Nominalization

Chomsky’s Remarks on Nominalization (RoN), published in 1970, has had an immense impact on syntax, and far reaching ramifications for phonology, semantics, and morphology. Among other major factors, RoN[R1] propelled the emergence of theoretical morphology as a distinct subfield within generative grammar. The original agenda set up by RoN, as augmented by supplemental work on argument structure, on the typology of derived nominals, and on the role of morphological complexity, continue to inform major contemporary theoretical approaches to morphosyntax in general, and to the study of derived nominals, in particular. This volume brings together contributions which address these issues from different perspectives and which, importantly, focus on a broad range of typologically diverse languages (Archi, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hiaki, Icelandic, Japanese, Jingpo, Korean, Mayan, Mẽbengokre, Navajo, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish, Udmurt). The volume also contains an introduction by the editors as well as a short contribution by Noam Chomsky.<153>

The Origin of a New Kind of Science From the Life Sciences

Science in the modern era began with a process of synthesis; the natural sciences in particular emerged through a coalescence of several cultural traditions. Scientific knowledge arose in a series of several separate events as mathematics, philology, physics and biology emerged independently. Scientific ideas about natural life developed via a synthesis of three types of knowledge. (1) There was the tradition of herbalism as a type of knowledge of nature, and this approach remained close to the Aristotelian tradition of describing nature with a bookish method centered on descriptive practice. (2) The scholastic tradition clarified existing concepts and formed new ones. Its role was crucial in supplying nascent science with its set of cognitive tools. (3) The alchemical tradition provided experimental knowledge of nature as applied to human life. It was particularly important in building the skills needed to connect theoretical systems with reality. This synthesis in natural philosophy was the basis of Linnaean reforms. However, theoretical morphology was cen¬tral to Linnaeus’ thinking and, its features were responsible for the success of his system. Theoretical morphology offered ways to decide how a natural phenomenon should be reduced and divided into parts in order to serve as an object of scientific cognition. Essential theoretical precepts for this morphology were formulated by Andrea Cesalpino in De plantis libri XVI (1583). Hence, the origin of the natural sciences as a study of living nature should properly be traced to the 16th century. This strand in the development of the new scientific approach in Europe through studying living things should also be connected with earlier (medieval) efforts of the Dominican Order (promoting purer versions of Aristotelianism), while another strand which led to the appearance of physics and other more mathematically expressed branches of the natural sciences belongs to the Franciscan orders (more influenced by Neoplatonism). Science emerged then as profound and experimentally verifiable theoretical knowledge based on ideation through the construction of the objects of experimental research.

Phonetic effects of morphology and context: Modeling the duration of word-final S in English with naïve discriminative learning

Recent research on the acoustic realization of affixes has revealed differences between phonologically homophonous affixes, e.g. the different kinds of final [s] and [z] in English (Plag, Homann &amp; Kunter 2017, Zimmermann 2016a). Such results are unexpected and unaccounted for in widely accepted post-Bloomfieldian item-and-arrangement models (Hockett 1954), which separate lexical and post-lexical phonology, and in models which interpret phonetic effects as consequences of different prosodic structure. This paper demonstrates that the differences in duration of English final S as a function of the morphological function it expresses (non-morphemic, plural, third person singular, genitive, genitive plural, cliticizedhas, and cliticizedis) can be approximated by considering the support for these morphological functions from the words’ sublexical and collocational properties. We estimated this support using naïve discriminative learning and replicated previous results for English vowels (Tucker, Sims &amp; Baayen 2019), indicating that segment duration is lengthened under higher functional certainty but shortened under functional uncertainty. We discuss the implications of these results, obtained with a wide learning network that eschews representations for morphemes and exponents, for models in theoretical morphology as well as for models of lexical processing.

