Workshop Description
Questions concerning affix
ordering and restrictions on affix combinations belong to the central ones in
morphological theory (see e.g.
Spencer 2006 for a useful survey). Proposals put forward thus far can be classified as:
1) typological
(e.g. inflection follows derivation, cf. Greenberg 1963; with respect to the
verb stem, the order of verb inflection morphemes is consistent across languages,
cf. Bybee 1985);
2) phonological (reflecting
the idea that morphology and phonology work in conjunction, i.e. the so-called
stratal approach, based on the
principle of Level Ordering; cf. Siegel 1974, Kiparsky 1982, Mohanan 1986, Giegerich 1999,
among others);
3) syntactic (morphological
operations in terms of affix ordering ‘mirror’ syntactic operations, cf.
Baker 1985, and Grimshaw’s 1986 criticism of Baker’s proposal);
4) semantic
(based
on the notion of semantic scope, cf. Rice 2000; see also the ‘relevance
principle’ in Bybee 1985);
5) psycholinguistic
(based on the notion of parsability, i.e. what is more easily parsable follows
what is less so, cf. Hay 2003); and
6) morphological
(selectional restrictions encoded in the affix or/and in the base, including
closing suffixes (i.e. suffixes that do not allow addition of further suffixes)
are responsible for affix ordering, cf. Fabb 1988; Plag 1996;
Szymanek
2000; Aronoff
and Fuhrhop 2002).
As
is often the case in linguistic theory, all the above approaches work properly
to some extent, but no approach is perfect, which has made linguists integrate
insights from different approaches (e.g. Hay & Plag 2004 who combine
psycholinguistic and morphological arguments). However, an important problem
remains. Some of the proposals have never been tested against data from (a)
language(s) typologically different from that/those for which they have been
originally formulated. For example, the recently suggested (probabilistic)
criterion of parsability has been applied only to English derivational
morphology. Thus although parsability has been claimed to be a universal
restriction on affix ordering working particularly well in combination with
selectional restrictions (Hay & Plag 2004), it remains unclear how this
criterion and proposals in which it participates account for the fact that in
languages with rich inflectional morphology, for example the Slavic ones,
inflectional suffixes are, by rule, vowel initial, often cause stress changes
and palatalizations (i.e. are difficult to parse) but follow derivational
suffixes.
Thus
this workshop aims to bring together morphologists working on affix ordering in
languages representing different morphological types. Papers applying
morphological, psycholinguistic and semantic approaches to languages with rich
inflectional morphology, or comparing such languages with English, are
particularly welcome, although the workshop is open to problem-solving papers
based on any language and any approach.
References
Aronoff,
Mark & Nanna Fuhrhop 2002. Restricting Suffix Combinations in German and English: Closing Suffixes
and the Monosuffix Constraint. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 20,
451-490.
Baker, Mark 1985. The Mirror principle and
Morphosyntactic Explanation. Linguistic Inquiry 16, 373-415.
Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphology. A Study of
the Relation between Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Fabb, Nigel 1988. English suffixation is
constrained only by selectional restrictions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6,
527-539.
Giegerich,
Heinz J. 1999. Lexical
Strata in English. Morphological Causes, Phonological Effects.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963 (ed.). Universals
of language. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press.
Grimshaw, Jane 1986.
A Morphosyntactic Explanation for the Mirror Principle. Linguistic
Inquiry 17, 745-749.
Hay, Jennifer
2003. Causes and Consequences of Word Structure. New York and London:
Routledge.
Hay,
Jennifer & Ingo Plag 2004. What constrains possible suffix combinations? On
the interaction of grammatical and processing restrictions in derivational
morphology. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22, 565-596.
Kiparsky, Paul 1982. Lexical morphology and phonology.
In Linguistics in the Morning Calm: Selected Papers from SICOL-1981,
Linguistic Society of Korea. Seoul: Hanshin, 3-91.
Mohanan, Karuvannur P. 1986. The
Theory of Lexical Phonology. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Plag, Ingo 1996. Selectional restrictions in English suffixation
revisited. A reply to Fabb (1988). Linguistics 34, 769-798.
Rice, Keren 2000. Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Siegel, Dorothy 1974. Topics in English Morphology.
Ph.D. Thesis. MIT.
Spencer, Andrew
2006. Morphological universals. In R. Mairal and J. Gil (eds.), Linguistic
Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 101-129.
Szymanek, Bogdan 2000. On
morphotactics: Closing morphemes in
English. In B. Rozwadowska (ed.). PASE
Papers in Language Studies.
Wrocław: Aksel, 311-320.
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