LINGUIST List 16.1351
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Wed Apr 27 2005
Review: Morphology: Katamba (2003) -- Part 1
Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara
<naomi linguistlist.org>
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1. Kalyanamalini
Sahoo,
Morphology: Critical Concepts in Linguistics
Message 1: Morphology: Critical Concepts in Linguistics
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Date: 26-Apr-2005
From: Kalyanamalini Sahoo <kalyanamaliniyahoo.com>
Subject: Morphology: Critical Concepts in Linguistics
EDITOR: Katamba, Francis X.
TITLE: Morphology
SUBTITLE: Critical Concepts in Linguistics
SERIES: Critical Concepts in Linguistics
YEAR: 2003
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
ISBN: 0415270782 (for the six-volume set)
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1129.html
Kalyanamalini Sahoo, language consultant
[This review divided into two parts. This part contains the Overview
and Synopsis of Volumes I-III. The second part in a subsequent issue
contains the Synopsis of Volumes IV-VI, the Critical Evaluation and
References.
To read Part II: http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1352.html -- Eds.]
OVERVIEW
This set of 6 volumes is a collection of 78 reprinted articles from
various journals and books. The anthology of articles beginning from
1939 to the year 2000 has been carefully planned and nicely
coordinated by the editor between the various contributors. Volume
1 "Word Structure: a variety of views" is constituted of 18 papers, a
preface by the editor, and a general introduction to all the volumes in
the set. Is it words or morphemes that are the basic units of
morphological analysis? - has been discussed in many articles of
volume I. Volume II "Morphology: Primes, Phenomena and Processes"
is constituted of 13 papers. Articles in this Volume survey
morphological phenomena in a huge number of genetically and
typologically different languages. The interaction of morphology with
other levels of linguistics (phonology, syntax and semantics) has been
dealt with in volumes III, IV and V. Volume III "Morphology: its relation
to Phonology", Volume IV "Morphology: its relation to Syntax", and
Volume V "Morphology: its relation to Semantics and the Lexicon" are
constituted of 10 papers each. Volume VI "Morphology: its place in
the wider context" deals with articles which discuss morphology
emerging in an interdisciplinary context or application-oriented field
(e.g. psycholinguistics, computational linguistics and historical
linguistics). This Volume is constituted of 17 papers, and an index of
linguistic terms referred to in all the volumes of the set.
Three articles (one in each of the volumes II, III and VI) are in French,
while all the other articles are in English. Each article has its own
Notes and References. There is no special effort to put all the articles
in the same format, they have just been reproduced from the
original/source.
SYNOPSIS
VOLUME I -- WORD STRUCTURE: A VARIETY OF VIEWS
Volume I presents a variety of approaches to word-
structure. 'Whether words or morphemes are the basic unit of
morphological description' is the topic of discussion in many articles.
Chapter 2, 3, 4, and 13 defend a morpheme-based approach, while
ch. 5, 7, 8, 17, 18 argue for a word-based approach. Ch.16 takes a
radical view and denies the existence of words. Overall, this volume
presents a unique collection of early influential studies in word
structure analysis by leading scholars in the field. Not only that the
authors have highlighted what phenomena a morpheme-based
approach or a word-based approach will be able to tackle, but also in
many articles, the authors have preferred to take a rather critical
stand to many key notions of this theoretical approach.
This volume starts with Roman Jakobson's article 'Quest for the
essence of language' (source: Diogenes 51 (1966): 21-37). It surveys
the development of theories of the linguistic sign from Ancient Greece
to the twentieth century. Beginning with Bloomfield's 1933 manual
regarding the study of language with respect to 'sound' and 'meaning',
Jakobson discusses Saussure's interpretation of the sign - 'significant'
and 'signifié'; St. Augustine's Latinized term 'signum' comprising
both 'signans' and 'signatum'; Charles Sanders Peirce's interpretation
of 'sign' as 'semiosis' in terms of 'icon', 'index' and 'symbol';
Greenberg's grammatical universals and near-universals; Bolinger's
importance of cross influences between sound and meaning. He
discusses the nature of the word and the place of morphology in the
study of language.
