: a case study in Ancient Greek and Old Church Slavonic. Indogermanische Forschungen. Zeitschrift für Indogermanistik und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft 115: 149–178.

Postal, Paul (1969). Anaphoric Islands. Papers from the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. 205–239.

Savčenko, A. N. (1974). Sravnitel’naja grammatika indoevropejskix jazykov. URSS: Moskva.

Szymanek, B. (2010). A Panorama of Polish Word-Formation. Wydawnictwo KUL: Lublin.

Vaillant, André (2002)[1948] Manuel du vieux slave. Paris. [Russian translation 2002 Rukovodstvo po staroslovjanskomu jazyku]. Moskva: URSS.

Doublets formation, ambiguity and polycategoriality in Hebrew

Lior Laks, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

This talk examines the criteria responsible for morphological variation in Hebrew. I compare two cases where words receive an additional form with no change in meaning. I account for the motivation for such changes, arguing that they target morphological and semantic transparency between related words and a morphological distinction between lexical categories. Though the two criteria seem to contradict each other, I argue that this can be resolved assuming a distinction between word formation and storage in the lexicon and in the syntax.

Instrument nouns (INs) can receive an additional form (e.g. maxded~mexaded ‚pencil sharpener‘, magresa(t)-kerax~gores-kerax ‚ice-crusher), where both words share the same stem consonants but are formed in different templates, e.g. maCCeC and meCaCeC. Following Bolozky (1999, 2003), I argue that INs tend to change into templates identical to participle forms of corresponding verbs. Hebrew participles host various categories (Berman 1978, in press, Doron 1999, 2013, Schwarzwald 2002, Bat-El 2008). While maxded and mexaded denote INs, only mexaded is the present form of xided ('sharpened‘).

This change can be predicted systematically. Participle formation targets morphological and thematic transparency between INs and verbs. Thematically, the participle IN corresponds to the verb's argument structure (Grimshaw 1990, Rappaport-Hovav & Levin 1992, Alexiadou&Schafer 2008). The more transparent the thematic relation, the greater the chance for morphological change. Morphologically, the formation in participle templates requires fewer changes on the base verb. This variation results in polycategoriality and ambiguity, where items with the same form function as different lexical categories.

Adjectives in the CaCCan template undergo variation by –i suffixation (daykan~daykani ‚punctual‘, aclan~aclani ‚lazy‘). This is triggered by the distinction between lexical categories because –i marks such forms in as typical adjectives. The CaCCan template is typical of agent nouns (e.g. saxyan ‚swimmer‘) that do not undergo a change (*saxyani). Forming additional adjectival forms results in a distinction between two categories in the same template; nouns retain their form, while adjectives receive the suffixed form.
The two cases represent two conflicting tendencies: transparency between words, resulting in ambiguity, and morphological distinction between categories. I argue that they actually do not conflict. Morphological distinction is required only when both forms are stored in the lexicon, e.g. adjectives and agent nouns. In contrast, when INs change into participles, the two meanings of ambiguous forms are in different components. The nominal meaning is in the lexicon, while the verbal meaning is an inflected form, which is assumed to be derived in the syntax (Aronoff 1976, Anderson 1982, Scalise 1984, Booij 1996, among others). It follows that the grammar tolerates ambiguity and polycategoriality when only one form is lexically stored. In almost all cases of morphological ambiguity at least one meaning represents an inflected form. Cases where both meanings are lexically stored are unproductive and result from historical reasons.

The study adds to previous accounts of morphological change and enables to shed more light on the triggers for it with respect to the organization of the mental lexicon.

Derived nouns in later language acquisition of German – a pilot study

Veronika Mattes, University of Graz, Austria

As opposed to inflection, the acquisition of German word-formation is not very well examined (cf. Rainer 2010: 9), and this holds especially true for derivations in later language development, essentially abstract nominalizations.

Children start early (at about 2;0) to productively derive person or object nouns from verbs by suffixation of –er (e.g.*Lach-er ‘laughing person’) and –e (e.g. *Lutsch-e ‘bonbon’), as investigated for example by Meibauer (1995) and Rainer (2010), but they do not productively use the more abstract nominalization affixes -ung, -heit, -keit, -schaft, Ge- etc. before the age of 5 or 6 (e.g. Rainer 2010: 138, Korecky-Kröll 2011: 465–507) and only gradually acquire them during school age.

The goal of my research is to gain insight into the development of these later nominalization patterns.The data base for my study is composed of several longitudinal studies found in the literature (Augst 1984, Elsen 1999, Rainer 2010 and others) and recorded by myself, and considers diary notes as well as spontaneous speech recordings of children acquiring German, focusing on the phase in which they start to use the mentioned abstract nominalization patterns, i.e. at the age of 5 to 7.

For example, one of the first patterns acquired in this age is the deverbal nominalization by -ung (e.g. Beobacht-ung ‚observation‘), one of the most frequent word-formation patterns in German, which, however, is considerably restricted in productivity due to various semantic constraints concerning the base selection as well as to many lexicalizations (cf. for example Demske 1999 or Hartmann 2014). On the semantic level these word forms cover a range from “nouny” items (e.g. concrete objects such as Wohn-ung ‘apartment’, Zeit-ung ‘newspaper’) and “verby” ones (action or state nouns such as Beweg-ung ‘movement’, Erwart-ung ‘expectation’) and differ considerably with respect to transparency. Because of the high degree of unpredictability of the class (cf. Demske 1999: 109), the constraints and meanings are hard to acquire.

The question is therefore, which of the functional and structural properties of the derivation patterns are the most salient for children, i.e. which are the first ones mastered? Are there clues in the data how and when do children detect the subtle base selection constraints for and the meanings and usages of the derived nouns?

Do children start to productively produce the more transparent “verb-proximal” action nouns (e.g. *Hüpf-ung ‘jumping’, *Roll-ung ‘rolling’), and do they produce object denoting -ung-neologisms (e.g. *Gesünd-ung ‘medicin’, *Anschnall-ung ‘binding’) only later?

The poster will present the results of a small pilot study (to be followed by more elaborate experimental testing) that examines the acquisition of different types of noun derivation. It will also consider type and token frequencies of canonical nominalized forms, the necessary basis for analogies and schematization, but the main focus will lie on the analysis of the semantic properties of children’s neologisms, as these forms “reveal a certain degree of analysis during the learning process …” (Cordes 2014: 106).

References
Augst, Gerhard (Hrsg.)(1984). Kinderwort. Der aktive Kinderworteschatz (kurz vor der Einschulung); nach Sachgebieten geordnet mit einem alphabetischen Register. Frankfurt/Main etc.: Lang.

Cordes, Anne-Kristin (2014). The role of frequency in children’s learning of morphological constructions. Tübingen: Narr.

Demske, Ulrike (1999). „Nominalisierungen im Deutschen und Englischen: Überlegungen zu einer Theorie sprachlichen Wandels“. In: Kanngießer, Siegfried & Vogel, Petra M. (Hrsg.). Elemente des Sprachwandels. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

Elsen, Hilke (1999). Ansätze zu einer funktionalistisch-kognitiven Grammatik. Konsequenzen aus Regularitäten des Erstspracherwerbs. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Hartmann, Stefan (2014). „The Diachronic Change of German Nominalization Patterns: An Increase in Prototypicality”. In: Rundblad, Gabriella et al. (eds.) Selected Papers from the 4th UK Cognitive Linguistics Conference, 152–171.

Korecky-Kröll, Katharina (2011). Der Erwerb der Nominalmorphologie bei zwei Wiener Kindern: Eine Untersuchung im Rahmen der Natürlichkeitstheorie. [Dissertation. Universität Wien.]

Meibauer, Jörg (1995). „Neugebildete er-Derivate im Spracherwerb“. In: Sprache & Kognition 14 (3), 138–160.

Rainer, Franz (2010). Carmens Erwerb der deutschen Wortbildung. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

How poor Japanese is in adjectivizing derivational affixes and why

Akiko Nagano, Nagano, Tohoku University, and Masaharu Shimada, University of Tsukuba, Japan

With the overall aim of shedding light on the typology of adjective derivation in world languages, we will zoom in on the scarcity of adjectivizing affixes in Japanese and consider a possible factor behind it.

Bauer, Lieber and Plag (2013: Ch. 14) investigate adjective derivation in English comprehensively and show that (i) this language possesses a wealth of adjectivizing affixes of both native and non-native origins and that (ii) those affixes are compartmentalized according to their semantics into the qualitative/gradable group and the relational/non-gradable group. Their study also shows the defaultness of qualitative and gradable semantics for derived adjectives, revealing that while English has exclusively qualitative affixes, it does not have exclusively relational affixes because ‘no relational affix is immune to being coerced to a qualitative reading’ (Bauer, Lieber and Plag ibid.: 318).

Compared to these characteristics, Japanese adjective derivation exhibits strikingly different organization. First, it is very poor in affixes available, only five being able to produce new derivatives: -rashi(i), -ppo(i), -gachi(na/da), -chikku(na/da), and -teki(na/da). The parentheses indicate inflectional morphemes; -i is used both for predication and modification, while -na and -da alternate between modification and predication. Not only number but also history indicates the dearth of adjectivizing affixes in Japanese. Two out of the five, -chikku and -teki, are borrowings from English and Chinese, respectively; and two out of the remaining three, -rashii and -gachi, result from grammaticalization.

Second, all of these affixes are exclusively qualitative affixes. That is, there are no relational affixes in contemporary Japanese. Although Bisetto (2010) argues that -teki is a relational suffix, it is semantically equivalent to -esque, -ish, and -like rather than -al and -ic, always expressing the simulative meaning ‘like N, resembling N’ when denominal. All teki derivatives can be predicatively used, intensified, and compared. The same is true of the other four affixes.

What do these facts tell us about the typology of adjective derivation? First, it is quite likely that qualitative and gradable semantics is the default of this derivational domain, for even Japanese adjective derivation, which is very poor overall, does have affixes of this type.

Second, it is also plausible that adjective derivation in a language reflects the morphological typology of non-derived adjectives in that language. Japanese simplex adjectives clearly differ from English counterparts in realizing the Tense-bearing copula as their inflection; for instance, compare the sentence Mt. Fuji is high with its Japanese counterpart Fujisan-wa taka-i (Mt.Fuji-TOPIC high-COPULA.PRESENT). The adjectival root taka ‘high’ cannot be used as a free morpheme. The parentheses on the above-listed five suffixes in Japanese represent this type of inflection. We will propose that the obligatory attachment of predicative inflectional morphology to adjectives (both simplex and derived) makes it impossible to use them purely attributively, in the relational and non-gradable interpretation.

Finally, we will briefly discuss how Japanese compensates for the lack of relational adjectivizing affixes, showing that it heavily depends on the use of the genitive suffix -no as an attributivizer.

References
Bauer, L., Lieber, R., and Plag, I. (2013) The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Bisetto, A. (2010) Relational adjectives crosslinguistically, Lingue e Linguaggio 9, 65–85.

Are word-formation processes preferred for some semantic fields and part of speech? Wichi (Mataguayan): A case study

Verónica Nercesian, Universidad Nacional de Formosa/Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Word-formation has been focus of different theoretical and typological studies over the last decade (Štekauer and Lieber 2005, Corbett and Baerman 2006, Lieber and Štekauer 2014, Audring and Masini, forthcoming, among others). Intending to contribute to these studies, this paper analyzes the differences of proportion and distribution of the word-formation processes within the vocabulary of the Wichi language (Mataguayan‒also known as Matacoan). I will argue that some word-formation processes are preferred for some semantic fields and word-classes, and that these preferences contribute to the organization of the vocabulary.
The analysis is based on two quantitatively and qualitatively representative Wichi vocabularies. The first one comprises 3,000 words distributed in 24 semantic fields (according to Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009). It includes all of the word-classes of this language (nouns, verbs, adverbs, pronouns, interrogatives, conjunctions, illocutionary markers, and numerals), and contains stems, derived words, compounds, verbs formed by lexical noun incorporation and ideophones. The second lexical database contains 1,000 words referring to place-names and people-names. The latter is relevant in this study because most of them are derived words from the vocabulary using special suffixes (Vidal 2014).

The word-formation processes in Wichi‒derivation, composition, lexical noun incorporation, conversion and onomatopoeia‒ are used in different proportion within the semantic fields and word-classes. In the former case, for example, derivation by suffixation is frequently preferred for creating nouns from a particular vegetable class. Most of names of wooden plants (trees, bushes, lianas or creepers) and community of wooden plants are formed by deriving the base referring to the fruit with two different special suffixes (eg. fwa’a ‘carob fruit (Prosopis alba)’, fwa’a-yekw ‘carob plant’, fwa’a-chat ‘community of carobs’). Composition is more used than derivation in the semantic fields of body and animals, for example. Onomatopeia is frequently used to create ideophones referring basically to birds (eg. tshohok [tsohõq] ‘Southern screamer’, ts’iya [ts’ija] ‘Chimango caracara’). Moreover, reduplication is combined with onomatopoeia in some cases (i.e. m’alh-m’alh [’maɬˈ’maɬ] ‘Greater wagtail-tyrant’, ch’ay-ch’ay [č’ajˈč’aj] ‘Crested gallito’). Unlike derivation, composition is highly infrequent in some semantic fields, like sense perception, cognition, speech and language, kinship.

Regarding word-classes, nouns and verbs are the most likely to be derived. Conversely, derived adverbials are conspicuously less common. In fact, special suffixes to derive adverbs are not found. Still, some nominal and verbal categories (like demonstratives, tense or directionals) combine with adverbs, nouns or conjunctions to create an adverb (eg., hotetsu ‘like that (towards there)’ < hote=tsu [COMP=DEM.to.there], pajche ‘a long time ago’ ‘in the old days’ < paj=che [then-DIR.in.extension]). Additionally, whereas nouns may be formed by derivation and composition, verbs are highly frequently created by derivation and noun incorporation. It is extremely rare to find compounded verbs. Convertion is frequently used when forming denominal verbs and it is only applied to alienable nouns.

This interesting unequal distribution of word-formation could be determined in part for (i) grammatical reasons (e.g., the development of particular derivational suffixes that create sets of words within the vocabulary), and (ii) cultural factors (e.g., the preference for naming animals, plants, things, places and people according to their physical characteristics and behaviors for which compounds are usefully metaphoric).

References
Audring, J. and F. Masini (Forthcoming). The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Corbett, G. and M. Baerman. 2006. Prolegomena to typology of morphological features. Morphology, 16: 231–246.

Haspelmath, M. and U. Tadmor (Eds.) 2009. Loanwords in the World’s Languages. A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Lieber, R. and P. Štekauer (eds.) 2014. The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology. Oxford: Oxford Unviersity Press.

Štekauer, P. and R. Lieber (eds.) 2005. Handbook of Word Formation. Netherlands: Springer.

Vidal, A. 2014. Nombres propios, denominación e identidad entre los pilagá y los wichí. En Language contact and documentation/Contacto lingüístico y documentación, Comrie, B. y L. Golluscio (eds). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

On the derivational adaptation of borrowings

Jurgis Pakerys, Vilnius University, Lithuania

When a borrowing passes along the integration path in the recipient language, it may undergo certain adaptation that involves derivational morphology. For example, in the case of blended derivatives discussed by Haugen (1950: 219), the suffix -y of English adjectives is replaced by -ig in Pennsylvania German: bass-ig, fonn-ig ← boss-y, funn-y, etc. The processes of this and some other types will be referred to here as derivational adaptation . Although these phenomena are not as widely spread as inflectional adaptation (cf. Haspelmath 2009: 39 on loanblends), they deserve to be investigated in more detail and are worth more attention in word formation theories.

In my talk, I aim at discussing the derivational adaptation by summing up the previous research and by bringing attention to some new issues in three areas: (1) the types of formal processes involved, (2) their interpretation, and (3) their relation to productivity.

