Marine Ivanishvili 9 Lexical Exceptions in the Comparative Reconstruction of the Kartvelian Langu

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth A. Berman

ABSTRACTThe paper examines the acquisition of selected aspects of the inflectional system of Modern Hebrew, a language rich in bound morphology. By age three, children acquire the major inflectionally marked categories of the system, in the sense that they make semantically relevant distinctions of tense, person, number, and gender. Certain morphologically complex forms are simplified by neutralization or reformulation or by analytic paraphrases of bound constructions. Various anomalous forms are handled by regularization of lexical exceptions or by conflating forms belonging to different lexical patterns, while forms which are opaque due to neutralization of historically distinct root consonants or to inaccessibility of rules governing their alternations are processed by reference to certain ‘paradigms’ taken as basic.


2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zev HANDEL

Abstract In a recent article, Fellner & Hill (this volume) level a strong critique against what they view as the misguided prevailing methodology of historical-comparative reconstruction in the Sino-Tibetan (aka Trans-Himalayan) language family. The central focus of their criticism is the assembling of “word families” and the reconstruction of ST proto-forms exhibiting variation to account for those word families. In this response, I argue that the methodology is basically sound and is appropriate to the current state of our knowledge. At the same time, I dispute some of the assertions made by Fellner & Hill, which I believe are mischaracterizations of the methods and assumptions underlying the work of Sino-Tibetan scholars.


Phonology ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Franks

Although primary word stress regularly falls on the penult in Polish and on the antepenult in Macedonian, there are a number of lexical exceptions in both languages. In the first generative treatment of such exceptions, Comrie (1976) suggested two unrelated diacritic features, [± stressable] for Polish and [ ± never posttonic] for Macedonian, in order to accommodate the accentual paradigms exhibited by exceptional words within the framework of Chomsky & Halle (1968). More recently, metrical accounts of exceptional stress have been proposed in Franks (1985), Halle & Vergnaud (1987) and Rubach & Booij (1985) for Polish and in Franks (1987, forthcoming) and Halle & Vergnaud (1987) for Macedonian. These analyse deviations from the regular patterns in the two languages in completely unrelated ways – in Polish exceptional stress is a consequence of idiosyncratic extrametricality, whereas in Macedonian it results from the idiosyncratic presence of an inherent accent. Responding to this type of analysis, Hammond (1989) argues that an alternative treatment in which exceptional stress in both languages is treated similarly is conceptually more elegant and descriptively superior. He accomplishes this by employing roughly the same set of stress rules for Polish and Macedonian, with the exception that lexical accent is interpreted differently in the two languages.


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