In chapter 2, Zellig S. Harris's article 'Morpheme alternants in linguistic
analysis' (Source: Language 18 (1942): 169-180) focuses on
morpheme-based approach to morphology. It presents regular
phonology, morphophonemics, sandhi, morphological processes like
vowel change, morpholexical variation, suppletion etc. as cases of a
single linguistic relation - morpheme alternants. It proposes
techniques for determining the morphemes of a language, gives an
account of key concepts and analytical techniques of morpheme
analysis in American structural linguistics.
In chapter 3, Eugene A. Nida's article 'The identification of
morphemes' (source: Language 24 (1948): 414-441) also focuses on
morpheme-based approach to morphology. This is in response to
Hockett's (cf. next chapter), and Bloch's (Language 23: 399-418)
morphemic analysis. He treats some of the specific problems raised
by Bloch's and Hockett's papers, which constitutes a background for
the development of certain principles for the analysis and classification
of morphemes. Adopting Bloomfield's definition, he provides sub-
morphemic distinctions of phonetic form as well as of semantic value.
According to it, a definition which contrasts one phonetic-semantic
entity with all other entities in the language still permits the sub-
morphemic distinctions of phonetic form and semantic areas within the
basic distinctiveness which sets off such a form from other possibly
related forms. Providing examples from different languages, he
discusses 13 principles which govern the identification of morphemes.
He classifies morphemes based on (i) the types of phonemes which
comprise the morphemes, (ii) the positional relationship of the parts of
the morphemes, and (iii) the positional relationship of the morphemes
to other morphemes.
In chapter 4 'Problems of morphemic analysis' (Source: Language 23
(1947): 321-343), Charles F. Hockett provides a critical evaluation of
the theory of morphemic analysis as propounded by Harris (cf.chapter
2).
Charles E. Bazell in chapter 5 'On the problem of the morpheme'
(Source: Archivum Linguisticum 1 (1949): 1-15.) stands his ground
and gives a good explanation of the morphemic analysis. He tries to
remove any skepticism about this approach by posing a more critical
questioning of the fundamental assumptions and analytical techniques
of morpheme theory.
In chapter 6, Hockett's article (source: Word 10 (1954): 210-234)
discusses two models of grammatical description: Item and Process
(IP) and Item and Arrangement (IA). Besides, he makes passing
mention of the traditional Word and Paradigm (WP) approach
employed since classical antiquity to describe the morphology of
Sanskrit, Greek and Latin as well as many modern languages but
which had not found favour with modern linguists in the first part of the
twentieth century. According to IP model, morphological description
involves identifying morphological items and the processes which they
undergo, while IA model essentially talks of things and the
arrangements in which those things occur. In both the types, the
minimal grammatical item is the morpheme, and this is the fundamental
unit for all subsequent grammatical analysis. However, neither
approach turns out to be entirely satisfactory. The paper concludes
with a proposal for a set of five criteria for evaluating models of
grammatical description namely, generality, specificity, inclusiveness,
productivity and efficiency. Judged using these criteria, none of the
models is found to be completely satisfactory, although Hockett leans
towards IA. However, he is concerned about its inability to deal
effectively with a number of phenomena (e.g. internal vowel change
as in take - took).