1. Processes
1.1. No derivational morphology is involved (= loanword in Haugen 1950: 214, importation without morphemic substitution).
• To be considered as default case due to non-obligatory nature of derivational meanings (vs. the obligatory marking of grammatical features reflected in inflectional adaptation).
1.2. Substitution of derivational markers.
• Derivational marker of the donor language is replaced by the one of the recipient language (= blended derivative in Haugen 1950: 219 illustrated above, a subtype of loanblend: morphemic importation + substitution).
1.3. Addition of derivational markers.
• A derivational marker is added to the borrowed stem.
• Cf. the indirect insertion strategy used to integrate verbs in some languages, as in, e.g., Jakarta Indonesian download-in (factitive suffix is added) ← English download (Wohlgemuth 2009: 95–101). Similar strategy is employed to adapt some borrowed adjectives, cf. (colloquial) Polish super-ow-y ← English super, (slang) Russian kul’-n-yj ← English cool, etc. (suffixes of relational adjectives are added).
1.4. Truncation of derivational markers
• A derivational marker of the donor (or pre-donor) language is truncated or completely removed.
• Cf. German studier-en → (colloquial) Latvian študier-ēt/studier-ēt → (standard) Latvian stud-ēt (-ier- is removed).
2. Interpretation
2.1. In 1.1, the speaker of the recipient language (= SRL) treats the source of the borrowing as derivationally non-analyzable.
2.2. In 1.2, the SRL treats the source of the borrowing as derivationally transparent and selects the derivational marker corresponding to the one found in structure of the source (cf. Haugen 1950: 213, 215).
2.3. In 1.3, the SRL treats the sources of the borrowings as quasi-bases for derivation.
2.4. In 1.4, the SRL (probably the prescriptivist) treats certain segments of the borrowing as redundant.
3. Productivity
• The markers employed in 1.2 and 1.3 have to be productive in the recipient language (cf. Dressler & Ladányi 2000: 119–122 based on the primary/secondary productivity of Wurzel 1989).

References
Dressler, W. & M. Ladányi. 2000. Productivity in word formation (WF): a morphological approach, Acta Lingistica Hungarica 47, 103–144.

Haspelmath, M. 2009. Lexical borrowing: concepts and issues. In: Haspelmath, M. & U. Tadmor (eds.) Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 35–54.

Haugen, E., 1950. The Analysis of Linguistic Borrowing, Language 26 (2), 210–231.

Wohlgemuth, J. 2009. A Typology of Verbal Borrowings. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Wurzel, W. U. 1989. Inflectional Morphology and Naturalness. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Neoclassical word formation in English and Russian: A contrastive analysis

Renáta Panocová, P. J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovak Republic, and Pius ten Hacken, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria

Neoclassical word formation is the formation of new words on the basis of Greek and Latin components. Examples are found in many European languages. Recent English examples listed in the OED new word updates (2014) include, authigenesis, ethnomycology, or nutrigenomics. Because of the Greek and Latin components, neoclassical word formation always involves a certain degree of borrowing. As neoclassical implies, a pure loan such as philosophy from Ancient Greek is not evidence for neoclassical compounding. The use of reanalysed components of such borrowings is necessary. Another type of borrowing is the spread of neoclassical formations over various languages. Thus, neuromyopathy ‘disease affecting both nerve(s) and muscle(s)’, first attested in English in 1958 (OED, 2015), has easily recognizable equivalents in German Neuromyopathie, French neuromyopathie, or Russian невромиопатия [nevromiopatija].

The analysis of neoclassical word formation can involve word formation rules and borrowing to different degrees. Our hypothesis is that in English and Russian, the status of neoclassical word formation is different. In English, there is a system of neoclassical word formation, so that speakers who are competent in this aspect of the language analyse formations in terms of their components and know the structural relations between similar formations. This means that it is not relevant whether a new formation in English is formed by speakers of English or borrowed from French or German and reanalysed by speakers of English. In Russian, however, only borrowed neoclassical formations exist. Some speakers may know their etymology, but there is no evidence that they use this knowledge to form new instances.

Part of the evidence for this hypothesis can be derived from the representation of neoclassical word formation in standard dictionaries. As shown by ten Hacken & Panocová (2014), standard general English dictionaries give not only more neoclassical formations, but also more information about their structure than their Russian counterparts. In particular, whereas many neoclassical formatives are described as separate entries in English dictionaries, Russian dictionaries only rarely have entries for such formatives.
A second piece of evidence is the status of neoclassical words in the language. As Panocová (2015) shows, English neoclassical formations are often the only valid naming device used for a particular concept. In Russian, however, there is much more resistance against the acceptance of a neoclassical name. Often, a calque is formed, using the structure of the neoclassical formation with native morphemes replacing the neoclassical formatives, as soon as the concept is used outside highly specialized discourse. An example is литотрипсия [litotripsija] ‘lithotripsy’ with the Russian equivalent камнедробление. The element litho- is translated by камне- [kamne] meaning ‘stone’ and -tripsy by дробление [droblenie] denoting ‘rubbing down or crushing’.

On this basis we will argue that neoclassical word formation is a separate subsystem of word formation in English, but not in Russian. In Russian the neoclassical structure has only etymological relevance.

References
ten Hacken, Pius and Panocová, Renáta (2014), ‘Neoclassical formatives in dictionaries’, in Proceedings of the XVI EURALEX International Congress: The User in Focus, pp. 1058–1072.

Panocová, Renáta, ‘Neoclassical compounds in the onomasiological approach’, to appear in ten Hacken, Pius (ed.), The Semantics of Compounding, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

OED (2015), Oxford English Dictionary, Third edition, edited by John Simpson, www.oed.com.
 

Head position in nominal compounds: A lesson from Africa

Steve Pepper, University of Oslo, Norway

Given the fact that so many languages in Africa…are poorly studied, there is obviously still a lot to be learned about the typology of languages. (Dimmendaal 2011: 298).

One of the major issues in the search for universals of compounding has been that of head position (Guevara & Scalise 2009).
Williams’ (1981) ‘Righthand Head Rule’ stated that “the head of a morpho¬logically complex word [is] the righthand member of that word.” While this rule generally works for English and other Germanic languages, it is invalidated by Hebrew, Maori and Welsh (among others), all of which have left-headed compounds.
A second, “principles and parameters” inspired hypothesis – that languages select for either left headed or right-headed compounds – is falsified by two kinds of evidence:
(1) from Javanese and Vietnamese, both of which exhibit left-headed native compounds and right-headed borrowings, from Sanskrit and Chinese, respectively (Bauer 2009); and
(2) from Mandarin Chinese, which has right-headed nominal compounds and left-headed verbal compounds (Ceccagno & Scalise 2006).

Based on a sample of 22 languages, Scalise and Fábregas (2010) conclude that the position of the head inside a compound can be considered neither a universal principle nor a parameter. Instead they hypothesize that “there is a canonical position for the head in each compound type [my emphasis] in a given language”, which might be violated by calques, loanwords and other contact effects.
This hypothesis appears to be contradicted by Štekauer et al. (2012) on the basis of their sample of 70 languages. Citing examples of nominal compounds from Vietnamese, Hindi and Breton, they observe that modifiers (and consequently also heads) “do not always seem to be restricted to one position.” However, as noted above, the Vietnamese situation can be ascribed to language contact, while the Hindi example is debatable – at best exceptional and quite possibly erroneous. The case of Breton is more interesting. Like Welsh, it has two classes of nominal compounds, traditionally termed ‘strict’ and ‘loose’, both of which can be either right- or left-headed, but to date there has been no in-depth study that can reveal which factors govern their origin and distribution.

One language that very clearly does falsify the Scalise-Fabregas hypothesis is the Bantoid language Nizaa (ISO 639: sgi), spoken by approximately 10,000 people in the area around the town of Galim in Cameroon’s Adamawa province and still only sparsely documented. Almost uniquely in the published literature, it seems, Nizaa exhibits both left-headed and right-headed N+N nominal compounds in approximately equal measure and this state of affairs cannot be attributed to language contact.

This paper describes a study of data from Nizaa. A detailed analysis of nominal compounds reveals a striking sub-regularity that involves semantic relations and is interpreted in the light of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 2008). The study highlights the importance of diachrony, offers certain insights into the nature of the compounding process itself, and may have ramifications for both the definition and classification of compounds and the understanding of word order correlations.

References
Bauer, Laurie. 2009. Typology of compounds. In Rochelle Lieber and Pavel Štekauer (eds.) The Oxford handbook of compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 343–356.

Ceccagno, Antonella and Scalise, Sergio. 2006. Classification, Structure and Headedness of Chinese Compounds. Lingue e Linguaggio, 2, pp. 233–260.

Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. 2011. Historical linguistics and the comparative study of African languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Guevara, Emiliano and Sergio Scalise. 2009. Search for Universals in Compounding. In Sergio Scalise, Elisabetta Magni & Antonietta Bisetto (eds.) 2009. Universals of language today. Springer: Amsterdam, pp. 101–128.

Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: A basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Scalise, Sergio and Antonio Fábregas. 2010. The head in compounding. In Sergio Scalise and Irene Vogel (eds.) Cross-disciplinary issues in compounding. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 109–126.

Štekauer, Pavol, Salvador Valera and Lívia Kőrtvélyessy. 2012. Word-formation in the world’s languages: A typological survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Williams, Edwin. 1981. On the notions ‘lexically related’ and ‘head of a word’, Linguistic Inquiry 12:2, pp. 245–274.

Conversion and Morphologization of Phonological Rules in Serbian

Stanimir Rakić, Belgrade University, Serbia

In this paper I want to show that morphologization of palatalization and iotation deeply affects the morphology and lexicon of standard Serbian. It occurs at all lexical level without clear phonetic motivation because palatalized consonants seem to be very good boundary symbols in SS. For this reason, the levels in SS can be distinquished only on the basis of prosodic factors. Capitalizing on the findings of Hay (2003), I try to show that palatalization and iotation are often morphologically or even lexically motivated expanding the possiblity of derivation and conversion in SS. The palatalization and iotation mark clearly the morphemic boundary because palatal consonants in Serbian rarely appear in the middle of monomorphemic words (cf. Hay 2003).

According to Rakić (1991, 1996) we can distinguish three kinds of suffixes in SS. For example, the first level suffixes –āč palatalizes the final consonant of the stem in proizvòđāč ‚poducer‘ < proizvòditi ’produce’, the second order suffix –ānin insert č in Zàgrepčanin ’the inhabitants of Zàgreb, the third level suffix –nī palatalize the final consonant in jȁbučnī ’like apple’ < jȁbuka ’apple’. Palatalization and iotation are present at all lexical levels in Serbian and most often are not properly phonetically motivated. Klajn (2003) justly raises the question whether j is necessary in all cases where palatalization occurs; in some cases it seems possible to single out cases of complementary distribution. For the pair –āk/ –jāk, a level 2 suffix, it is not easy to find the exact distribution. A tendency seems to be that –āk applies to monosyllabic bases (e.g. glùpāk ‘fool’ < glup ‘not clever’, čùdāk ‘odd fellow’ <čȕdan ‘strange’), whereas –jāk applies to polysyllabic bases (e.g. stȑučnjāk ’expert’ < strȕčan adj. ’of expert’). The principle of faithfulness seems to protect the monosyllabic bases as one can also find examples in which the monosyllabic bases before j are preserved ( pròsjāk ‘begger’ < prȍsiti ‘to beg’). These forms are completely consonant with ’new iotation’ in which j does not coalesce with the preceding consonant (Stavanović 1981: 133). In fact, the consonant clusters in the last syllables generally distinguish nominal and verbal forms.

The most alternations are connected with the adjectival suffix –jī. Not only k, g, h are palatalized into respectively č, ž, š, but also the labials b, p, m, v become respectively blj, plj, mlj, vlj (e.g. gòlūbljī adj. <gȍlūb ’pigeon’, ŝomljī adj. < sôm ’catfish’, kȑavljī adj. < krȁva ’cow’). According to the pattern of ’new jotation’ j is preserved after s, z, š and ž (e.g. `pasjī adj. < pȁs ’dog’, `kozjī adj. < kòza ’goat’, `mišjī adj. < mȉš ’mouse’, `božjī adj. < bôg ‘god’).

Palatalization and iotation expand the possibility of word-formation not only in derivation, but also in conversion as they can characterize whole lexical classes. They apply only to some nominal forms, and even there not completely consequently, while in some sorts of verbs they mark all their forms. Thus, consonant alternations produced by palatalizations and jotations can differenciate nominal and verbal forms (zrâk ‚ray‘ – zráčiti ‚to radiate‘, svèdok ‚witness – svedòčiti 'to testify‘):
(1) zrâci nom. pl. – zrâčī 3p.sg. ‘(he) radiates’ – zrâči imperative ‘radiate!’
In many cases the length of the final vowel in verbs adds another difference regarding nominal forms, as well as the sibilation k → c which applies only in nominal forms. For masculine nouns, the difference between nom.pl. and the third person singular and the imperative of 2.person singular is crucial. For feminine nouns in (2), the opposition exists between the form of dative sg. and 3.p. sg. and imperative of 2.p. sg. as well as between between gen. and acc. sg. and 3.p.pl. We give here the example of the oposition snága ‚strength‘ – snážiti ‚to strengthen‘:
(2) snágēgen.sg – snázi dat.sg. – snâge acc.pl. – snâžī 3.p.sg – snáži imp. – snâžē 3.p.pl
The accent differences in the present are produced by the rule which rising accent turns into falling one. In the verbal forms the final consonants are palatalized, while in the nominal forms they are sibilized or unchanged. In polisyllabic forms such as cepìdlaka ‚hair-splitter‘ – cepìdlačiti ‚to split hairs‘ there is no accentual variations:
3p.sg. imp. 3p.pl. gen.sg dat.sg. acc. pl.
(3) cepìdlačī – cepìdlači – cepìdlačē – cepìdlakē – cepìdlaci – cepìdlake
In this type of morphology segmental alternations may also take the role of inflectional affixes.
The examples kȉša ‚rain‘ – kȉšiti ‚to rain‘, krȅč ‚lime‘ – krèčiti ‚to whitewash‘, kȕrāž ‚courage‘- kurážiti ‚to encourage‘ show that the derivation of verbs by depalatalization is not possible. The derivation of nouns by depalatalization is however possible (e.g. skôk ' jump'- skòčiti ‚to jump‘, ìzlog ‚show window‘- izlòžiti ‚to display‘, Babić 1986: 290) because palatalization is productive in the domain of verbs. Depalatalization is therefore possible in the domain in which palatalization is completely applicable. For such derivation, it is crucial that there are verbal paradigms in which palatalized consonants č, ž, š are generalized in all forms, and that there are a number of cases of corresponding nouns with related meaning with consonants k, g, h in their stems. Whether the corresponding nouns would be produced, and whether these nouns would get an institutional status depends on their meaning and on the possible social needs as in any other kind of word-formation.

References
Babić, S. 1986. Tvorba riječi u hrvatskom književnom jeziku, JAZU i Globus, Zagreb.

Hay. J. (2003) Causes and Consequences of Word Structure, Routledge.

Klajn, I. 2003. Tvorba reči u savremenom srpskom jeziku. Drugi deo: Sufiksacija i konverzija, Institut za srpski jezik, Beograd.

Rakić, S. 1991. O receptivnim sufiksima i pravilu akcenta srpskohrvatskog jezika, Zbornik Matice srpske za filologiju i lingvistiku 34/2, 121–134.

Rakić,S. 1996. Suffixe, lexicalische Schichten und Akzent in Serbokroatischen,Linguistische Berichte 163.

Loan verbs and verbalizers in dialectal variation

Angela Ralli

This presentation investigates verb borrowing in a language-contact situation involving dialectal variation. I argue that the accommodation of loan verbs in a recipient language is not only the product of extra-linguistic factors (e.g., among others, degree of bilingualism, Thomason 2001, Matras 2009) but follows specific linguistic constraints, mostly due to language internal factors.

By examining the integration of Turkish and Romance (source language) verbs in a number of Modern Greek dialects (target language) with the presence or absence of verbalizers, I deal with the following issues: (a) the important role of the target’s morphology in loan verb accommodation; that is, the property of Greek verbs to be combinations of stems and inflectional suffixes, as well as the strong presence of non-phonological allomorphy in the verbal system, which determines the borrowing strategy. (b) The role of productivity which makes verbal loans to be integrated in the recipient language with the use of some of the most productive derivational suffixes, the form of which varies from one dialect to another. © The target’s inherent tendencies to classify native and loan verbs into different categories.

