Re: [Conlangs-Conf] Conference Overview

And wrote:
<<
And after reading John Q's summary of the talks, I was wondering
whether yours, David, was just espousing a Word-and-Paradigm model of
inflection, or whether it went further and somehow advocated radical
suppletion... Perhaps you'd give a short summary?
 >>

First, it's a cohesive model for inflection and derivaton (and, with
appropriate tweaking, I think the model could handle phonology
*and* syntax.  Unfortunately, I can count on two fingers the number
of people seriously working with Bochner's Lexical Relatedness
Morphology, and neither of them have left the morphological
realm, yet).  And, second, no--at least, by the definition that
suppletion
is the following:

-Where X and Y are in a systematic morphological relationship
such that by looking at either X or Y, one can predict the meaning
and form of the member, and this systematic morphological
relationship holds in general for the language as a whole, suppletion
is where the systematic relationship between a pair X and Y is
systematic in meaning, but totally unpredictable in form (i.e.,
the form X is in no way related to the form Y).

So, in English, "go" is the present tense, and "went" is the past tense.
Verbs having a present and past tense form is something morphologically
encoded by English, and there are various systematic patterns which
relate present and past tense forms ("miss/missed", "raze/razed",
"eat/ate", "hit/hit", etc.).  The pair "go/went", however, are in no
way related to each other in form.  This is different from, say,
"ride/rode"
because there is still a phonological similarity between "ride" and
"rode", and the pair belongs to a larger pattern of words that work
the same way (e.g., "write/wrote").

I *think* where there may be confusion is the idea of dispensing
with morphemes.  I don't mean to dispense with affixes.  Affixes
are great, and do a lot of work for a lot of languages.  What I was
talking about was dispensing with the formal notion of a morpheme--
that is, the notion that a morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning
in language, and that a language is simply composed of thousands
and thousands of morphemes.

Without going into it too much (I plan to do a whole write-up and
put it on my website, and when it's done, I'll post here), the very
notion of the morpheme is problematic.  Morphemes *look* pretty
good when you have pairs like this:

cat = CAT (a feline entity), singular
cats = CAT, plural

Looking at those two, it's easy to say that cat = CAT, and -s = plural.
It becomes somewhat more complicated with something like this:

fish = FISH, singular
fish = FISH, plural

And also:

man = MAN, singular
men = MAN, plural

These examples have been explained away by morpheme-based
theories by positing zero morphs--morphemes that have no
phonological form but mean something.  So fish is "fish" plus a
null suffix that means plural, and this null suffix is an allomorph
of /-s/.  There's a second null suffix which changes the vowel in
[&] to [E] to form a plural, and that's another allomorph of /-s/.

In other words, what a morpheme-based theory of morphology
does with language is it treats *everything* like affixation.  And
yet, at other times, it has a lot of problems with what looks like
simple affixation.

So in English we have a bunch of "berry" words.  "Berry" is mono-
morphemic (though note that /-y/ is a common suffix, whether
it has meaning or not).  In a word like "blueberry", you have a
compound with "blue" and "berry", rendering "a berry that's
blue" (whether a blueberry is or not.  I think of them as blue).
Then, however, there are words like "cranberry", "boysenberry",
"huckleberry" and "raspberry" which look to be built in the same
manner, but which, when broken down, appear to be a meaningless
prefix (or word) attached to a meaningful base.  In a morpheme-
based theory, all of these words would be necessarily mono-
morphemic.  In a sense, this is accurate: If a person has never
seen or tasted a huckleberry, if they hear the word for the first
time, they're not going to have any idea what color the berry is,
what it tastes like, etc.  *However*, they're probably going to be
able to guess it's a berry--more easily than if the word word "blick".
Yet, a morpheme-based theory would treat "huckleberry" and
"blick" identically.

The general point is that morpheme-based theories treat instances
like the "berry" in "huckleberry" as accidents, and treat word-internal
morphological processes like prefixation or suffixation.  Further,
by positing all these different allomorphs, it treats systematic
relationships like accidents.  Here's my favorite example to illustrate
that point.