Chapter 7 'In defence of WP' (Source: Transactions of the Philological
Society (1959): 116-144) is written by R. H. Robins as a response to
the apologetic passing mention of WP by Hockett (ch.6). Robins's
paper presents a defence of a word-and-paradigm approach and
shows how revamped WP can be reinstated as a model suitable for
aspects of grammatical analysis, in particular the description of
languages with inflecting morphology. The distinctive characteristics
of a WP model is: the word is taken as the basic unit of both syntax
and morphology, and variable words are grouped into paradigms for
the statement of their morphological forms and the listing of their
various syntactic functions. WP has advantages over Hockett's IA or
IP in the sense that (i) the word as a unity is more easily susceptible to
grammatical statement than is the individual bound morpheme; (ii) WP
avoids some of the difficulties in morphophonology
(morphophonemics), in the relating of grammatical structuring, which
beset IA and to a lesser extent IP. However, WP has its
disadvantages also: (i) with its use of Process terminology, WP, like IP,
implies a historic perspective and confuses synchronic linguistics with
diachronic linguistics. (ii) WP appears to be less tidy and economical
in requiring both Process and Arrangement as separate terms (in
morphological and syntactic description respectively) than either IA or
IP with their exclusive use of one or the other. (iii) a descriptive model
is intrinsically less desirable if it makes a non-minimal element, the
word, basic in the hierarchy of structures at the same general level of
analysis, as against both the other models that make the minimal
grammatical element, the morpheme, also the basic element of
structure. However, Robins admits that because of the immense
complexity of language, none of the three models, IA, IP and WP, has
worked out to be equally suitable for every part of a grammatical
system in every language.
In chapter 8 'Some concepts in word-and-paradigm morphology'
(Source: Foundations of Language 1 (1965): 268-289.), Peter H.
Matthews takes up the baton and develops an explicit account of WP
articulating, in particular, the notion of "paradigmatic structure".
In chapter 9 (Source: Journal of Linguistics 21 (1985): 321 -337.),
Wolfgang U. Dressler elaborates a claim for the predictive
(explanatory) power of Natural Morphology (NM). The first part of NM
is a theory of universals; the second is of morphological typology; the
third is of language specific system adequacy. Although it does not
have a sociolinguistic or psycholinguistic theory of its own to account
for norms and performances, however, it consistently refers to such
theories.
In chapter 10 (Source: Foundations of Language 16 (1982): 181-
198.), Dieter Kastovsky outlines a functional approach to word-
formation. He concedes that it is impossible to formulate a set of
general rules that account for all word-formation patterns in a
language. The dual functions of naming and syntactic
recategorization affect word-formation in different ways, resulting in
different outcomes depending on which of these functions is dominant.
Chapter 11 'Prolegomena to a theory of word formation' (Source:
Linguistic Inquiry 4 (1973): 3-16.) is a study in morphology in early
generative grammar. In this, Morris Halle proposes that morphology
consists of three distinct components: a list of morphemes, rules of
word formation, and a filter containing the idiosyncratic properties of
words. The list of morphemes and the rules of word formation
together define the potential words of the language. The set of actual
words is obtained from that of the potential words by applying to the
latter the modifications indicated in the filter. Morphology, thus,
producing a long list of words designated as dictionary. Lexical
insertion transformations select items from the dictionary and enter
these in appropriate slots in structures representing the underlying
constituent structure of particular sentences. It is to these underlying
representations that the syntactic transformations apply and generate
the surface structure. Contra Bresnan (1971, 1972), he does not
accept any phonological rule applying as part of the transformational
cycle of syntax.
Stephen R. Anderson's article 'Where's morphology?' (Source:
Linguistic Inquiry 13 (4) (1982): 571-612.) is also a study in
morphology in early generative grammar. In chapter 12, Anderson
argues that in the domain "inflection", there is a nontrivial intersection
between the theories of syntax and morphology. In order to capture
both the relation of inflectional morphology to the syntax, and the
exclusion of derivational morphology from "syntactic accessibility", he
proposes a model of morphological operations, and provides the
outlines of a theory of "Extended Word and Paradigm" morphology as
an account of the mechanism of inflectional specification. He proposes
principles governing the interaction of morphological rules, and also
notes their interaction with "phonological" rules.
In chapter 13, 'A general theory of word structure' (Source: E.