Overabundance in Morphology

Overabundance is the situation in which two (or more) inflectional forms are available to realize the same cell in the inflectional paradigm of a lexeme (i.e., to express the meaning arising from the combination of the lexical meaning of the lexeme and the morphosyntactic and morphosemantic feature values that define the cell). An example from English is dreamed / dreamt, both of which realize ‘dream.pst’, the past tense of the verb dream. The forms that realize the same cell are called cell mates. Certain cell mates can be used interchangeably in the same context, even by the same speaker, with no difference in style and meaning; other cell mates are subject to various kinds of conditions, so that different forms are used in different styles, registers, social or geographic dialects, or in different semantic, syntactic or pragmatic contexts. Cell mates by definition are formally different in some respect: they may display different stems (e.g., Italian sepol-to / seppelli-to ‘bury-pst.ptcp’), or different endings (e.g., Czech jazyk-u / jazyk-a ‘language-gen.sg’), they may be built according to different means (e.g., English more choosy / choosier ‘choosy.comp’, where the first cell mate is periphrastic and the second one synthetic), or they may differ in various other ways. Overabundance can be limited to a specific cell of a specific lexeme, or it can occur systematically in certain cells of certain lexemes or of all lexemes in a given word class and language (e.g., all Spanish verbs have two ways of realizing all the forms of the imperfect subjunctive). Most linguists assume that overabundance can exist only as a transitional stage during diachronic change, and that any single speaker only uses one of the cell mates available in a community’s repertoire; besides, many assume that cell mates always differ according to geo-socio-stylistic conditions, or in meaning. However, corpus based studies of specific instances of overabundance have shown that there are cases of truly interchangeable cell mates, that a single speaker can use different cell mates even within the same utterance, and that some instances of overabundance are stably attested for centuries. Language standardization often aims at eliminating overabundance, but low frequency forms may escape elimination and remain in usage. Many principles assumed to regulate language acquisition (e.g., Clark’s Principle of Contrast) ban overabundance; however, forms acquired later than in the early stages of language acquisition, sometimes only with schooling, may escape this ban. Even principles of grammar, such as Blocking, or Pāṇini’s principle, appear to entail the impossibility of having synonymous cell mates. However, much depends on the exact formulation of these principles; and the existence of cell mates can be reconciled with certain versions of them and has been acknowledged in much recent work in theoretical morphology.

Modeling the Duration of Word-Final S in English with Naive Discriminative Learning

Recent research on the acoustic realization of affixes has revealed differencesbetween phonologically homophonous affixes, for example the different kinds offinal [s] and [z] in English (Plag et al. 2017, Zimmermann 2016). Such resultsare unexpected and unaccounted for in widely-accepted post-Bloomfieldian item-and-arrangement models (Hockett, 1954), which separate lexical and post-lexicalphonology, and in models which interpret phonetic effects as consequences of different prosodic structure. This paper demonstrates that the differences in duration of English final S as a function of the morphological function it expresses (non-morphemic, plural, third person singular, genitive, genitive plural, cliticized has, and cliticized is) can be approximated by considering the support for these morphological functions from the words’ sublexical and collocational properties. We estimated this support using naive discriminative learning, and replicated previous results for English vowels (Tucker et al., 2019) indicating that segment duration is lengthened under higher functional certainty, but shortened under functional uncertainty. We discuss the implications of these results, obtained with wide learning network that eschews representations for morphemes and exponents, for models in theoretical morphology as well as for models of lexical processing.

Predicting Morphological Disparities in Sea Urchin Skeleton Growth and Form

Sea urchins exhibit among their many species remarkable diversity in skeleton form (e.g., from spheroid to discoid shapes). However, we still do not understand how some related species show distinct morphologies despite inherent similarities at the genetic level. For this, we use theoretical morphology to disentangle the ontogenic processes that play a role in skeletal growth and form. We developed a model that simulates these processes involved and predicted trajectory obtaining 94% and 77% accuracies. We then use the model to understand how morphologies evolved by exploring the individual effects of three structures (ambulacral column, plate number, and polar regions). These structures have changed over evolutionary time and trends indicate they may influence skeleton shape, specifically height–to-diameter ratio, h:d. Our simulations confirm the trend observed but also show how changes in the attributes affect shape; we show that widening the ambulacral column or increasing plate number in columns produces a decrease in h:d (flattening); whereas increasing apical system radius to column length ratio produces an increase in h:d (gloublar shape). Computer simulated h:d matched h:d measured from real specimens. Our findings provide the first explanation of how small changes in these structures can create the diversity in skeletal morphologies.

Distributed Morphology

Distributed Morphology (DM) is a framework in theoretical morphology, characterized by two core tenets: (i) that the internal hierarchical structure of words is, in the first instance, syntactic (complex words are derived syntactically), and (ii) that the syntax operates on abstract morphemes, defined in terms of morphosyntactic features, and that the spell-out (realization, exponence) of these abstract morphemes occurs after the syntax. Distributing the functions of the classical morpheme in this way allows for analysis of mismatches between the minimal units of grammatical combination and the minimal units of sound. Much work within the framework is nevertheless guided by seeking to understand restrictions on such mismatches, balancing the need for the detailed description of complex morphological data in individual languages against an attempt to explain broad patterns in terms of restrictions imposed by grammatical principles.