\In order to illustrate arguments and proposals, I draw evidence from three Asia Minor dialects, i.e. Aivaliot, Pontic and Cappadocian (Sakkaris 1940, Ralli 2012a, Oekonomides 1958, Dawkins 1916, Janse forthcoming), Grekanico (Griko and Bovese spoken in South Italy, Rohlfs 1933), Lesbian (Ralli forthcoming), Heptanesian (Ralli 2012b), Cypriot (Dendias 1923) and Cretan (Pangalos 1955). The Asia Minor dialects have been affected by Turkish, Heptanesian and Grekanico have been influenced by Romance, while Cypriot, Cretan and Lesbian display both Turkish and Romance loans, depending on the period of contact. For an illustration, consider the following examples, where borrowed verbs are loanblends (Whichmann & Wohlgemuth 2008), consisting of a borrowed and a native part: the stem comes from Turkish or Romance, the inflectional ending is Greek and the verbal suffix (if there is one), between hyphens, is native e.g. -iz)-) or the product of exaptation (e.g. -ar-):

(i)a.Turkish → Aivaliot Cappadocian, Pontic b. Turkish → Cypriot
kazanmak kazad-iz-u, γazand-iz-o γazan-ev-o yoklamak joklat-iz-o
‘to profit’ ‘to search/survey’

c. Turkish – > Cretan d. Turkish → Lesbian
dayanmak dajad-iz-o aktarmak axtard-o/axtard-iz-u
‘to resist / be strong’ ‘to overthrow’

(ii)a. Salentino → Griko b. Venetian → Heptanesian c. Venetian → Cypriot
kuntare kunt-e(v)-o imitar imit-ar-o arrestar, avisar arest-iaz-o, aviz-ar-o
‘to narrate’ ‘to imitate’ ‘to arrest’ ‘to warn’

d. French → Cypriot e. Venetian → Cretan
gouverner govern-iaz-o accettar atseter-n-o/atset-ar-o
‘to govern’ ‘to accept’

g. Venetian → Lesbian
arrivar ariver-n-u
‘to arrive’

On the basis of Greek dialectal evidence, I conclude that it is possible for a language (in this case, the fusional Greek) to be affected by a linguistic system of distinct typology (agglutinative or analytical) provided that certain morphological conditions are met. I also demonstrate that the study of dialects offers new challenges to morphology, since dialects provide a variety of phenomena which may not be found in the standard language, and that information drawn from language contact can shed light on crucial issues regarding word formation in general.

References
Dawkins, R. 1916. Modern Greek in Asia Minor. Cambridge: CUP.

Dendias, M. 1923. Cypriot verbs from French and Italian. Athena 23: 142–165.

Janse, M. forthcoming. Cappadocian. In Ch. Tzitzilis ed. Modern Greek Dialects. Thessaloniki.

Matras, Y. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: CUP.

Oekonomides, D. 1958. Grammar of the Greek dialect of Pontus. Athens: Academy of Athens.

Pangalos, G.E. [1955] 2000. On the Cretan linguistic variation (in Greek). 2nd edition,. Vol.1–6, Center for the creation of the historical lexicon, Athens

Ralli, A. 2012a. Morphology in language contact: verbal loanblend formation in Asia Minor Greek (Aivaliot). In Th. Stolz (eds.) Morphologies in Contact. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 177–194.

Ralli, A. 2012b. Contact-induced morphological change: loan-verb formation in Griko and Heptanesian. L’Italia Dialettale LXXIII: 111–132.

Ralli, a. Forthcoming. Dictionary of the dialectal varieties of Kydonies, Moschonisia and Eastern Lesbos.

Rohlfs, G. 1933. Scavi linguistici nella Magna Grecia. Halle (Saale) Niemeyer / Roma: Collezione Meridionale

Sakkaris, G. 1940. The Kydonies dialect in comparison with the Lesbian dialect. Asia Minor Chronicles 3. Athens: Enosis Smyrneon.

Thomason, S. 2001. Language Contact: An Introduction. Edinburgh: EUP.

Wichmann, S. & Wohlgemuth, J. 2008. Loan verbs in a typological perspective. In Th. Stolz et al. (eds.), Aspects of language contact. New theoretical, methodological and empirical findings with special focus on Romancisation processes. Berlin: de Gruyter, 89–121.

Emergence of the derivational verb family in Hebrew: Analyses of parental input and child output

Dorit Ravid1, Orit Ashkenazi1, Ronit Levie1, Galit Ben Zadok1, Tehila Grunwald1,2, Ron Bratslavsky1,2, Shirley Eitan1 and Steven Gillis3
1 Tel Aviv University, 2 Center for Educational Technology, 3 Antwerp University

The paper aims to uncover the route to learning morphological verb families in child Hebrew and provide an account of how Hebrew-speaking children gain command of the complex structural-semantic configuration of the verb lexicon. The verb lexicon is the earliest to acquire, most tight-knit derivational system in Hebrew. It is composed of seven conjugations termed binyanim (literally: buildings) conveying transitivity and aktionsart values. Morpho-phonologically, binyanim are sets of non-concatenative patterns, each consisting of a unique template of vowels (often prefixed), e.g., niCCaC or hitCaCeC. These templates specify the insertion of tri- (and quadri-) consonantal roots, which convey the lexical essence of verbs (Bolozky, 1999; Ravid, 2012; Schwarzwald, 2002). Together, roots and patterns create derivational verb families based on the same root in combination with different binyanim. The Hebrew verb lexicon is entirely organized by this root-and-pattern structure, with about 1,200 different roots and the seven binyan patterns responsible for all verbs and verb families (Ravid et al, in press). As derivational entities, these combinations are semi-productive and often non-predictable (Berman, 1988; Ravid, 1990). For example, root ħ-š-b ‘think’ relates xashav ‘think’, nexshav ‘be considered’, hexshiv ‘consider’, huxshav ‘be taken into consideration’, xishev ‘calculate’, xushav ‘be calculated’, and hitxashev ‘act considerately’.

We propose that children learn this morphologically and lexically complex system by (i) ‘starting small’ (Elman, 1993) in the sense of first gaining command of sparse, semantically coherent morphological families; and by (ii) making use of reduced morphological entropy (Ackerman & Malouf, 2013) in the form of two binyan subsystems.

To investigate the emergence of Hebrew derivational verb morphology, we analyzed two databases of adult input and child output produced by typically developing, monolingual native speakers of Hebrew from mid-high SES. The adult input database consisted of two corpora – a spoken parental corpus to toddlers aged 1;8–2;4, and a written corpus of storybooks targeting children aged 2–8. The child output database also consisted of two corpora – child speech by toddlers aged 1;8–2;4, and peer talk by children aged 2–8. All verbs in the corpora were identified, counted and analyzed into their root and pattern components.

Findings indicate that our predictions were confirmed. First, the overwhelming majority in both input and output databases were verbs that did not share a root with any other binyan, showing that Hebrew roots initially ride on verbs and not vice versa. Roots as relating different verb lemmas ‘start small’ in two-binyan verb families with transparent semantics, which shoulder the early burden of learning about verb morphological derivation in Hebrew (about 25–30% of the root families). One member of the pair always has a much larger frequency, entrenching basic root meaning by frequent repetition, while a second, root-related verb with a more complex meaning modulation makes a smaller appearance. This promotes learning the transitivity values such pairs convey by frequent association. Moreover, these two-binyan pairs always occur within the same binyan subsystem, reducing the entropy of the complex system. Three- and four-binyan families, which hardly occur in our databases, herald more complex semantic and structural relationships.

References
Ackerman, F. & Malouf, R. 2013. Morphological organization: The low conditional entropy conjecture. Language, 89, 429–464.

Berman, R.A. 1988. Productivity in the lexicon: New-word formation in Modern Hebrew. Folia Linguistica, 21, 425–461.

Bolozky, S. 1999. Measuring Productivity in Word Formation. Leiden: Brill.

Ravid, D. 1990. Internal structure constraints on new-word formation devices in Modern Hebrew. Folia Linguistica, 24, 289–346.

Ravid, D. 2012. Spelling Morphology: The Psycholinguistics of Hebrew Spelling. New York: Springer.

Ravid, D., O. Ashkenazi, R. Levie, G. Ben Zadok, T. Grunwald, R. Bratslavsky and S. Gillis. In press. Foundations of the root category: analyses of linguistic input to Hebrew-speaking children. In R. A. Berman (ed.) Acquisition and Development of Hebrew: From Infancy to Adolescence. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Creative Compounds in Child Language with Focus on Function

Maria Rosenberg and Ingmarie Mellenius, Umeå university, Umeå, Sweden

This study addresses the function of novel compounds in child language. Swedish children start to productively create compounds before age 2. From a cognitive perspective, it is therefore an intriguing question to investigate the main functions of such coinages. The objective is to come up with a classification of functions displayed within the children’s lexical innovations, aiming at cross-linguistic validity. Previous accounts of the function of innovations will be discussed and evaluated in relation to our data.

The data contains about 400 novel (i.e. non-established) nominal compounds (mainly NN), spontaneously produced by three monolingual Swedish children. The compounds were collected sporadically from age 1 to 6, along with specifications of context and semantics.

Brekle (1986) proposes several functions of novel German compounds in adult speech: filling lexical gaps, reference, contrast, ambiguity or analogy. Analogy to lexicalized compounds is claimed to predominate, especially among innovations with context-dependent interpretations, in contrast to context-independent interpretations (compositional).

Becker (1994) raises the question of the function of innovations in child language. Her data contains ‘meaningless’ words (thumble), redundancy (granola-cereal), and non-established terms (bee-house) for already known items (bee-hive). Such functions are not motivated as lexical gap fillers: the traditional explanation given by Clark (1981). Becker (1994) assumes that lexical knowledge in terms of generalizations affects innovations: “there were more innovations in categories in which there were more well-established lexical items” (Becker 1994:206).

Mellenius (1997) claims that is difficult both to define a lexical gap and to verify that novel words are used to fill gaps. She lists six motivations for the creation of novel compounds by children:
(i) The established word is unknown: guldlagare ‘gold-mender’ for guldsmed ‘jeweller’.
(ii) An established word lacks: broschhäfte ‘brooch-stick’ (needle at the brooch’s back).
(iii) Picking out a particular member among familiar members of a category: myrsten ‘ant-stone’ (because an ant walked on it).
(iv) Naming fantasy concepts without real-world referents: dörfiltar ‘die-blankets’ (‘You die when you walk on the die-blankets’).
(v) Finding le mot juste: djungeltoa ‘jungle-lavatory’ (bathroom full of plants being replanted).
(vi) Contrasting: nattmoln ‘night-cloud’ vs. regnmoln ‘rain-cloud’.

Leaning on Mellenius (1997), Berman claims that children’s novel compounds are “highly ‘context-dependent’ and hence more likely to express temporary rather than intrinsic relations” (2009:311). However, Clark et al. (1985) claimed the opposite, namely that children’s compounds mostly tend to be context-independent, expressing inherent relations.

In our analysis, we aim to elucidate previously proposed functions, seeing that they are not always clear-cut. In particular, Brekle (1986) and Berman (2009) seem to differ on their definitions of ‘context-dependent’. Hence, this notion needs clarification in relation to the semantics of children’s innovations. Moreover, we categorize the compounds according to how we interpret their functions in the light of previous accounts, and propose a more sharp-edged classification.

Despite limited data, our typological classification of functions displayed within the children’s innovations aims to have general validity and cognitive relevance, as well as to provide guidance for future research.

References
Berman, R. A. (2009). Children’s Acquisition of Compound Constructions. In R. Lieber & P. Štekauer (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compounding, 298–322. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Becker, J. A. (1994). “Sneak-Shoes”, “Sworders”, and “Nose-Beards”: A Case Study of Lexical Innovation. First Language 14:195–211.

Brekle, H. E. (1986). The Production and Interpretation of Ad Hoc Nominal Compounds in German: A Realistic Approach. Acta Linguistica Academiae Scientarum Hungaricae 36(1–4):39–52.

Clark, E. V. (1981). Lexical Innovations: How Children Learn to Create New Words. In W. Deutsch (ed.), The Child’s Construction of Language, 299–328. New York: Academic Press.

Clark, E. V., Gelman, S. A. & Lane, N. M. (1985). Compound Nouns and Category Structure in Young Children. Child Development 56(1):84–94.

Mellenius. I. (1997). The Acquisition of Nominal Compounding in Swedish. Doctoral Dissertation, Lund: Lund University Press.

Slobin, D. (2004). The Many Ways to Search for a Frog: Linguistic Typology and the Expression of Motion Events. In S. Strömqvist & L. Verhoeven (eds.), Relating Events in Narrative: Vol. 2. Typological and Contextual Perspectives, 219–257. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
 

Adjectives as nouns? A cross-linguistic overview

Juan Santana, University of Granada, Granada, Spain

A query submitted by L. Bauer to the linguistlist forum some time ago on “adjectives […] used as nouns” in English states that “[…] any adjective which can be used to modify people can be used with plural concord to provide a generic group of people, and any adjective which can be used for inanimates can be used with singular concord to provide a sort of generic group of things: _*The impossible* takes a little longer_..” (Bauer 1999). At the same time, the query gave evidence of apparently irregular behavior, as in the examples below:

(1) The undesirables have arrived
(2) *The amiables have arrived
Except for specific papers like Fábregas (to appear) that approach a part of the evidence, in that case in Spanish, the state of the art on the issue remains, to the best of my knowledge, as described in that query. The literature on adjectives used as nouns or nominal heads appears to conclude that this type of structure displays two major properties:

9. The structure is frequent and operates under relatively few constraints in English but apparently also in many languages, so much so that it appears to confirm Kruisinga’s (1927: 103) claim that conversion of adjectives to nouns is related at least to primitive Indo-European grammar.

ii) The structure lends itself to relatively few interpretations but there is little agreement on which interpretation should be preferred, e.g. word-class undercategorization (as in Distributed Morphology, e.g. Marantz 1997, Farrell 2001), syntactic processes (“adjective functioning as head of noun phrase”, Quirk et al. 1985: 1559, or “adjective functioning as a fused modifier-head”, Huddleston & Pullum 2002: 1642) with or without possible lexical effects (e.g. Plag 2003: 113–116, among others, on syntactic conversion).

Applying Bauer’s (2010) method for cross-linguistic research to a sample of 76 languages from 15 language families (Indo-European Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavonic, Baltic, Albanian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Uralic, Basque, Semitic, Turkic, Mongolian, Northwest Caucasian and Northeast Caucasian), as described in Müller, Ohnheiser, Olsen & Rainer (to appear), this paper aims to identify:

9. which of the word-class systems of the languages of the sample allow the possibility of adjectives being used as nouns or nominal heads,

ii) within the former, how many actually display actual evidence of such use, and
iii) how the evidence is interpreted within the framework of the standard system of word-classes
The value of this paper proposal is not in a major empirical finding or a new major theoretical argumentation. Still, it collects empirical evidence of this structure on a number of languages, recapitulates on how each of the major interpretations put forward for this structure fits the evidence collected cross-linguistically, and is thus intended to contribute towards answering some of the questions posed in Bauer’s query above. 

References
Bauer, Laurie. 1999. Adjectives as nouns. https://linguistlist.org/…/10-649.html#2

Bauer, Laurie. 2010. An overview of morphological universals. Word Structure 3(2). 131–140.

Fábregas, Antonio (to appear). Deconstructing the non episodic readings of Spanish deverbal adjectives. Word Structure.

Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kruisinga, Etsko. 1927. On the history of conversion in English. English Studies IX: 103–108.

Marantz, Alec 1997. No escape from syntax: don't try morphological analysis in the privacy of your own lexicon. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 4(2), 14.

Müller, P.O., I. Ohnheiser, S. Olsen & F. Rainer (eds.) (to appear). HSK Word-Formation. An International Handbook of the Languages of Europe. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

Plag, Ingo 2003. Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.

Is it word-formation? An experimental study on English, French and German

Marcel Schlechtweg and Holden Härtl, Universität Kassel, Germany

Whether or not morphology represents a separate grammatical domain distinct from syntax has been a controversial issue for decades. While some researchers emphasize contrasts between the two (e.g. Di Sciullo & Williams 1987; Bisetto & Scalise 1999), others deny a fundamental distinction between morphology and syntax (e.g. Lieber 1992; Kremers 2011). In a recent study, Kotowski, Böer and Härtl (2014) compared German adjective-noun compounds (morphological products) and adjective-noun phrases (syntactic products) and revealed stronger memorization effects for compounds, which the authors interpreted as a reflex of compounds to be more prone to be memorized/lexicalized in comparison to phrases.
The current paper explores the question whether the hypothesized difference between compounds and phrases can also be speculated to have cognitive implications from a cross-linguistic perspective. We investigate the process of memorization of adjective-noun/noun-adjective constructions in German, English, and French. German has been claimed to prefer a morphological route to realize new lexical concepts, that is, it utilizes compounding in that respect (cf. Bücking 2010; Hüning 2010), whereas French can be argued to favor a syntactic route, that is, it primarily employs phrases here (cf. Van Goethem 2009). English might be prone to use both routes (cf. Carstairs-McCarthy 2005).