O.Selkirk, The Syntax of Words, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982,
pp. 1-12.) Elisabeth O. Selkirk argues that word structure has the
same general formal properties as syntactic structure. In generative
grammar, as word-formation was considered as a part of syntactic
transformations (Lees 1960), she argues that words, like sentences,
have internal constituent structure, and they should be treated
syntactically using phrase structure grammars.
In chapter 14, Stephen R. Anderson asks, "How much structure do
words have?" (Source: S. R.Anderson, A-Morphous Morphology,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.256-291.). He
denies any internal morphological structure for words and argues for
a-morphous morphology in which word-internal structure is eliminated
and replaced with conditions on the structure of the derivation of a
word.
In chapter 15 'Autolexical syntax: a proposal for the treatment of noun
incorporation and similar phenomena' (Source: Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory 3 (1985): 379-439.), Jerrold M. Sadock puts forward
a proposal for autolexical syntax, a theory in which morphology and
syntax operate in a completely autonomous fashion and are held
together by universal principles relating possible pairings of analyses
sanctioned by each. One distinct advantage of an autolexical
treatment of a polysynthetic language is that it allows a cross-
componential analysis of phenomena such as noun incorporation
while not requiring the mingling of syntax and morphology where there
is no evidence for it.
In chapter 16, 'Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection'
(Source: Kenneth Hale and S. Jay Keyser (eds), The View from
Building 20, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993, pp.111-176.), Morris
Halle and Alec Marantz take a radical view and deny the existence of
words, the lexical component and of lexical insertion. They propose a
theory "Distributed morphology" (DM) (which adopts the basic
organization of a principles and parameters grammar) and assume
that it is only after all syntactic operations are completed that
phonological expressions get inserted in a process called spell-out.
The theory assumes underspecification of vocabulary items such that
the phonological information of a word is not listed together with its
matching morphosyntactic properties. The theory also assumes that
syntactic and morphological objects have the same types of
constituent structures. In particular, Distributed Morphology attempts
to make precise the claim that all derivation of complex objects is
syntactic. In respect to the interface between syntax and morphology,
this architecture has a clear consequence: since the only mode of
combination in the grammar is syntactic, it follows that in the default
case, morphological structure simply is syntactic structure. Moreover,
this is a comprehensive rejection of the Lexicalist Hypothesis which
claims that words and word-formation belong in the lexicon (see ch.
11, 12 and 25).
Taking a different view, in chapter 17, Chet Creider and Richard
Hudson elaborate an account of inflectional morphology in Word
Grammar (Source: Lingua 107 (1999): 163-187.). In their approach
the relevance of the word and the lexicon is accepted. They use
ideas from the Word-and-Paradigm tradition - Lexeme, Stem and
Inflection - in combination with the logic of default inheritance. They
apply this theory to a range of different morphological data and
compare the theory with the other contemporary approaches like a-
morphous morphology, distributed morphology and network
morphology.
In chapter 18 'On the separation of derivation from morphology:
toward a lexeme/morpheme-based morphology' (Source: Quaderni di
Semantica 9(1) (1988): 3-59.), Robert Beard presents another word-
based approach. A key feature of this Lexeme/morpheme-based
model is the Separation Hypothesis, which assumes that the
derivation of meaning and the realization of phonological marking are
distinct processes in word-formation. The function (grammatically
relevant <>) of derivations is not predictable on the basis of
affixation nor vice versa.
VOLUME II -- MORPHOLOGY: PRIMES, PHENOMENA AND
PROCESSES
The main concern of this volume is the nature of morphological
primes, phenomena and processes. Beginning from defining a word,
morphological phenomena like difference between inflectional and
derivational morphology is discussed. 4 articles concerning issues in
inflectional morphology, and a series of articles on derivational
morphology dealing with issues in compounding, reduplication, clitics
and particles etc. are the main topic of discussion.
In chapter 19, 'Qu'est-ce qu'un mot?' (Source: Knud Togeby, Travaux
du Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague, Volume 5: Recherches
Structurales, Copenhague: Nordisk Sprog-og Kulturforlag, 1949, pp.