In Spanish, you can take a name ending in masculine /-o/ or
feminine /-a/ (crucially treated as suffixes by a morpheme-based
theory) and add the suffix /-it/ before it to get a nickname.  Here
are some examples:

Nacho > Nachito
Dora > Dorita
Carla > Carlita
Carlo > Carlito

Then you get this pair:

Carlos > Carlitos

Under a strict morpheme-based analysis, "Carlitos" is a huge problem.
You have to posit one of the following solutions:

(1) /-os/ is an allomorph of /-o/ (only used with the stem "Carl-")

(2) /-it-/ is an infix which is an allomorph of /-it/ that is only used
with the name "Carlos"

(3) /-s/ has some sort of meaning

It seems to me like (1) is the best solution of the three.  However,
it's positing a single morpheme that only works with one word.
(2) does the same thing, but positing that Spanish has exactly one
infix that accidentally looks like the suffix /-it/ and only is used
with one name seems utterly preposterous.  And with (3), what
meaning could be associated with this /-s/?  A general "this is a
name" suffix?  If so, why does it only show up on one name?

So, keeping with this Carlitos example, the solution I proposed is
to abandon the formal notion of a morpheme.  By doing so, you
can recognize that there's a general pattern between names in
Spanish that looks like this:

(a) Xo  <->  Xito

On the left is a form for a name (X is a variable that stands in for
the rest of the name), and on the right is a nickname associated
with it.  This is just stating a relationship between forms and
meaning; it's not suggesting that /-o/ or /-it/ means anything.
Further, there's nothing in the rule that would prevent it from
applying to Carlos.  Carlos can have it's own rule:

(b) Xos  <->  Xitos

But this rule is simply a more specific instantiation of the rule in
(a), and isn't necessary.  What this kind of rule does for a speaker
is it models (or is an attempt to model) the human capacity for
linguistic analogy.  Thus, if a speaker has the notion of the
relationship
in (a), and hears a name like "Carlos", if there's a phonological
relation between the first item in (a) and the name, then the
speaker can analogize that there may also be a member like that
on the right to get "Carlitos".

I personally think this type of theory lends is a pretty good model
of acquisition, because when you encounter a word for the first
time (say a noun), it's not always going to be in the nominative
singular.  You hear words in context, and never in citation form.
So say for some reason a new verb pops up in English:

"Yesterday, I was at the store, and this guy in a cart came by and
blope me, and I was like, 'Dude!  Watch where you're going!'"

So a hearer can take a pretty good guess at what the word means
(i.e., either to "hit", or maybe "to hit with a shopping cart"), they
know it's in the past tense, and the form they're given is "blope".
Immediately, two patterns should come to mind:

X  <->  X
XiY  <->  XoY  (using English orthography)

The first is the pattern for "hit/hit", the second the pattern for
"ride/rode".  At this point, the hearer can take a guess at how
the rest of the paradigm (in this case, the present tense) is formed.
Given that the second pattern up there is more common (or
maybe...  "Hit", "put"...  I can't think of anymore), they might
guess the second, but who knows.  And they could be wrong.
However, you'd predict that they'd fit that word into an extant
pattern of English, and wouldn't say something like, "Why did
he bloip you?"

This is a nice feature of Lexical Relatedness Morphology, because
in a morpheme-based theory, if you hear "wrote", there's no
formal way to predict the singular would be "write".  Rather
than having a list of fully inflected words with patterns of
relationship between those words stored in the lexicon, you
have a list of morphemes, with, at most, a series of diacritics
for what attaches where, for example...

-er (suf.) comparative [attaches to class A adjectives only]
big (adj.) class A
large (adj.) class A
hilarious (adj.) class B
perpendicular (adj.) class B
magnificent (adj.) class B
morphological (adj.) class B
funny (adj.) class A

Then when a new adjective comes in, you have to decide which
class it belongs to, with no formal basis for deciding as much, unless
you specify which words can fall into class A, and which can't.
And then if someone comes up with a novel form (possibly to
be funny), "Yeah, well my car, is more, like...magnificenter,
so...yeah!",
the question is, how on earth could they have ever done that, if
"magnificent" is class B?  And how do we understand it?

Darn, I went on much longer than I intended to.  And what's even
more perplexing, is that I don't even know if I answered your
question.  Is this close?

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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