In our study, native speakers of the above-named languages participated in an auditory memorization experiment on three days. On each day, the experiment consisted of a memorization and a recall phase. In the memorization phase, subjects were asked to memorize non-lexicalized complex items (adjective-noun for German and English, adjective-noun or noun-adjective for French, e.g. Jungtourist/young tourist/jeune touriste) and, as a baseline, real nouns (e.g. Architekt/architect/architecte) of their respective native language. In the recall phase (lexical-decision paradigm), subjects responded to items that they memorized in the memorization phase (response = yes) as well as to items that they did not memorize (response = no). We examined RESPONSE TIME and RESPONSE ACCURACY as dependent variables and focused on the analysis of the independent variables LANGUAGE (German, English A (= complex items with initial stress), English B (= complex items with non-initial stress), French), ITEM TYPE (complex, real nouns), and DAY (1, 2, 3) for learned items only.
We hypothesized only complex items to reveal a significant difference across languages but not real nouns. Considering response times of real nouns, we found no significant difference between German and French and no significant difference between the two English groups. Further, response times for the complex German items were shorter than for the complex French ones and the complex English items bearing non-initial stress were responded to faster than the complex English items carrying initial stress. In our follow-up study, we aim to investigate the interaction of stress and semantic compositionality in English, i.e., e.g., whether semantic non-compositionality improves the memorization of adjective-noun constructions with initial stress in comparison to those with non-initial stress. We will discuss our results against the background of a cognitive distinction between compounds and phrases as well as its implications across languages.

References
Bisetto, Antonietta & Scalise, Sergio. 1999. Compounding: Morphology and/or syntax? In Mereu, Lunella (ed.), Boundaries of morphology and syntax (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 180), 31–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Bücking, Sebastian. 2010. German nominal compounds as underspecified names for kinds. In Olsen, Susan (ed.), New impulses in word-formation (Linguistische Berichte, Sonderheft 17), 253–281. Hamburg: Buske.

Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. 2005. Phrases inside compounds: A puzzle for lexicon-free morphology. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 2(3). 34–42.

Di Sciullo, Anna-Maria & Williams, Edwin. 1987. On the definition of word (Linguistic Inquiry Monographs 14). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Hüning, Matthias. 2010. Adjective + noun constructions between syntax and word formation in Dutch and German. In Michel, Sascha & Onysko, Alexander (eds.), Cognitive perspectives on word formation (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 221), 195–215. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.

Kotowski, Sven & Böer, Katja & Härtl, Holden. 2014. Compounds vs. phrases: The cognitive status of morphological products. In Rainer, Franz & Gardani, Francesco & Luschützky, Hans Christian & Dressler, Wolfgang U. (eds.), Morphology and meaning: Selected papers from the 15th International Morphology Meeting,
Vienna, February 2012 (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 327), 191–203.Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kremers, Joost. 2011. Morphology – like syntax – is in the eye of the beholder. Ms. Universität Göttingen.

Lieber, Rochelle. 1992. Deconstructing morphology: Word formation in syntactic theory. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Van Goethem, Kristel. 2009. Choosing between A+N compounds and lexicalized A+N phrases: The position of French in comparison to Germanic languages. Word Structure 2(2). 241–253.

Schwarzwald, O.R. 2002. Modern Hebrew Morphology. Tel Aviv: The Open University [in Hebrew].
 

Innovative Consonantal Elements in Newly Formed Hebrew Roots

Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald, Bar Ilan University, Israel

The purpose of this paper is to describe the expansion of three- to four-consonantal verbal roots in Modern Hebrew, to show the techniques used for this expansion and to explain them. The ways to create new verbal roots will be demonstrated first, followed by the formation of four-radical verbal roots by the addition of initial ˀ, t, and š and by duplication of consonants. The sources of new initial consonants ˀ, t, and duplication in four-radical verbs can be based on derivational and inflectional factors as well as by historical processes. The newly formed first radical š can be explained by historical development, but it might also hint towards the interaction between syntactic and morphological elements. The issue of the number of templates in Hebrew will be addressed, followed by the conclusion that it is the structure of the root that modifies the meanings rather than the template itself.
 

Processing of a repeated free morpheme in English: Facilitation for compounds, but inhibition for pseudo-compounds.

Thomas L. Spalding, Christina L. Gagné, Kelly A. Nisbet, and Cairtrin Armstrong
Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Canada

How the language system makes use of morphological structure is not yet known. Previous research has focused on the extent to which representations of the constituents are accessed during the processing of multi-morphemic words, and there is considerable evidence showing that lexical representations of the constituents are activated during word processing, even for opaque compounds, in which the constituents do not contribute to the meaning of the compound (e.g., Andrews, Miller & Rayner, 2004; Ji, Gagné, & Spalding, 2011; Libben, Gibson, Yoon, & Sandra, 2003). Given the previous evidence that the constituents’ representations become available during processing, it is useful to consider how the constituents are used (if at all) during the processing of multimorphemic words. There is growing evidence to suggest that not only are constituent representations available but that they are used to actively construct morphemic structures and also possible interpretations for compound words (e.g., Fiorentino & Poeppel, 2007; Gagné & Spalding, 2009, 2014; Spalding, Gagné, Mullaly, & Ji, 2010; Kounios, Bachman, Casasanto, Grossman, Smith & Yang, 2003; Koester, Gunter & Wagner, 2007). Again, it appears that the construction of a morphological structure and an interpretation is attempted even for opaque compounds (e.g., Spalding & Gagné, 2014).

In the current studies, we investigate whether the language system attempts to construct a morphological structure and meaning whenever potential morphemic representations are available, regardless of whether the word actually contains a morphemic structure. We present three lexical decision experiments examining whether exposure to a pseudo-compound or to a fully opaque compound affects the ease of processing an embedded word. Responses were slower and less accurate, relative to an unrelated prime, when the target (e.g., car) was preceded by a pseudo-compound prime (e.g., carpet). However, responses were faster and more accurate, relative to an unrelated prime, when the target (e.g., hog) was preceded by an opaque compound prime (e.g., hogwash). Our results indicate that the language system parses incoming stimuli and attempts to construct a meaning whenever morphemes are available, even if those morphemes do not play a morphological role in the compound word. For pseudo-compounds, the constructed morphemic structure conflicts with the words’ monomorphemic structure and induces processing difficulty.

References
Andrews, S., Miller, B., & Rayner, K. (2004). Eye movements and morphological segmentation of compound words: There is a mouse in mousetrap. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 16(1–2), 285–311.

Fiorentino, R., & Poeppel, D. (2007). Compound words and structure in the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes, 22(7), 953–1000.

Gagné, C. L., & Spalding, T. L. (2009). Constituent integration during the processing of compound words: Does it involve the use of relational structures? Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 20–35.

Gagné, C. L., & Spalding, T. L. (2014). Conceptual composition: The role of relational competition in the comprehension of modifier-noun phrases and noun-noun compounds. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (pp. 97–130). New York: Elsevier.

Ji, H., Gagné, C. L., & Spalding, T. L. (2011). Benefits and costs of lexical decomposition and semantic integration during the processing of transparent and opaque English compounds. Journal of Memory & Language, 65, 406–430.

Koester, D., Gunter, T. C., & Wagner, S. (2007). The morphosyntactic decomposition and semantic composition of german compound words investigated by ERPs. Brain and Language, 203(1), 64–79.3

Kounios, J., Bachman, P., Casasanto, D., Grossman, M., Smith, R. W., & Yang, W. (2003). Novel concepts mediate word retrieval from human episodic associative memory: Evidence from event-related potentials. Neuroscience Letters, 345(3), 157–160.

Libben, G., Gibson, M., Yoon, Y. B., & Sandra, S. (2003). Compound fracture: The role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness. Brain and Language, 84, 50–64.

Spalding, T. L., & Gagné, C. L. (2014). Relational diversity affects ease of processing even for opaque English compounds. The Mental Lexicon, 9(1), 48–66.

Spalding, T. L., Gagné, C. L., Mullaly, A. C., & Ji, H. (2010). Relation-based interpretation of noun-noun phrases: A new theoretical approach. In S. Olsen (Ed.), New impulses in word-formation (Linguistische Berichte, Sonderheft 17) (pp. 283–315). Hamburg: Buske.
 

Searching for Competing Patterns in Morphological Derivation: the Case of Adjective Borrowing

Bonifacas Stundžia and Lina Inčiuraitė-Noreikienė, Vilnius University, Lithuania

Rival patterns of borrowed adjectives in language typology have received scant attention. The research presents a preliminary cross-linguistic overview of competing patterns which are characteristic of loan adjective formations in the Baltic, Slavic and Germanic languages. Despite some of the languages are inflectional and some are analytic, it is possible to find competing words which share the same base or root, and differ from one another only by the absence or presence of an affix. In Lithuanian and Latvian, borrowed adjectives are accommodated with the help of productive inflection paradigms which compete with the borrowed adjectives accommodated by means of affixation. It seems that these two competing patterns correspond to two strategies of morpho-syntactic loanword accommodation, namely direct and indirect insertion strategies. On the other hand, tendency towards rivalry between affixes in the process of accommodation of borrowed adjectives in the analyzed languages can be observed as well. One of the reasons for the co-existence of rival derivational suffixes is the influence of other languages, mainly French, Latin and Greek.

References
Dokulil, M. 1994: The Prague School´s Theoretical and Methodological Contribution to “Word Formation” (Derivology). In: P. A. Luelsdorff (ed.), The Prague School of Structural and Functional Linguistics: A Short Introduction. Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 123–161.

Marchand, H. 1969: The Categories and Types of Present-day English Word Formation: a Synchronic Diachronic Approach, 2nd ed., München: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

Štekauer, P & Rochelle Lieber (eds.), 2005: Handbook of Word-Formation. Dordrecht: Springer.

Urbutis, V. 2009: Žodžių darybos teorija, Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas.

Wohlgemuth, J. (2009): A Typology of Verbal Borrowings, Berlin–New York. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs, 211).

Улуханов, И. С., 2010: Мотивацияв словообразовательной системе русского языка. Изд. 2, Mocква: URSS: ЛИБРОКОМ.

Adjectival non-heads and the limits of compounding

Pius ten Hacken and Maria Koliopoulou, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria

In this paper, we consider A+N naming units in which A is a qualitative adjective and ask the question under which conditions they should be considered a compound. Here we exclude units with relational adjectives, e.g. solar energy, because for them the question of compoundhood is subject to very different considerations (cf. ten Hacken, 2013). In German, there is a clear distinction between compounds and phrases as illustrated in (1).
(1) a. Altstadt ‘central / old part of a city’
b. alte Stadt ‘old city’

The compound in (1a) is a morphological and phonological word with a single main stress and without inflection on the adjective, whereas the phrase in (1b) has phrasal stress and an obligatory inflectional ending. Semantically, (1b) has a compositional meaning, whereas in (1a) the meaning is specialized. In other languages, the correlation between these properties is less neat. This raises the question how and to what extent a set of general criteria can be determined that distinguishes A+N compounds from A+N phrases cross-linguistically. We take our data from English, Dutch, and Modern Greek.

In English, we find A+N compounds of the type in (1a), e.g. blackboard, but they are hardly productive (cf. Bauer et al., 2013: 452). Whereas in German, we can distinguish Rotwein and roter Wein along the same lines as in (1), both translate as red wine in English. In German, the compound refers to a type of wine and the phrase to wine with a particular colour, but English does not make this distinction. As in English, adjectives are not inflected and stress is subject to a variety of pragmatic factors, morphological and phonological criteria do not point in one or the other direction as clearly as in German.

In Dutch, A+N compounds behave more or less as in English (cf. De Haas & Trommelen, 1993: 390–392), but adjectives are inflected. Therefore, we can distinguish between the compound (2a) and the phrase (2b) in a way analogous to German.
(2) a. hoogspanning ‘high voltage’
b. hoge spanning ‘high tension’

In most cases, however, Dutch does not have compounds such as (2a). Thus, we have rode wijn (‘red wine’), morphosyntactically parallel to (2b), corresponding to German Rotwein as well as roter Wein.
In Modern Greek, A+N compounds behave similarly to Dutch and German (Ralli, 2013: 23–24). An example parallel to (1) and (2) is the pair in (3).
(3) a. ελαφρόπετρα ‘pumice stone’
b. ελαφριά πέτρα ‘light stone’

Whereas (3a) indicates a type of stone, (3b) refers to a light stone in general. This distinction coincides with the use of the stem ελαφρ(ο)- in (3a) and the inflected adjective ελαφριά in (3b).
In general, in languages that show a morphological distinction of the type in (1), (2) and (3), the distinction correlates with a crosslinguistically much more stable semantic distinction. We argue that this semantic distinction should take priority. On this basis, also cases such as black hole, German schwarzes Loch, Dutch, zwart gat, Modern Greek μαύρη τρύπα, are analysed as compounds.

References
Bauer, Laurie; Lieber, Rochelle & Plag, Ingo (2013), The Oxford Reference Guide to English Morphology, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

de Haas, Wim & Trommelen, Mieke (1993), Morfologisch Handboek van het Nederlands: Een overzicht van de woordvorming, 's Gravenhage: SDU.

ten Hacken, Pius (2013), ‘Compounds in English, in French, in Polish, and in General’, SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 10: 97–113.

Ralli, Angela (2013), Compounding in Modern Greek, Dordrecht: Springer.
 

Suffixation and what else? A corpus and cognitive linguistic analysis of the Hungarian suffix –Ó.

Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

The presentation aims to demonstrate that the Hungarian deverbal suffix –Ó is a highly polysemous symbolic unit. It is hypothesized that the seemingly diverse functions that –Ó can take in discourse are conceptually related and are the result of a set of systematic meaning extensions from a core sense. A cognitive and corpus analysis reveals that a range of conceptual metonymic patterns (after Kövecses and Radden 1998) can be identified, which are able to account for the extended senses of the affix -Ó. These metonymies are the following: GENERAL ACTIVITY FOR TYPICAL ACTIVITY, ACTION FOR AGENT, ACTION FOR INSTRUMENT, ACTION FOR LOCATION and ACTION FOR EVENT. Furthermore, the analysis also demonstrates that these meaning extensions are carried out on the linguistic level via conversion. It is also argued that due to the morpholexical invariance in conversion (Brdar and Brdar-Szabó 2014), one of the special typological characteristics of this word formation device in Hungarian is that it allows – compared to that of affixation – for a wider range of transition from one conceptual and grammatical category to another. Therefore, in terms of conceptual construal, conversion allows for a metonymic slow walk. In sum, the presentation gives an account of how the flexibility of coding (Langacker 1987) enables the affix -Ó to take all these various, though related, meanings in discourse. The presentation will show how these metonymic patterns contribute to the high productivity of the affix –Ó. In order to account for authentic data, Hungarian Gigaword Corpus (HGC, Oravecz-Váradi-Sass 2014) was consulted.

References
Brdar, Mario & Rita Brdar-Szabó. 2014. Where does metonymy begin? Some comments on Janda (2011). Cognitive Linguistics 25/2, 313–340.

Kövecses, Zoltán & Günter Radden. 1998. Metonymy: Developing a cognitive linguistic view. Cognitive Linguistics 9/1, 37–77.

Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, fire and dangerous things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oravecz, Csaba & Tamás Váradi, Bálint Sass. 2014.The Hungarian Gigaword Corpus. Proceedings of LREC. 1719–1723.
 

From prosaic to mimetic: How is meaning assigned?

Natsuko Tsujimura, Indiana University, USA

Recent literature on morphology (inclusive of morphosyntax and morphosemantics) of mimetic lexemes focuses on the degree of interaction that they have with the grammar of non-mimetic (or prosaic) lexemes, while maintaining their own unique linguistic properties. (cf. Akita 2009, Dingemanse 2011) For example, the Japanese mimetic lexeme unzari “disgusting” is morphologically integrated with the prosaic light verb suru, deriving unzari-suru “be disgusted” as a full-fledged verb. Once sufficiently conventionalized, mimetic lexemes—particularly their semantic properties—are often given a linguistic treatment on par with prosaic words. (cf. Kageyama 2007) Unlike prosaic words, however, mimetic lexemes are neither denotational nor indexical; instead, their semantic nature can be captured as “sensual (as opposed to cognitive) reference” (Samarin 1970). Such semantic difference, thus, needs to be negotiated in word formation process that involves these types of words. The goal of this paper is to examine contemporary Japanese mimetic lexemes that originate from prosaic words diachronically or synchronically, and to discuss a possible path through which prosaic words can be transformed into mimetic words.