97-111) Knud Togeby asks the question 'what is a word?' He
grapples with the challenge of defining the word and identifying a set
of robust criteria for word recognition, a theme also taken up in
chapter 20 by John Lyons.
John Lyons in chapter 20 'The word' (Source: Introduction to
theoretical linguistics (1968) pp 194- 208, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.) gives a brief account of the primary units of
grammatical analysis and the way in which the terms applying to them
have been defined in modern linguistics. (For him, the relationship
between sentences, clauses, phrases, words and morphemes can be
expressed as a unit of 'higher' rank being composed out of units
of 'lower' rank.) Next, morphological phenomena are discussed. Traditionally,
the two major divisions of morphology are said to be inflection and derivation.
What is the difference between the two?
In chapter 21 'Inflection' (Source: M. Hammond & M. Noonan (eds.)
Theoretical Morphology: Approaches to Modern Linguistics,
California: Academic Press, 1988, pp. 23- 44.), Stephen R. Anderson
explains the properties of inflection, emphasizing its syntactically
driven nature. Assuming that inflection is outside of derivation, he
claims that material introduced by inflectional rule (not lexically) on the
basis of properties assigned in the syntax to the morphosyntactic
representation of the word presupposes, but is not presupposed by,
material that is present in the lexical form. In particular, nonregular
(hence lexical) morphology as well as material which is introduced not
in response to the requirements of the syntax but for semantic or
purely derivational reasons, may appear in derivational forms or
compounds because it is in the lexicon.
Chapter 22 'Stems in Latin verbal morphology' (Source: Mark Aronoff,
Morphology by itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. Linguistic Inquiry
Monograph Twenty-Two, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994, pp. 31-
59.) stays with the same theme. Focusing on the role of stems in
Latin verbal inflectional morphology, Mark Aronoff examines the role
of stems from a functional perspective in a word-based theory of
morphology (cf. chs. 7, 10, 16, 17, 18).
Chapter 23 'Paradigm economy' (Source: Journal of Linguistics 19
(1983): 115-128.) treats another aspect of inflection: paradigms (cf.
ch. 8). Andrew Carstairs discusses how, in any inflected language,
the inflectional resources available in some word-class or part of
speech are distributed among members of that word-class. He argues
that inflectional class systems depend crucially on the distinction
between suffixal inflection and stem alternations: stem alternations
and affixal alternation interact in ways that favour certain patterns and
disfavour or completely exclude others.
In chapter 24 'On rules of referral' (Source: Language 69(2) (1993):
449-479.), Gregory Stump puts forward a proposal (in another word-
based approach) for a formal theory of rules of referral to account for
syncretism in inflectional morphology. This theory affords a precise
account of a range of rule interactions involving rules of referral. It
furnishes a simple explanation for the fact that syncretisms donot
always encompass whole words, for the fact that some referrals are
bidirectional, and for the fact that two or more referrals may participate
successively or simultaneously in the definition of a single instance of
syncretism.
Then there follows a group of articles on derivational morphology.
In chapter 25 "Remarks on Nominalization" (Source: R. Jacobs & P.
Rosenbaum (eds.) Readings in English Transformational Grammar,
Waltham, MA: Ginn, 1970, pp. 184-221.), Noam Chomsky argues in
favour of the Lexicalist Hypothesis which hypothesizes that syntactic
operations only apply to syntactic constituents and hence cannot be
employed in derivational morphology. Focusing on the contrast
between derived nominals (which are created by derivational
morphology in the lexicon), and -ing gerundives (which are the result
of syntactic inflection), he claims that the former are similar to
underived words and the latter are comparable to syntactic phrases.
Word formation is firmly put in the lexicon; words are treated as
syntactic atoms whose internal structure is unavailable to syntax.
The next two articles deal with compounding.
In chapter 26 'On the creation and use of English compound nouns'
(Source: Language 55 (1977): 810-842.), Pamela Downing deals with
the semantic properties of noun + noun compounding in English. She
illustrates that the constraints on English N+N compounds cannot be
characterized in terms of absolute limitations on the semantic or
syntactic structures from which they are derived. Rather, the data
examined here reflect tendencies for compounds to be based on
permanent, non-predictable relationships of varying semantic types,
depending on the nature of the entity being denoted.
Rochelle Lieber's article (ch. 27) 'Argument linking and compounds in
English' (Source: Linguistic Inquiry 14(2) (1983): 251-286.) proposes
an analysis of compounds with a Lexicalist framework. The Argument-
linking Principle allows us to formulate a set of predictions about
possible and impossible combinations of stems within each compound
type and the productivity of the compounds in the language. She
argues that a compound type containing an argument-taking stem will
never be as productive as compound types containing no argument-
taking stems. Synthetic compounds are analyzed by referring to the
theta grid of the verb (cf. ch. 13).
In chapter 28 'Nimboran position class morphology' (Source: Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory 11 (1993): 559-624.), a different kind
of phenomenon, positional class morphology, is introduced. Sharon
Inkelas explores the Papuan language Nimboran where verbal
morphemes are inflexibly ordered and morphemes with the same
ordering properties are in complementary distribution (cf. ch 42). He
labels these verbal morphemes "positional class morphemes" and
exemplifies new support for the theory of level-ordering. Examining a
large corpus of data, he offers a formal theory of position class
morphology.
In chapter 29 'Reduplicative constructions' (Source: Joseph
Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Human Language, Vol. 3: Word
Structure, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978, pp. 297-334.)
Edith A. Moravcsik surveys the form, meaning and distribution of
reduplicative constructions within and across languages. She comes
to the conclusion that:
i) phonological properties determining which part of a string be
reduplicated in cases of partial reduplication are restricted
to 'canonical form'-type properties like consonantality, vowelhood, and
linear precedence among the segments and boundaries.
ii) languages usually use reduplicative patterns - i.e. quantitative form
differentiation - for the expression of meanings that have something to
do with the quantity of referents.
iii) reduplicative constructions express a more specific meaning than
their unreduplicated counterparts.
This is followed by chapter 30, which deals with metathesis.
In chapter 30 'Metathesis as a grammatical device' (Source:
International Journal of American Linguistics 35(3) (1969): 213-219.),
Laurence C. Thompson and M. Terry Thompson discuss metathesis in
the Austronesian language Rotuman and the Straits Salish language
Clallam.
The final chapter in this volume ends with chapter 31 'Clitics and
particles' (Source: Language 61(2) (1985): 283-305.). In this, Arnold
M. Zwicky investigates typological properties of clitics and particles,
phenomena whose existence complicates decisions about the status
of the word. He distinguishes clitics from inflectional affixes and
independent words, and for this purpose he makes use of various
tests like phonological tests, syntactic tests, accentual test etc.. He
shows that in many cases items labeled 'particles' have been treated
as clitics. As most of the 'particles' in the literature are simply words,
he argues that treating words with idiosyncratic distributions as
acategorial 'particles' is wrong. Finally, he depicts a class of discourse
markers: a grammatical category of items which are often classified
as 'particles' but which turn out to be independent words rather than
clitics of any sort.
VOLUME III -- MORPHOLOGY: ITS RELATION TO PHONOLOGY
This volume focuses on the relation of morphology to phonology.
Contra the doctrine of separation of levels, in which sound structure
used to be described before grammatical structure, hence separating
grammatical information when performing phonemic analysis, a series
of articles in this volume pioneer the idea that morphological and
phonological analysis can be intertwined in a linguistic description.
Chapter 32 is Leonard Bloomfield's classic paper on 'Menomini
morphophonemics' (Source: Travaux du circle linguistique de Prague
8 (1939): 105-115.), in which he demonstrates that some phonological
alternations require a morphological trigger. Simple words and the
members of compounds in Menomini can be analyzed into
morphologic elements which vary greatly in different combinations. He
distinguishes these morphophonemic alternations from morpholexical
variations and describes the internal sandhi or morphophonemics of
the language. He sets up each morphological element in a theoretical
basic form, and then states the deviations from this basic form which
appear when the element is combined with other elements.