Many instances of mimetic words that seem to have their origins in prosaic words take the morphological forms of reduplication of a base (CVCV-CVCV) or CVQCVri (Q=geminate). For instance, words mochimochi and mocchiri, which are based on the prosaic noun mochi “rice cake”, describe the springy texture of food items that resemble rice cake. As another example, mattari can diachronically be traced back to the adjective matai “complete, lacking nothing” used in the 8th century (Hayakawa 2003). These two morphological templates, particularly the reduplicated form, constitute prototypical morphological constructions of the mimetic lexical stratum in Japanese. Agreeing with Akita (2009), I view these morphological constructions that are typical of existing mimetic vocabulary as serving as a templatic vehicle by which a prosaic word receives its morphological identification belonging to the mimetic stratum. I claim that the reduplication template of CVCV-CVCV and the CVQCVri template—together with many other templates representing mimetics in Japanese—can be considered grammatical constructions that are associated with image-based sensual reference as their semantic property. When a prosaic word or a part of it is plugged in the templatic representation, it loses its denotational or indexical force, and instead gains through the construction a salient image that the prosaic word invokes via our five senses. For example, the mimetic word mochimochi, based on the prosaic noun mochi “rice cake”, takes the reduplicated form and appeals to our sense of touch by the image of sticky and springy texture that a rice cake has. Morphological templates with which mimetic expressions are identified in Japanese are constructions that have a closed set of morphological forms paired with sensory images as their inherent semantic property. Since the “meaning” aspect of the mimetic templates is “sensory reference” subjective to the language user (following his/her individual senses), innovative meanings may arise. Creative mimetic expressions based on prosaic words and newly assigned meanings are indeed observed in Japanese haiku and tanka poetry as an effective rhetorical tool to appeal to the reader.
 
References
Akita, Kimi. 2009. A Grammar of Sound-Symbolic Words in Japanese: Theoretical Approaches to Iconic and Lexical Properties of Mimetics. Ph.D. dissertation, Kobe University.

Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu. Ph.D. dissertation, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen/Radboud University.

Hayakawa, Humiyo. 2003. Tabemonono tekusuchaa to gengohyoogen [Food texture and linguistic expressions]. Shokuseikatsu 97. 38–42.

Kageyama, Taro. 2007. Explorations in the conceptual semantics of mimetic verbs. In Bjarke Frellesvig,

Masayoshi Shibatani, and John Smith (eds.), Current issues in the history and structure of Japanese, 27–82. Tokyo: Kurosio.

Samarin, William. 1970. Inventory and choice in expressive language. Word 26. 153–167.

A Unified Account of Spatial Prepositions and Toponyms

Francesco-Alessio Ursini & Aijun Huang, Stockholm University, Sweden & Soochow University, Shanghai

Recent cross-linguistic works on spatial prepositions (SPs) have suggested that SPs involve a hierarchical “sequence” of morphemes, examples being English (e.g. ahead of involving a-, -head and of: Svenonius 2010) and Spanish (e.g. enfrente de ‘in front of’ including en-, -frente and de: Romeu 2014). SPs are syntactically and morphologically connected to the NPs denoting the landmark object, or ground NPs (Talmy 2000: ch.2). Ground NPs can act as (syntactic) complements of SPs (e.g. in front of the car), but may also be morphologically incorporated in SPs, as in Mandarin (zai che-zi qian-mián ‘at car-CL front-side’: Zhang 2014) and Finnish (auton ed-essä ‘car-GEN front-INESS’: Asbury 2008). Furthermore, certain sub-sets of toponyms (“place names”) lack key nominal properties, and have a morphological structure akin to that of SPs (Könlein, forthcoming). Examples include English Stratford-upon-Avon, Spanish Palma de Mayorca ‘Mayorca’s palm’, Finnish Joe-n-suu ‘river’s mouth’, and Mandarin Shàng-hai ‘upon the sea’. These toponyms cannot distribute with determiners and quantifiers (cf. in the car vs. *la Palma de Mayorca, in front of every door vs. *in every Stratford-upon-Avon), and include SP heads in their structure which include SP elements (here, upon, de, -n-essa, Shàng-). Under current morphological assumptions about SPs and their interplay with ground NPs, these morpho-syntactic patterns seem to form unconnected sets of data, although they intuitively represent variants of the same underlying construction.

The goal of this paper is to offer a unified account of this construction by extending a proposal about spatial free relatives (SFRs) found in Caponigro & Pearl (2008, 2009). They suggest that SFRs include a silent “Place” head that takes a free relative phrase as an argument (here, where Mario sleeps), and forms an SP phrase, viz. (1):

(1) [VP Luigi goes [PlaceP (Place)Place [FR where Mario Sleeps ]]]

We extend this proposal via two supplementary assumptions, based on Hale & Keyser (2002) “Lexical Syntax”. First, “Place” may be overtly realized, and can have a flexible valence: it can be a “relational” syntactic head (a 2-place head), or a derivational suffix (a 1-place head). Second, Other SP morphemes with flexible valence may be stacked on “Place”.

The first assumption can account the structure of toponyms: “Place” can be realized by their SPs, viz. (2)-(3), and ground incorporation can occur when Place is a 1-place suffix, viz. (4)-(5):

(2) [PlaceP [ Stratford ] uponPlace [Avon ]]
(3) [PlaceP [ Palma ] dePlaceP [ Mayorca ]]
(4) [PlaceP [ aut-on] ed-essaPlace ]]
(5) [PlaceP [ che-zi [qian-miánPlace ]]

The second assumption reconstructs the “P-within-P hypothesis” (Hale & Keyser 2002). We can thus have toponyms qua SPs within SP structures, viz. (6)-(8):

(6) [PlaceP inside [PlaceP [ Stratford ] uponPlaceP [Avon ]]]
(7) [PlaceP en [PlaceP[Palma]dePlaceP [ Mayorca ]]]
(8) [PlaceP zai [PlaceP[ sheng-guo ] xianmianPlace ]]]

Thus, our analysis shows that by allowing SPs to have a more flexible valence than what assumed in current research (e.g. Svenonius 2010), their morphological structure and interaction with ground NPs, including the “hybrid” toponyms (e.g. Stratford-upon-Avon), can find a unified account.

References
Asbury, A. (2008). The Morphosyntax of Case and Adpositions. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Utrecht.

I. Caponigro & L. Pearl. (2008). Silent Prepositions: Evidence from free relatives. In A. Asbury, J.

Dotlacil, B. Gehrke, & R. Nouwen (eds), The Syntax and Semantics of Spatial P, Amsterdam, John Benjamins: 365–385.

I. Caponigro & L. Pearl. (2009). The nominal nature of where, when, and how: Evidence from free relatives. Linguistic Inquiry 40(1): 155–164.

Hale, K., & S. J. Keyser. (2002). Prolegomena to a Theory of Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Köhnlein, B. (Forthcoming). The morphological structure of complex place names: the case of Dutch. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics.

Romeu, J. F. (2014). Cartografía mínima de las constucciones espaciales. Doctoral
Dissertation, Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Svenonius, P. (2010). Spatial P in English. In G. Cinque & L. Rizzi, The Cartography of syntactic Structures: vol. 6. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 127–160.

Talmy, L. (2000). Towards a cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge, MA: the MIT press.

Zhang, N. (2014). Adpositions. In R. Sybesma, W. Behr, Y. Gu, C.T. Huang & J. Myers (eds.). Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 60–69.

The meaning of parasynthetic verbs

Alina Villalva, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

Parasynthesis is a kind of word formation resource that gathers quite a number of interesting features, some of which defy basic tenets of concatenative morphology languages, such as binary branching (cf. Villalva 1994). In this paper, I will discuss the status of parasynthetic constituents.

Deadjectival and denominal verbs (with a broadband causative meaning) may be formed by sheer root conversion. Apparently, there is no need to involve any other lexical material to generate them:

(1) igualADJroot ‘equal’ igualVrootar ‘to_make equal’
armadilhNroota ‘trap’ armadilhVrootar ‘to_trap’

The same kind of verbs may display one of a series of derivational suffixes:

(2) altADJrooto/a ‘high’ alt-eVroot ar ‘to_put_higher’
alardNroote ‘flamboyance’ alard-eVrootar ‘to_boast’
escurADJrooto/a ‘dark’ escur-ecVrooter ‘to_darken’
alvorNroot ‘dawn’ alvor-ecVrooter ‘to_rise’
imunADJroote ‘immune’ imun-izVrootar ‘to_make_immune’
hierarquiNroota ‘hierarchy’ hierarqui-izVrootar ‘to_submit_to_a_hierarchy’

Apparently, the presence of the suffix is irrelevant. From a strictly grammatical point of view, it is unnecessary, which is clearly demonstrated by the coexistence of a suffixed and a non-suffixed version of semantically equivalent verbs, derived from the same base:

(3) amarelNrooto ‘yellow’ amarelVrootar; amarel-ecVrooter ‘to_turn_yellow’

Parasynthetic verbs are quite similar to the previous: they can either be obtained by conversion (like 1) or by suffixation (like 2), but a prefix is always involved in this case (cf. 4a, 4b). We can even find cases of non-parasynthetic and parasynthetic semantic doublets (cf. 4c):

(4) a. célere ‘quick’ a-celer- -ar ‘to_ accelerate’
carícia ‘caress’ a-carici- -ar ‘to_make_a_caress’
b. mole ‘soft’ a-mol-ec-er ‘to_soften’
pedra ‘stone’ a-pedr-ej-ar ‘to_hit_with_stones’
c. claro/a ‘clear’ clar-ific-ar; es-clar-ec-er ‘to_clarify’

As before (cf. 3), the presence of a suffix is not indispensable:

(5) rijADJrooto/a ‘stiff’ en-rijVrootar, en-rij-ecVrooter ‘to_stiffen’

Prefixes that take part on parasynthesis (e.g. a-, des-, en-, es-) are exclusive to parasynthesis and their contribution to the building of these words is not easy to ascertain, especially if we take into account the fact that the prefix may also be present or absent, either in diatopic (cf. 6a), diachronic (cf. 6b) or crosslinguistic (cf. 6c) contrasts. In some cases different prefixes occur in semantically equivalent verbs (cf. 6d):

(6) a. balanç-ar vs em-balanç-ar ‘to_rock’
b. brav-ej-ar vs es-brav-ej-ar ‘to_roar’
c. a-boto-ar vs bouton-er ‘to_button’
d. atulhar vs entulhar ‘to fill up with rubbish’

Thus, parasynthetic affixes look like expletive affixes. Notice that the major restriction on its occurrence is related to vowel initial words:

(7) a. amarel-ar, amarel-ec-er ‘to_turn_yellow’
azul-ar ‘to turn blue’
b. a-vermelh-ar ‘to_turn_red’
es-verd-e-ar ‘to_turn_green’

However, examples can be found that point in a different direction. They include verbs with different prefixes have different meanings (cf. 8a) and verbs derived from the same polysemic root (cf. 8b)

(8) a. sombra ‘shadow’ en-sombr-ar ‘to_shade’
a-sombr-ar ‘to_haunt’
b. claro/a ‘clear’ es-clar-ec-er ‘to_clarify’
claro/a ‘light’ a-clar-ar ‘to_turn_lighter’

I will try to give an account of these cases in connection with lexical semantic change and lexical loci filling phenomena.

References
A. Villalva (1994) Configurações não-binárias em morfologia. In Actas do X Encontro da Associação Portuguesa de Linguística (583–597).
 

Classifiers as derivational markers: the case of Murui from Northwest Amazonia

Katarzyna I. Wojtylak, James Cook University, Australia

Murui (known to its speakers as búe) is a Witotoan language spoken in southern Colombia and northern Peru. The language is nominative-accusative, both head and dependent marking, agglutinating with some fusion and predominantly suffixing.

One of the most salient characteristics of the nominal morphology of Murui is a large multiple classifier system that consists of more than 80 classifiers. In this system, the same (or almost the same) sets of bound classifier morphemes can occur in numerous morphosyntactic contexts forming new words: on verbs, nouns, adjectival modifiers, quantifiers, pronouns, demonstratives, numerals, interrogatives and anaphoric forms. The classifiers differ in how obligatory they are in those environments. In terms of semantic parameters, the language mainly distinguishes between classifiers which characterize their referents by their physical properties, natural gender and degree of abstractness.

In addition to their anaphoric and discourse-pragmatic functions, the main function of Murui classifiers is derivation of new stems. Each classifier carries a specific semantic load that is essential for the interpretation of a noun. Depending on the meaning of the referent, nouns can be associated with more than one classifier, e.g. the noun yera ‘liquid tobacco’ can be followed by the classifier -ji (CLF:SAP) deriving ‘yera substance’, -ko (CLF:COVER) for ‚yera container‘, -jɨ (CLF:SMALL.ROUND) ‚drop of yera‘, -ru (CLF:OVAL) ‚yera (oval, totuma) container‘. There are semantic restrictions for such derivations, e.g. *yera-mani with the classifier -mani (CLF:BIG.RIVER) is not grammatical as liquid tobacco does not have the form of a big river.

The Murui multiple classifier system is semi-open due to the occurrence of repeaters (partially repeated nouns); their referents are never humans. Repeaters do not classify nouns but occur in the classifier slot for nouns which do not have a classifier of their own. This is particularly visible for certain Spanish loan words for which no classifiers exist in Murui, such as da-mana (one.alone-CLF.REP:WEEK) for ‚one week‘ (from Spanish semana ‘week’). Additionally, there are a few ‚borderline‘ cases that straddle the boundary between classifiers and instances of compounding.

Multiple classifier systems are a feature not only of the Witotoan languages, but also of other genetically unrelated neighbouring languages spoken in the vicinity of the Vaupés linguistic area, such as Tariana, Baniwa of Içana/Kurripako, Resígaro, Miraña, Yagua and Tucano (Aikhenvald, 2003, 2007a; Derbyshire & Payne, 1990; Ramirez, 1997; Seifart, 2005). All these are characterized by close parallels in their nominal classification structures, but not in the forms of classifiers (Seifart & Payne, 2007).

This paper provides the first in-depth look at forms and functions of an intricate system of classifiers in in Murui. It describes the multiple classifier as a word-formation process, in particular derivational morphology of classifiers and its correlation with syntax (Aikhenvald, 2007b). In addition, the paper also briefly addresses some possible areal influences in the light of the multiple classifier systems from Northwest Amazonia.

References
Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2003). A Grammar of Tariana, from Northwest Amazonia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2007a). Classifiers in Multiple Environments: Baniwa of Içana/Kurripako—A North Arawak Perspective. International Journal of American Linguistics, 73(4), 474–500.

Aikhenvald, A. Y. (2007b). Typological distinctions in word-formation. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon (Vol. 3, pp. 1–65). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Derbyshire, D. C., & Payne, D. L. (1990). Noun Classification Systems of Amazonian Languages. In D. L. Payne (Ed.), Amazonian Linguistics, Studies in Lowland South American Languages (pp. 243–271). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Ramirez, H. (1997). A Fala Tukano dos Ye'pa-Masa (Vol. 1). Manaus: Inspetoria Salesiana Missionária da Amazônia CEDEM.

Seifart, F. (2005). The structure and use of shape-based noun classes in Miraña (North West Amazon). Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Seifart, F., & Payne, D. L. (2007). Nominal Classification in the North West Amazon: Issues in areal diffusion and typological characterization. International Journal of American Linguistics, 74(4), 381–387.

POSTERS

Derivational paradigms within selected conceptual fields – contrastive research

Vesna Antoniová, P.J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia

According to a deep-rooted view, inflectional morphology is paradigmatic, while derivational morphology is not. The notion of paradigm has traditionally been discussed exclusively within the field of inflectional morphology and the idea of derivational paradigms has, for a long time, been subject to mistrust. Nevertheless, recent research (e.g., Furdík 2004; van Marle 1985; Pounder 2006; Štekauer, to appear) has shown that derivational paradigm is a well-defined concept and that its acceptance within the scope of derivational morphology should not be perceived with scepticism. The paper examines the extent to which patterns of relationships among derived words form derivational paradigms, presents several arguments supporting the paradigmatic nature of derivational morphology and challenges the traditional belief of irregularity of derivational morphology. In addition, it compares the saturation, i.e., structural completion of selected de-verbal, de-adjectival and de-substantival paradigms with existing complex words in English, Slovak and French.

References
Bauer, L. 1997. “Derivational Paradigms.” In: G. Booij and J. van Marle (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1996. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 243–256.

Bauer, L. 2001. Morphological Productivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Beecher, H. 2004. “Derivational Paradigm in Word Formation.” 45pp. Available at http://pdfcast.org/…rd-formation. [ 18.10. 2013]

De Saussure, F. 1959. Course in general Linguistics. Philosophical Library: New York.

Dokulil, M. 1962. Tvoření slov v češtině I. Teorie odvozování slov. Prague: ČAV..

Furdík, J. 2004. Slovenská slovotvorba (teória, opis, cvičenia). Ed. M. Ološtiak. Prešov: Náuka.

Lieber, R. and Štekauer, P. (2014). “Derivational Paradigms” in.: Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 354–369.

Pounder, A. 2000. Processes and Paradigms in Word-Formation Morphology. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Sokolová, M. 2009. “Súčinnosť verbálnych kategórií (aspekt – modus – tempus)”. In: Slovakistika vo všeobecnolingvistickej perspektíve. Košice 28. Mája 2009.

Van Marle, J. 1985. On the Paradigmatic Dimension of Morphological Creativity. Dordrecht: Foris. 305 pp.

Van Marle, J. 1994. “Paradigms.” In.: R. E. Asher (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 6, 2927 – 2930 
 

Language acquisition in bilinguals – aspects of interference at the morphological level

Bibiána Bobčáková, P. J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovakia

The subject of language acquisition in children has been raising many questions in linguistic research for many years. The process and mechanisms of extracting notions out of the speech flow and language development are often attributed to so called language acquisition device (Chomsky 1965), which helps children to break utterances into smaller chunks, extract linguistic patterns and rules and enable children to acquire their first language without any obvious effort. Language acquisition in bilinguals is intriguing even more as children are exposed to two different language systems at the same time and the language acquisition device in human brain has to process two concurrent analyses of two different languages. This opens some questions closely related to the theory of the Universal Grammar (Chomsky 1965).

My research concerns a longitudinal study of language acquisition in a bilingual acquiring his two languages (English and Slovak) simultaneously under a specific circumstance – the mother is not an English native speaker.

My study also explores the aspect of interference at the morphological level, namely borrowing the inflectional and word-formation morphemes between the two languages. Whether or not some patterns and principles of this language phenomenon can be identified is concluded at the end of my work.

References
Berko, Jean. 1958. “The Child´s Learning of English Morphology”, Accesed on 18.3.2015, http://www.clips.us.ac.be/…ugs/wugs.pdf

Brown, Roger. 1973. “A First Language: The Early Stages” Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press.

Chomsky, Noam. 1965. “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.” Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Dulay, Heidi C. and Martina K. Burt. 1974. “Natural sequence in child second language acquisition.” Language Learning 24 (1), 37–53

Grosjean, François. 1982. The Life with two Language. An Introduction to Bilingualism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Grosjean, François. 2010. Bilingual Life and Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Jacobson, Roman. 1953. “Results of the conference of anthropologists and linguistics.” IJAL Supplement, Memoir No. 8:19–22.

Lieberman, Mark. 2003. “Stages of language acquisition in children” Accessed on March 3, 2015, http://www.ling.upenn.edu/…isition.html

Miller, Jon F. 1981 “Eliciting procedures for language” in Miller, Jon F. (ed) Assessing Language Production in Children London: Edward Arnold.

Miller, Jon F. and Robin S. Chapman. 1981 ‘The relation between age and mean length of utterance in morphemes’ Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 24 (2), 154–161.

O’Grady, William. 2005. How Children Learn Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

O’Grady, William. 1997. Syntactic development. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Peters, Ann M. 1977. “Language learning strategies.” Language, 53, 560–573.

Romaine, Suzanne. 1989. Bilingualism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell

Hungarian preverbs in second language acquisition: Focusing on Japanese-native learners description of INTO events

Kiyoko Eguchi, Applied Technology High School, Abu Dhabi, UAE

In Hungarian preverbs are one of the most difficult grammatical items to learn for the L2 learners because not only of their structural uniqueness but also of their semantic complexity. Though they have several semantic functions, the primary contribution of the preverbs is to stand for the spatial meanings using with the motion verbs, eg., be-megy (into-go) ‘go in’, fel-megy (up-go) ‘go up.’ This study examines 1) How the description patterns, especially the use of preverbs, are different between the L1 Hungarian data and the Japanese-native learner’s L2 data through a production experiment, 2) How influence their first language (L1) in comparison the L1 Japanese data, since Talmy (1985, 1991, 2000) suggests the typology of motion event descriptions based on the patterns by which languages code the path of motion (Hungarian is classified as S-language, and Japanese as a V-language).

A production experiment was adapted towards 3 groups: two L1 groups (Hungarian and Japanese) and one intermediate L2 learner group (Japanese-native learners of Hungarian). They are asked to watch the video clips of motion events (self-agentive and caused motion events) and describe them verbally assuming that they are in the position of the camera. Each motion event includes the same Path of motion “into the pavilion” with different Manners (walk/ run/ carry/ kick/ put) and different deictic directions (Deixis: towards the speaker/ from a neutral position).

The typology predicts that the same construction pattern is used through all of the event descriptions listed above, i.e. preverb be- ‘into’, manner verbs and NP with the illative case affix (eg., be-fut a pavilon-ba (into-runs the pavilion-ILL) ‘runs into the pavilion’, be-rúgja a labdá-t a pavilon-ba (into-kicks the ball the pavilion-ILL) ‘kicks the ball into the pavilion’) as L1 Hungarian data. The research questions are: 1) Do the L1 data shows exactly what the typology predicts? 2) What semantic components do the learners describe and what syntactic structures do they use? 3) Are there same tendencies observed through all of the event descriptions?

The L1 Hungarian data shows that almost equal to what the typology predicts except for the expressions of deictic notions, as previous studies have already mentioned (Yoshinari etal 2013, Mano etal. 2014, Matsumoto 2014). Comparison between L1 Hungarian group and L2 Hungarian group suggests two remarkable features: 1) the L2 group describe Path notion (into) less frequently than L1 group, especially the use of preverbs is extremely low, 2) L2 group express the Path (into) more often in neutral motion scenes indicates that the learners refer to Deixis in priority to Path in the motion events toward the speaker. The most interesting result is that favorably compare with L1 data only in the description for /put/ event, wherein we can observe the use of preverb be- ‘in’ in contrast to other events descriptions. This experimental study demonstrates while the L2 learners have difficulty to use preverbs, the difficulty more depend on its semantic complexity than its lexical form.

References
Mano, M., Yoshinari, Y. & Eguchi, K.. (2014) The effects of the first language on the description of motion events: Focusing on L2 Japanese learners of English and Hungarian. The Sixth CLS International Conference Proceedings.

Matsumoto, Y. (2014). Common tendencies in the descriptions of manner, path and cause across languages: A closer look at their subcategories. Langacross 2. (Linguistic diversity and cognition: implications for first and second language acquisition. 21 June 2014

Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen
(Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, Vol.3: Grammatical categories and the lexicon (pp.57–149). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Talmy, L. (1991). Path to realization. Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the
Berkeley Linguistics Society, 17, 480–519. Berkeley Linguistics Society, University of California, Berkeley.

Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Yoshinari, Y., K. Eguchi, & M. Mano. (2013). Idoo-hyoogen niokeru daini-gengo gakusyuusyakan no gengoka-keikoo: nihongo, eigo, hangariigo o hikakushite. JSLS proceedings 2013, 103–106.
 

From “aclisia” to inflection: evidence from Heptanesian, a Modern Greek Dialect

Katerina Fragkopoulou, Laboratory of Modern Greek Dialects, University of Patras, Greece.

Heptanesian is a Modern Greek Dialect, spoken in the area of Ionian Islands. Due to the long Italian/Venetian rule, which lasted around four centuries (Fanciullo 2008, Ralli 2012), Heptanesian displays many lexical loanwords from Italian and Venetian (Fragkopoulou 2015). Among these lexical loanwords, on the one hand there are many loanwords which exhibit the feature of aclisia that means absence of inflection, e.g.[ kavole]N Neuter ‘cauliflower’ <it. cavolo (il) ‘cabbage’. On the other hand, there are some other inflected nominal loanwords, e.g. [[kantzelo]ø]N Neuter ‘drawer’ < it. /ven. cancello (il) ‘drawer’ that manifest a fully fledged inflectional paradigm. If we admit the existence of levels of morphological integration among languages within the framework of language contact, we can explain these parallel inflected and uninflected types of loanwords.

To put it differently, we can set a continuum between inflection and ‘aclisia’ or uninflection and hypothesize that in language contact situations there are inflected and uninflected loanwords as a part of the gradual process of morphological integration of the loanwords in the recipient-language (Van Marle 1993: 259). Interestingly, the distribution of inflection and uninflection appears in Heptanesian, loan compounds too, e.g. the uninflected [baticuore]N Neuter ‘heartbeat’ < it./ven. batticuore (il) ‘heartbeat’ in contrast to the inflected [scaldaleto]N Neuter ‘a bronze tool for heating the bed’ < it. / ven. scaldaletto/ ven. scaldaleto (il) ‘a bronze tool for heating the bed’. Furthermore, the feature of ‘aclisia’ does not appear in the derived loanwords, e.g. [barbieriko]N Neuter ‘ barber shop’ < barbieri(s) ‘coiffeur’ < it. barbiere (il)/ven. barbier (il) ‘coiffeur’ + [-iko]derivational suffix. Derived loanwords like the above example are integrated in the inflectional classes of Heptanesian and this can be explained within the framework of graduality theory (Poplack & Dion 2012: 6).

References
Fanciullo, F. (2008). Gli italianismi del neogreco. L’Italia Dialettale 69: 1–41.

Fragkopoulou, K. (2015). Integration of lexical Italian/Venetian loanwords in Heptanesian. Unpublished MA thesis. University of Patras.

Poplack, S. & N. Dion (2012). Myths and facts about loanword development. Language Variation and Change 24, (03): 279–315.

Ralli, A. (2012a). Romance verbal loans in Modern Greek Dialects. On-line Proceedings of the MGDLT5.

Ralli, A. (2012b). Verbal loanblends in Griko and Heptanesian: a case study of contact morphology. L'Italia dialettale: rivista di dialettologia italiana, (73): 111–132.

Van Marle, J. (1993). Morphological adaptation. In Booij G. & J. Van Marle (eds) Yearbook of Morphology 1993, 255–265. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Springer Science & Business media, B.V.

Blurred boundaries

Camiel Hamans, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań, Poland

The aim of this paper is to show how language change may shed light on morphological
theory. Especially instances of recent changes show how theoretical demarcations do not
match the reality of the data. Since we nowadays have access to more and better data than
before, precise microanalysis of these data challenges theoretical assumptions about distinct
morphological phenomena.
In synchronic descriptions of language there usually is a clear distinction between
composition and derivation. Composition or compounding is a combination of free lexemes,
whereas derivation is a combination of a lexeme and a formative, a bound morpheme.
However, when one takes a closer look at language change it becomes clear that lexemes may
change into derivational morphemes. A classical example is the German suffix –heit, which
originates from an Old High German noun heid. Another well known example is the modern
English suffix –hood which can be traced back within the history of English to the Old
English noun hād (Olsen2014). Booij (2012:87) describes the change from Dutch boer
‘farmer’ to a suffix –boer ‘seller’.
These examples make clear how the boundary between composition and derivation
historically may be blurred. However, these examples also suggest that this process of losing
morphological independence is a process that occurred long ago in the history of the language.
However, precise microanalysis of recent morphological processes shows that a change from
lexeme to affix is still quite normal. See for instance the development of the German noun
Scheiße to a prefixoid as in Scheißkerl or the Dutch noun pracht to a prefixoid as in
prachtvrouw. In addition changes in the opposite direction – suffixes that become free forms

• still occur, as Norde (2006) showed. See for instance the Dutch suffix –tig, which appears in

numerals such as vijftig, zestig, zeventig and recently became an accepted independent lexeme
These types of changes are well documented. Another, more complex and less discussed type
of morphological change will be shown to offer an even more convincing argument for the
gradual transition of categories. Reinterpretation of opaque forms may lead to what Zwicky
(2010) calls ‘libfixes’, that subsequently may become affix-like elements and finally even
new nouns. This kind of morphological change is rather frequent in modern languages. For
instance the English word entertainment has been reinterpreted as consisting of two parts:
enter and tainment. Most likely the similarity with the existing but not related verb enter plays
a role here. A next and possibly intermediate stage may have been the forming of portmanteau
forms such as infotainment and docutainment . Later on –tainment became a productive
suffix, see sportainment and mathtainment. In modern Dutch similar forms have been taken
over, which lead to an independent word formation process, that resulted in forms such as
muzitainment and corsotainment with main stress on the penultimate syllable. The next step in
this very recent process is a form with stress shift such as Twenter-tainment and Limburgtainment
. In these forms main stress is on the first part and even on the first syllable just as in
normal Dutch compounds. The final step is tainment as a free form, as a noun, which is
attested a few times.
This type of complex process of language change, in which reinterpretation of an opaque form
leads to affixation which subsequently leads to composition and to the origin of new free
forms, shows that the boundary between composition and derivation is not only blurred
historically, but also synchronically.

References
Booij, Geert E. (2012³). The Grammar of Words. Oxford: OUP
Olsen, Susan (2014). Delineating Derivation and Compounding. Rochelle Lieber and Pavol
Štekauer (eds.). Derivational Morphology . Oxford: OUP.
Norde, Muriel (2006). Van suffix tot telwoord tot bijwoord: degrammaticalisering en (re)grammaticalisering van tig. TABU 35:1/2, 33–60.
Zwicky, Arnold (2010). http://arnoldzwicky.org/…23/libfixes/

An onomasiological approach to the naming of selected cognitive categories – a sociolinguistic perspective

Matúš Hrubovčák, P. J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovak Republic

It comes as a suprise that so few studies on word-formation take into account the most central element of every naming act – the actual language users. This poster’s aim is to contribute to those that do. Drawing upon Štekauer´s (1998) theoretical foundations and Štekauer et al (2005). empirical research, word-formation strategies to naming Agents and Instruments are compared. This is done in five samples varying in age, gender, education, professional orientation and language background. The two cognitive categories were selected due to their multiple and similar means of realization. The informants were tasked with naming concepts that, at the time of research, had no names. The control group comprises Slovak high school graduates from two prominent high schools with generally oriented curricula, the second group presents their counterparts studying at a secondary professional school of mechanical engineering. The next two groups consist of Slovak-Ukrainian and Hungarian-Slovak bilingual high school students respectively. Finally, a group of elementary school students is surveyed. It is hypothesized that it is not solely linguistic but also extra-linguistic factors that exert influence on the coiners´ word formation strategies, on their inclination to economy/explicitness of expression in particular.

References
Štekauer, P. et al. (2005). ‘Word–formation As Creativity within Productivity Constraints: Sociolinguistic Evidence’, In Onomasiology Online 6: 1–55. [www.onomasiology.de].

Pavol Štekauer. (1998). An onomasiological theory of English word-formation (Vol. 46). John Benjamins Publishing.

Cognitive abilities and meaning predictability of English compounds

Lenka Janovcová, P. J. Šafárik University, Košice, Slovak Republic

The paper discusses the interpretation of novel English compounds within the Meaning Predictability Theory (Štekauer 1998, 2005). It aims at comparison of language users with different levels of verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities. Meaning Predictability Theory focuses on the identification of the most probable of all possible interpretations of a novel complex word. It relies on the naming needs and judgment of language users, and it claims that the process of selection of the preferred reading (interpretation) of a new complex word is influenced by linguistic as well as extra-linguistic factors, such as human knowledge, experience, cognitive abilities or imagination. Different potential interpretations of a complex word compete to be selected as the most predictable. The central question of the present research is whether the level of verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities belong to the psycholinguistic factors influencing meaning predictability, i.e. whether the level of verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities of language users influence their prediction of meaning of novel English compounds. The participants of the experiment filled in the psychological tests of verbal and non-verbal cognitive abilities (Smith – Whetton, 1988) and a questionnaire concerning the interpretation of a sample of English novel compound words. The participants were subsequently divided into the groups based on their cognitive abilities and the data were analysed. The results confirm the tendency of one (or two) dominant reading for each novel compound, observed in previous research (Štekauer, 2005; Gagné et al., 2010; Janovcová, 2012). In addition, they point out both to certain similarities and differences between the meaning prediction of language users with high and low verbal cognitive abilities on the one hand, and language users with high and low non-verbal cognitive abilities on the other hand.

References
Gagné, C. L. et al. ‘Meaning predictability and compound interpretation: A psycholinguistic investigation’. In Word Structure, 2010, vol. 3, no. 2, p. 234 – 251.

Janovcová, L. ‘Influence of the field of education on meaning predictability of novel compounds’. In SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 2012, vol. 9, no. 2, p. 27 – 42. Available online <http://www.skase.sk/…f_doc/02.pdf>.

Smith, P. – Whetton, C. General Ability Tests. Great Britain: ASE NFER-NELSON, 1988. Slovak version: Jurčová,
Marta. Testy všeobecných schopností. Príručka pre užívateľov testu. Bratislava: Psychodiagnostika, a. s., 1993.

Štekauer, P. An Onomasiological Theory of English Word-formation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998.

Štekauer, P. Meaning Predictability in Word Formation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005.
 

Compound genitives in Latvian

Andra Kalnača, Ilze Lokmane, University of Latvia, Latvia

The compound genitives belong to a specific group of Latvian compound nouns that have only one genitive form either in the masculine or feminine gender in singular (1) or more commonly only in plural (2), and they are normally used in the function of an attribute that does not agree with the word it refers to:
(1) vien-zilbes (F) vārdi ‘monosyllabic words’
bez-maksas (F) pakalpojums ‘free service’
(2) liel-ziedu (M) ceriņi ‘large-flowered lilac’
deviņ-stāvu (M) māja ‘nine-storey house’

Word class based division of compound genitives is as follows: noun (NGEN) + noun (3a), adjective + noun (3b), numeral + noun (3c), adverb + noun (3d), preposition + noun (3e):
(3) a. zelt-spārnu ‘golden-winged’
b. zem-papēžu ‘low-heeled’
c. div-istabu ‘two-room’
d. daudz-gadu ‘multiannual’
e. bez-vadu ‘wireless’

All the mentioned genitives are right-headed endocentric compounds that have originated from noun phrases (see Spencer 2000, Booij 2005, and also Haspelmath 2002 for a detailed insight in the types of compounds), e.g:
(4) div-u istab-u → div-istabu
two-GEN.PL.F room-GEN.PL.F
bez vad-u → bez-vadu
without wire-GEN.PL.M

Traditionally compound genitives are highly productive in Latvian. They have been found even in folklore texts, whereas today they are commonly used for naming new technologies, new items and notions as well as in the terminology in various fields. These compound genitives reveal a specific feature of Latvian – the lack of adjectives derived from nouns instead of which the genitives of nouns are used (Nītiņa & Grigorjevs 2013, 215); see example (5) to compare Latvian and Lithuanian:
(5) Latvian
māla trauks
clay.GEN.M vessel.NOM.M
‘crockery’

Lithuanian
molinis indas
clay.ADJ.NOM.M vessel.NOM.M
‘crockery’

Thus, in Latvian instead of derived adjective and noun phrase that are in agreement, there is a phrase (noun in genitive and a head noun) which lacks agreement. Compound genitives belong to the phrase model the words of which do not agree, even if in this case a compound derived adjective would be expected. However, in some exceptional cases, the compound genitive serves as the stem for the derivation of an adjective of the same meaning with the suffix -īg-:
(6) mūs-dienu → mūsdien-īg-s ‘contemporary’
vien-zilbes → vien-zilb-īg-s ‘monosyllabic’

Through metonymy a part of compound genitives can change into declinable words obtaining a full case paradigm in masculine or feminine gender, e.g., see compound nouns (7a) that have originated from genitives (7b):
(7) a. bezgaiss (M) ‘bad air’, mūsdienas (F) ‘contemporaneity’
b. bezgaisa (GEN SG M) telpa ‘airless room’
mūsdienu (GEN PL F) sabiedrība ‘contemporary society’

Metonymy is created by the attribute that is not in agreement and that has overtaken the naming function of the general meaning of a particular item or phenomenon thus reducing the noun itself. The head noun of the compound determines the declension form of this ‘new’ declinable noun.
Compound genitives in the Latvian grammars are treated as indeclinable nouns that are described only in the connection of the morphemic division without detailing the syntactic aspects of their derivation and functions (e.g., Nītiņa & Grigorjevs 2013, 212–215). These aspects will be considered in detail in the report.

References
Booij, Geert. 2005. The Grammar of Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2002. Understanding Morphology. London: Hodder Education, part of Hachette Livre, UK.

Nītiņa, Daina & Juris Grigorjevs. 2013. Latviešu valodas gramatika. Rīga: LU Latviešu valodas institūts.
Spencer, Andrew. 2000. Morphological Theories. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

When Intransitive Means Passive: De-causativization in Japanese

Hideki Kishimoto, Kobe University, Japan

Cross-linguistically, verbs like ‘break’, ‘burn’, ‘melt’, and ‘open’ typically participate in inchoative/causative alternation, but verbs like ‘dance’ and ‘work’ do not. One salient semantic property of inchoative/causative verb pairs is that an agentive meaning is not encoded in the inchoative (or intransitive) verbs. It is observed (Haspelmath 1993), however, that in certain languages, intransitive verbs sometimes include an agentive meaning, while English lacks this option entirely. Nevertheless, it seems generally true that inchoative verbs do not allow agents to be expressed. Japanese presents an interesting case in this respect, since some, though not all, inchoative verbs allow agent to be manifested with morphologically oblique marking, as in (1a).

(1) a. Gootoo-ga keikan-ni tukamat-ta.
burglar-NOM police-by be.caught-PAST
‘The burglar was caught by the policeman.’
b. Gootoo-ga keikan-ni tukame-rare-ta.
burglar-NOM police-LOC catch-PASS-PAST
‘The burglar was caught by the policeman.’

Intransitive verbs are related to transitive verbs via morphological affixation of an intransitivizing or a transitivizing suffix. The intransitive tukamar-u in (1a) differs morphologically from tukamae-rare-ru in (1b), derived by combining the transitive tukamaeru with the passive rare. Nevertheless, (1a) expresses a passive-like meaning while the agent is present, just like the passive (1b). This raises the question of why the passive-like form and meaning are available for an inchoative verb like tukamaru.

In this paper, I suggest that, contrary to what it looks like, (1b) is an intransitive clause where the ‘real’ agent is not overtly expressed, and that what looks like an agent is in fact a locative. I suggest that the passive-like meaning of (1a) is derived on a semantic basis, due to the linking of a location to the agent, plus ‘de-causativization’ in the sense of Kageyama (1996), which allows the verb to retain an agentive meaning only semantically. More specifically, I propose that (1a) has the argument frame <theme, (loc)> without a real ‘agent’ (derived from <agent, theme, (loc)> via de-causativization), but that an agent-like argument is available for the clause as a result of identifying ‘loc’ as the agent’s place. I will argue for this view, by showing that (1a) has a locative meaning that the active counterpart of (1b) lacks, which is the meaning of ‘getting trapped in one place’, as seen in (2).

(2) Kuma-ga wana-ni tukamat-ta.
bear-NOM trap-in be.caught-PAST
‘The bear was caught in the trap.’

Essentially, (1a) is intransitive (and not passive), but carries the meaning of ‘the event of the burglar’s getting caught takes place and he is at the policeman’s location’. Since Japanese has a semantic means of equating the location with the agent, the intransitive clause (1a), which expresses approximately the same meaning as the passive clause (1b) by virtue of de-causativization, allows an ‘apparent’ agent to be expressed overtly.

References
Haspelmath, M. (1993) “More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations.” In B. Comrie and M. Polinsky (eds.) Causatives and Transitivity. John Benjamins.

Kageyama, T. (1996) Dooshi Imiron [Verb Semantics]. Tokyo: Kurosio.

Deverbatives in the Old French word-formation system and discourses

Svitlana Kremzykova, Donetsk National University, Ukraine

In this talk on the material of Early French period (XI-XIII s.) I will first outline the mechanisms by which the Action nouns and Agent nouns derivatives of various types are constructed as a fragment of Old French word-formation system, from one hand, and from another hand they represent some components of verbalized ontological situation which reflect some sphere of action. The contribution considers the categories of Action and Agent nouns that include derivatives from the verbs in a set of word-formation types and their interaction as verbalizers of concrete situation. For example, the derivational series: V¹ Garn(ir)/-iss ‘garnir’ (XI s.)---NAc/NRes. garnissement ‘action de garnir’/‘vêtements, équipement’(XI s.) ; ---N.f garnissure ‘ce qui garnit’(XIIs.) ; ---NAg garnisseor n.m. ‘ouvrier qui garnit’ (XIIs.); garnisseresse n.f. ‘ouvrière qui garnit’ (XIIs.) which characterizes the special artisanal dicourse and another series : V² Garnir ‘munir, fortifier’---N.m. garnement ‘défense, protection’; ---N.f. garnison ‘action de garnir’/défense, provision, forteresse’; ---N.f. garneture ‘ce qui garnit’ which characterizes the discourse of the battle.

The abstract deals with the peculiarities of derivatives in the Old French and their functioning in discourses. It makes possible to analyze the relations of derivational synonymy and competition between the derivatives of different structure motivated by the same basis form. For example, the series of Old French Nomina actionis – garnement ‘équipement’, -garnissement ‘action de garnir’, -garnison ’défense, garantie’, -garnisoison ‘forteresse’, -garnisure ‘garniture, ce qui garnit’, -garneterie ‘sorte de charge militaire’, as well as Nomina agentis – garnisseor’ouvrier qui garnit les gaines à épées’, garnisseresse ‘ouvrière qui garnit divers objets’ motivated by the base Verb garnir find out similarities and differences in their structural and semantic characteristics as verbalizers of action situations. I will explore the conditions that make verbalization peculiarities of the ontological situations in the Old-French period interpretations possible. Using a corpus of deverbatives in -ement, -aison/-oison, -ance, -eure/-ure, -erie, -eor/eresse I will consider factors such as semantic structure of base verb and type of derivational paradigm also as character of ontological situation that influence the representative possibilities of such derivatives. There will be revealed different levels of the many-level structure activity-based situation and its participants. The nuclear contents of the interactive situation are demonstrated by the verbs and their derivatives action nouns. Some of new aspects of analysis are grounded: the peculiarities of speech activity and derivation, word-formation and text-formation relations; as a sum total of different language models interacting.

References
Benveniste, Emile (1974) : Mécanismes de transposition. Problèmes de linguistique générale. T. II. Paris:Gallimard

Corbin, Danielle (1987) :Morphologie dérivationnelle et structuration du lexique. Vol.1. Tübingen: Niemeyer

Guilbert, Louis (1975) : La créativité lexicale. Paris:Larousse

Kremzykova, Svitlana (2010) : Slovotvir ta discours :dialnisni sytuatsiȉ u starofrantsuzki movi / Monographia. Kyїv : Vyd. Dim Dmytra Burago.

Greimas A.J. Grand dictionnaire Ancien français / Algirdas Julien Greimas.bvParis: Larousse, 2007.

Godefroy F. Lexique de l’ancien français / Frédéric Godefroy. – Paris : Honoré Champion, 2003.

The clipping of proper names in Persian

Behrooz Mahmoodi-Bakhtiari, University of Tehran, and Faeghe Shahhoseini,Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran

Clipping in Persian is a common process, especially in the case of proper nouns. The present paper seeks the notion of clipping as a morphological, phonological, and social issue. As a matter of fact, the decision for choosing the correct clipped form is shown to be influenced by several factors. The most important factor is the phonological one. Morphologically clipped nouns are usually phonologically irregular in Persian, forming a class of exceptions to regular patterns. Moreover, an analysis of 793 clippings is performed with a focus on the contrast between foreclipping and backclipping in Persian, as well as the gender of nouns. In this paper, the authors proposed that phonological irregularities are controlled by constraints demanding identity between clipped forms and their derived nouns. These constraints are ranked and violable in the Optimality Theory model (Prince & Smolensky 1993); moreover, faithfulness constraints necessitate identity of base and copy in reduplicated nouns (McCarthy & Prince 1993, 1994, 1995). Finally, this analysis reveals that the clipping copy properties of their full forms. In addition, by considering social factors, the name of females take part in this process more than males' names. Furthermore, comparing with the foreclipping process, backclipping is more frequent in Persian proper nouns.

References
Bauer, Laurie. 1983. English word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Benua, Laure (1995) „Identity Effects in Morphological Truncation“ to appear in J. Beckman, S. Urbanczyk & L. Walsh, eds., University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics. 18 P. in Optimality Theory, Graduate Linguistic Student Association, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Berg, Thomas. (2011). The clipping of common and proper nouns, Word Structure 4.1 (2011): 1–19. Edinburgh University Press.

Haspelmath, Marthin.) 2002). Understanding Morphology. London: Arnold Publishers.

Katamba, Francis and John Stonham (2006) Morphology. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

McCarthy, John J. & Alan M. Prince (1995) „Faithfulness and Reduplicative Identity,“ to appear in J. Beckman, S. Urbanczyk & L. Walsh, eds., University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18: Papers in Optimality Theory, Graduate Linguistic Student Association, Amherst, Massachusetts.

Plag, Ingo. (2003). Word formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Van Dam, Mark (2003). On the phonological structure of /i/-suffixed English nicknames. http://www.vandammark.com.

Verb Borrowing and Chomsky’s v

Nazir Ahmed Malik and Madeeha Shabbir, University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan

The paper offers a formal explanation of why verbal roots borrowed by English appear to be fully-fledged Vs whereas verbal roots borrowed by Urdu and other South Asian languages always remain uninflected lexical roots with no syntactic role to play. The empirical data consisting of list of verbal roots borrowed by Urdu from Arabic, Farsi and English and by English from Latin, French and Greek indicate that roots borrowed by Urdu appear to be syntactically inactive roots whereas verbal roots borrowed by English appear to be syntactically active Vs possessing all morphological properties and plays active role in placing their complement projections. It is posited that this difference in the status of verbal roots borrowed by Urdu and English is due to the different nature of Urdu and English v. In the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), syntactic categories are conceived of as bundles of features which are broadly divided into two categories. As proposed by Chomsky (1995) and many others, functional categories are conceived of as bundles of features which determine categorial status of lexical categories which originate as unspecified roots becoming verbal if they merge with a functional head like v and nominal if they merge with a functional head like n or D (Boeckx 2008). However, verbal roots borrowed by a language with phonetically null v appear to be fully-fledged verbs having all morphological properties because verbal roots get adjoined to null v and therefore appear to inflect with morphology of borrowing language associated to null v. But verbal roots borrowed by languages with overt v do not get adjoined to v and therefore they remain frozen roots having no syntactic role to play except assigning theta role to its complements projections. Thus, since Urdu possesses phonetically overt v ‘ker’(do) and ‘ho’ (be), each token of verbal root borrowed by Urdu invariably co-occurs with a token of v which possesses all the morphological properties marking ɸ -features and case feature whereas since English possesses phonetically null v, verbal roots borrowed by English are employed as fully-fledged Vs because they get adjoined to v through head-movement and consequently appear to inflect with morphology of English.

References
Boeckx, C. (2008). Bare Syntax. New York: Oxford University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Mass. MIT Press.

Implicit and explicit morphological knowledge among children with developmental dyslexia

Rachel Schiff 1, Miki Cohen 1, and Dorit Ravid 2.
1 Bar Ilan University, 2 Tel Aviv University

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is characterized by non-fluent word identification and poor spelling performance, which are not the result of sensory impairments, impairments in intelligence, or inadequate educational experience (Pennington, 2009; American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Readers with DD have difficulties in reading morphologically complex words, make morphological errors in writing (Egan & Pring, 2004; Schiff & Raveh, 2007), are insensitive to the root and the pattern of Hebrew words (Schiff & Ravid, 2004), and show weakness in consciously eliciting morphemes and constructing morphologically complex words (Schiff & Ravid, 2013). The goal of the present study was to evaluate derivational morphology awareness in Hebrew-speaking dyslexic children compared to typically developing controls, with the objective of determining the quantitative and qualitative differences between these populations (Casalis, Colé, & Sopo, 2004; Tsesmeli & Seymour, 2006).

Participants were 97 native-speaking Hebrew speaking children from mid-high SES. This cohort was composed of an experimental group of 31 seventh graders with dyslexia (age M=12.9), a control group of 34 age-matched typically developing seventh graders (age M=12.10), and a second control group of 32 reading-age-matched typically developing fourth graders (age M=10.0). They were administered an auditory derivational morphology task requiring them to complete the missing word in a word pair analogy, based on words with a similar root and a similar pattern (Ravid & Schiff, 2006a,b; Schiff & Ravid, 2007). For example, given the pair kéfel / maxpela ‘multiplying / multiple’ and séret ‘film’, the expected response was masreta ‘beamer’. Responses were analyzed for accuracy and for reaction time. Erroneous responses were analyzed qualitatively. In addition, qualitative data from a follow up metacognitive interview was analyzed to pinpoint processing differences between the DD and non-impaired participants.

Results indicate that the dyslexic children scored lower than the age matched and similarly to the younger, reading level matched controls. The dyslexia group and the younger group had similar reaction times, and both were slower than the age-matched control group. The types of errors that the different groups made were different: both the dyslexics and younger reading level matched controls made more pattern errors (i.e., responses with correct root and incorrect pattern) and provided more ‚don’t know‘ responses. The metalinguistic interview with participants also showed that the strategies that dyslexics used for solving the analogies task were different from the ones used by the control groups. They apparently ignored patterns, making no mention of them as aiding their performance in the interview.

These findings suggest that the locus of dyslexics’ morphological difficulty is at the level of pattern processing, hindering their abilities of morphological decomposition. Identifying the Semitic root is easier than identifying the pattern as roots carry the main lexical substance of the word, while patterns contribute categorical meaning. But it is impossible to solve the analogies task without having recourse to the pattern structure. Our findings thus support the hypothesis that language problems in dyslexia extend beyond the visual word recognition and phonology to morphology decomposition.

References
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Casalis, S., Colé, P., & Sopo, D. (2004). Morphological awareness in developmental dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia, 54, 114–138.

Egan, J., & Pring, L. (2004). The processing of inflectional morphology: A comparison of children with and without dyslexia. Reading and Writing, 17, 567–591.

Pennington B.F. (2009).Diagnosing learning disorders: A neuropsychological framework. 2nd ed. Guilford Press; New York.

Ravid, D., & Schiff, R. (2006a). Roots and patterns in Hebrew language development: evidence from written morphological analogies. Reading and Writing, 19, 789–818.

Ravid, D., & Schiff, R. (2006b). Morphological abilities in Hebrew-speaking gradeschoolers from two socioeconomic backgrounds: An analogy task. First Language, 26, 381–402.

Schiff, R., & Raveh, M. (2007). Deficient morphological processing in adults with developmental dyslexia: another barrier to efficient word recognition? Dyslexia, 13, 110–129.

Schiff, R. & Ravid, D. (2004). Representing written vowels in university students with dyslexia compared with normal Hebrew readers. Annals of Dyslexia, 54, 39–64.

Schiff, R. & Ravid, D. (2007). Morphological analogies in Hebrew-speaking university students with dyslexia compared with typically developing gradeschoolers. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 36, 237–253.

Schiff, D. & Ravid, D. (2013). Morphological processing in Hebrew-speaking reading-disabled students. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 46, 220–229.

Tsesmeli, S. N., & Seymour, P. H. K. (2006). Derivational morphology and spelling in dyslexia. Reading and Writing, 19, 587–625.

The general scheme of the Kalmyk and English sets of words

Valentina Sitnik, Kalmyk State University, Elista, Russia

The ordinary pairs of antonymic adjectives and their derivatives in Kalmyk and English were chosen to explore universal tendencies in the respective word-formation systems of both languages. In the bigger research Kalmyk word 1– Kalmyk word 2; English word 1 – English word 2; Kalmyk 1– English 1; Kalmyk 2 – English 2 are contrasted to define the typical word family. The Kalmyk adjective ‘зузан’ is correlated with the English adjective ‘thick’: the Kalmyk adjective ‘зузан’ (meaning ‘thick’ about flat objects) can function both as an adjective and as a noun, similar to the English adjective ‘thick’. The difference lies in the absence of a converted adverb in the given Kalmyk set of words.

The next item to discuss is the derivative verb: the Kalmyk adjective ‘зузан’ motivates (directly and through some of the derivative verbs) six derivative verbs – ‘зузарх’, ‘зузарулх’, ‘зузадх’, ‘зузадулх’, ‘зузалх’, ‘зузалулх’, whereas the English adjective ‘thick’ motivates only one derivative verb ‘thicken’. It is quite clear that the different systems of the two contrasting languages influences this diversity of the Kalmyk derivative verbs. The corresponding Kalmyk set of cognate words with the root ‘нимгн’ does not correlate exactly neither with its Kalmyk antonym nor with its English counterpart ‘thin’.

The third to confer is the derivative noun. One similarity is absolutely definite between the derivative nouns of the second derivational stage which are motivated by the derivative verbs of the first derivational stage: ‘зузан’→ ‘зузарх’ →‘зузарлһн’ and ‘thick’→’thicken’→‘thickening’. There might be a slight difference in the meanings of the Kalmyk and the English verbs. The English word-formation chain ‘thick’→ ‘thicken’ motivates one more derivative noun ‘thickener’, unlike the similar Kalmyk word-formation chain. One more derivative English noun ‘thicket’ ‘an area with a lot of bushes and small trees growing very close together’ is motivated by the third meaning (according to the Macmillan Dictionary) of the English adjective ‘a thick forest, bush, area of grass etc has many trees, leaves, or plants growing very close together’.
The fourth is the derivative adverb. It is rather surprising not to find the appropriate Kalmyk derivative adverb, but its antonymic counterpart ‘нимгнәр’exists.

The fifth is the derivative adjective. The meaning of both Kalmyk and English derivatives is rather close: ‘зузавр’ means ‘thickish’.

The sixth is compounds. That is the sphere where the largest difference lies. The Kalmyk compound adjectives are typical components of the set of words, but not in this very family, though Kalmyk is rich of complex alliterating words, such as ‘шулун-дулун’ or ‘шулун-шудрмг’(approximate meaning ‘quick-brisk’). The English compounds are widely represented in the set of words: ‘thick-lipped’, ‘thick-witted’, ‘thick-skinned’ formed on the word-formation model – adjective+noun+suffix –ed.

The number of the derivative verbs prevails in Kalmyk, but in English it might be one derivative verb or one converted verb. The nature of the compounds is different. The typical scheme of the set of words might be shown in the chains: adjective→adverb; adjective; noun; verb; adjective→verb→noun.

References
Kalmyk-Russian and Russian-Kalmyk Dictionary
http://www.multitran.ru/c/m.exe?…
Macmillan dictionary and thesaurus http://www.macmillandictionary.com/

‘Reflexive’ compounds

Mária Vasiľová, P. J. Šafárik University Košice, Slovakia/Utrecht Universitet, The Netherlands

This paper concentrates on ‘reflxivization’ in the nominal domain, in examples such as self-control in English, Eigenlob/Selbstlob ‘self-praise’ in German,autodérision ‘self-derision’ in French, or ön-becsülés ‘self-esteem’ in Hungarian. Reflexivity and reflexive markers have been studied mainly in the verbal domain, but only very limited in the nominal domain (Alexiadou (to appear), Di Sciullo (1996), König (2011)).
We will concentrate on a comparison of reflexivization in the verbal and nominal domain in languages like English, Slovak, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Polish and Romanian, focusing on the role of the morpheme self- and its counterparts in these languages. The comparison of self-compounds at the lexical level throughout several languages aims to find out whether the properties of reflexive markers and reflexivity differ in the two domains.
Following Faltz (1975), Everaert (2013) illustrates that languages quite systematically use different strategies for reflexivization in the syntactic domain, the question is whether it is possible to identify similar or identical strategies of reflexivization on the lexical level as on the syntactic one. To that intent I will compare the described syntactic properties and criteria of reflexivization with the properties and features of self-compounds in different languages.

References
Alexiadou, A. (to appear). Roots in transitivity alternations: afto/auto reflexives. In: A. Alexiadou, H. Borer & F. Schäfer (eds.) The syntax of roots and the roots of syntax. Oxford University Press.

Di Sciullo, Anna-Maria. 1996. Word-internal pronouns and reflexives. In: de Mulder, W.m
Tasmowski, L.: Cohrence and anaphora. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. 1996. pp. 103–121.

Everaert, M. 2013. The criteria for reflexivization. In: Brown, D., Chumakina, M., Corbett, G.: Canonical Morphology and Syntax. Oxford:Oxford University Press. 2013.

Faltz, L. 1985. Reflexivity: A Study in Universal Syntax. New York: Garland. 1985.

König, E. 2011. Reflexive nominal compounds. In: Studies in Language 35:1. 2011. iii, 112–127)

The relation of the head and the modifier in names of medicinal herbs

Milada Walková, Technical University of Košice, Slovakia

Studies of English noun-headed compounds (e.g. Levin et al. 2014, Levin & Jurafsky 2013, Wisniewski & Love 1998) show that the relationship between the head and the modifier is systematic rather than idiosyncratic. In particular, the relation depends on whether the compound denotes an object of nature – natural kind, or an object created for a purpose – artifact. In particular, natural kinds are named after an essential property, such as appearance or habitat, while artifacts are named after an associated event of creation or use.
I present research into English, Slovak, Dutch and French names of medicinal herbs, which are natural kinds but are also associated with an event of use. Of the names of 256 herbs, only endocentric compounds are considered. From the morphological point of view, the head noun in these compounds is modified by a noun, a relational adjective, or a genitive phrase (cf. ten Hacken 2013). For some names, there are several head-modifier relations due to recursiveness, e.g. European white birch, nl. witte paardenkastanje ‘white horses-chestnut’, sk. rosička okrúhlolistá ‘drosera round-leaved’.

From the semantic point of view, the plant names were coded for the head-modifier relations according to Levin et al. (2014), who based their categories on Wisniewski & Love (1998). The results show that these categories, only slightly adapted, apply cross-linguistically and to all modifiers. The modifiers in the names of medicinal herbs typically refer to their various perceptual properties (e.g. sweet, fr. blanc ‘white’, sk. trojlistá ‘three-leaved‘, nl. groot ‘large’, wooly) or environmental conditions (e.g. meadow, nl. IJslands ‘Icelandic’, fr. de printemps ‘of spring’), meaning that herbs are construed as natural kinds. However, the modifier can also refer to an associated event of use through purpose or effect (e.g. soapwort, sk. prečisťujúci ‘purging’, nl. slaap- ‘sleep’). In addition, the modifier may bear a name of other properties (wild, nl. gewone ‘common’, fr. officinal ‘medicinal’), or other plants and beings (dog-, sk.fazuľová ‘bean-ADJ’, fr. petit-dragon ‘little-dragon’, nl. sint-jans- ‘Saint John’s’).

To conclude, the results suggest universal relevance of the semantic categories of the head-modifier relations regardless of the morphological make-up of the modifier.

References
Levin, Beth, Lelia Glass & Dan Jurafsky. 2014. Corpus evidence for systematicity in English compounds. Paper presented at the 19th Sinn und Bedeutung conference, 15–17 September 2014, University of Göttingen.

Levin, Beth & Dan Jurafsky. 2013. Names for artifacts and natural kinds. Paper presented at the 9th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting, 15–18 September 2013, Dubrovnik.

ten Hacken, Pius. 2013. Compounds in English, in French, in Polish, and in General. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 10(1): 97–113.

Wisniewski, Edward J. & Bradley C. Love. 1998. Relations versus properties in conceptual combination. Journal of Memory and Language 38(2): 177–202.

Underspecification in derived adjectives. The case of German and Luxembourgish

Britta Weimann, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Analyzing and describing the meaning of derived adjectives seems to be much harder than analyzing derived nouns. This can be seen if you compare several corpus based studies on German Word Formation like Kühnhold/Putzer/Wellmann (1978) on Modern Standard German adjectives, Thomas (2002) on Early Modern High German adjectives, Ganslmayer (2012) on Middle High German adjectives and Klein/Solms/Wegera (2009) on Middle High German adjectives and nouns with Wellmann (1975) on Modern Standard German nouns, Müller (1993) on Early Modern High German nouns and Ring (2008) on Middle High German nouns. It is remarkable that the range of functions assigned to the affixes deriving nouns in these studies is quite similar while there is a large difference in the range and number of functions assigned to the affixes deriving adjectives. This difference seems to be a consequence of the fact that the meaning of an adjective is strongly bound to the context it is used in.

In the case of denominal adjectives there is a relation between the two entities referred to by the base noun and the modified noun that can be compared with the relation between the two constituents of an N+N compound. As with N+N compounds there is the possibility to work with one single underspe¬cified relation or to analyze the several underlying semantic relations in detail as done by Eckhard Meineke in Klein/Solms/Wegera (2009).
Fábregas (2014) describes some differences of underspecified and specified adjective affixes. The objective of this paper is to discuss the possibilities of using the concept of underspecification in analyses of derived adjectives in further detail. Related questions are:
• Where do we find specification and underspecification in the formation of adjectives?
• What is the role of restrictions if an affix is analysed as being underspecified?
• How can specification and underspecification change over time?
To answer these questions data from the Middle High German Corpus of Klein/Solms/Wegera (2009) and the Modern Standard German corpus COSMAS II will be used as well as data from a newly built corpus of Luxembourgish. Luxembourgish is a young Germanic language mainly spoken in Luxembourg (cf. Gilles in presss). It is one of three official languages beside German and French and highly influenced by both of them. The Luxembourgish corpus was built for a project on Luxembourgish word formation that has been running since 2009 at the University of Luxembourg. This leads to a brief outlook on a last question:

• How can the concept of underspecification be used for the analysis of corpus data?

References
COSMAS II. http://www.ids-mannheim.de/cosmas2/

Fábregas, Antonio (2014): Adjectival and adverbial derivation. In: Lieber, Rochelle / Štekauer, Pavol (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology. Oxford, 276–296.

Ganslmayer, Christine (2012): Adjektivderivation in der Urkundensprache des 13. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen.

Gilles, Peter (in press): Evaluative morphology in Luxembourgish. In: Grandi, Nicola / Kortvelyessy, Livia (eds.): Edinburgh Handbook of Evaluative Morphology.

Klein, Thomas / Solms, Hans-Joachim / Wegera, Klaus-Peter (2009): Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik. Band III: Wortbildung. Tübingen.

Kühnhold, Ingeburg / Putzer, Oskar / Wellmann, Hans (1978): Deutsche Wortbildung. Typen und Tendenzen in der Gegenwartssprache. Eine Bestandsaufnahme des Instituts für deutsche Sprache. Forschungsstelle Innsbruck. 5 Bde. 3. Hauptteil: Das Adjektiv. Düsseldorf (Sprache der Gegenwart, 43).

Müller, Peter O. (1993): Substantiv-Derivation in den Schriften Albrecht Dürers. Ein Beitrag zur Methodik historisch-synchroner Wortbildungsanalysen. Berlin, New York (Wortbildung des Nürnberger Frühneuhochdeutsch, 1).

Ring, Uli (2008): Substantivderivation in der Urkundensprache des 13. Jahrhunderts. Eine historisch-synchrone Untersuchung anhand der ältesten deutschsprachigen Originalurkunden. Berlin, New York (Studia Linguistica Germanica, 96).

Thomas, Barbara (2002): Adjektivderivation im Nürnberger Frühneuhochdeutsch um 1500. Eine historisch-synchrone Analyse anhand von Texten Albrecht Dürers, Veit Dietrichs und Heinrich Deichslers. Berlin, New York (Wortbildung des Nürnberger Frühneuhochdeutsch, 3).

Weimann, Britta (2011): Berührungspunkte bei der Erforschung historischer Wortbildung und Syntax. In: Simmler, Franz / Wich-Reif, Claudia (eds.): Syntaktische Variabilität in Synchronie und Diachronie vom 9. bis 18. Jahrhundert. Akten zum Internationalen Kongress an der Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 9. bis 12. Juni 2010. Berlin (Berliner Sprachwissenschaftliche Studien, 24), 321–335.

Wellmann, Hans (1975): Deutsche Wortbildung. Typen und Tendenzen in der Gegenwartssprache. Eine Bestandsaufnahme des Instituts für deutsche Sprache. Forschungsstelle Innsbruck. 5 Bde. 2. Hauptteil: Das Substantiv. Düsseldorf (Sprache der Gegenwart, 32).

POSTERS:
A poster is a short, concise, highly accessible description of new, unpublished research mounted on a poster stand for public viewing. Posters typically include not only text (approx. 2,000 words) but also graphs, photographs, and charts. Posters should be no bigger than 120 cm in width x 150 cm in height.
The aim of a poster session is to provide conference participants, and poster presenters in particular, with additional opportunities for discussion and feedback about research in an informal setting. Therefore, presenters are strongly encouraged to be present during the poster session and to have handouts available for distribution.