In chapter 33 'A problem in phonological alternation' (Source:
Language 15 (1939): 1-10.) also, Morris Swadesh and CF. Voegelin
discuss that phonological alternations are motivated by morphological
factors (also see ch 6 for the discussion of IP). They consider
Tübatulabal, a Uto-Aztecan language of California, as a striking
illustration to account for irregular or "non-patent" phonological
alternations.
Two decades later, writing on phonotactics in early generative
grammar, Morris Halle discusses the limitations which the language
places on the occurrence of distinctive feature complexes in the
sequence. In chapter 34 'Sequential constraints' (Source: Morris
Halle, The Sound Pattern of Russian, The Hague: Mouton, 1959, pp.
55-75.), he has shown that there are phonological regularities
governing the phonological realization of morphemes. Phonological
representations contain a minimum of specified features and the
automatic distribution of features is governed by the following three
types of rule:
i) the morpheme structure rules deal exclusively with the feature
composition of individual morphemes.
ii) the morphological rules, which are part of transformational level,
require reference not only to the feature composition of morphemes
but also to the morpheme class to which the latter belong.
iii) the phonological rules assign features on the basis of purely
phonological criteria; they require reference only to features and
phonological boundaries.
Halle's idea was further articulated by Richard Stanley in 'Redundancy
rules in phonology' (Source: Language 43(1) (1967): 393-436.), in his
proposal for a theory of lexical redundancy (ch 35). How should the
linguist deal with those phonological properties of words and
morphemes that are entirely predictable? That is the question that
Stanley set out to answer. He gives particular attention to the formal
nature of morpheme structure rules and to the use of blanks in
representing redundancies. However, later he replaces morpheme
structure rules with a new formal device called 'morpheme structure
conditions' and provides strong motivation for the preference of the
latter one.
The fact that certain morphological rules have a close affinity with
phonological rules goes back to the proposal by (Whitney 1889,
Bloomfield 1933). Such interaction between morphology and
phonology got articulated by Paul Kiparsky as the theory of Lexical
morphology and phonology (chapter 36) (Source: The Linguistic
Society of Korea (ed.), Linguistics in the Morning Calm, Seoul:
Hanshin Publishing, 1982, pp. 3-91.). Kiparsky proposes that in this
theory, word-formation takes place in the lexicon. The lexicon is
stratified on the basis of the properties of various affixes.
Morphological rules and phonological rules belonging to the same
stratum apply in tandem.
Kiparsky's approach, although insightful it was, had its own
drawbacks, many of them stemming from the fact that affix-driven
stratification all too often did not yield reliable results. Hence, Heinz J.
Giegerich in chapter 37 'Principles of base-driven stratification'
(Source: Heinz J Giegerich, Lexical Strata in English, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 53-99.) mounts a rescue for
lexical phonology and morphology in the form of a revised theory with
base-driven rather than affix-driven lexical stratification. This model
predicts that the 'Continuity of Strata Hypothesis' must be true on both
the phonological and the morphological side.
In chapter 38 'A prosodic theory of nonconcatenative morphology'
(Source: Linguistic Inquiry 12(3) (1981): 373-418.), following Harris's
(1941, 1951) notion of long components, John McCarthy provides a
more successful approach to the description of nonconcatenative
morphology which employs CV skeletal tier positions as templates for
canonical morphological forms. This is an extension to morphology of
Goldsmith's autosegmental phonology model. McCarthy justifies this
theory by an analysis of the formal properties of the system of verbal
derivation and aspect and voice inflection in Classical Arabic. He also
discusses reduplication and the extension of this treatment to non-
Semitic languages.
In chapter 39 'Théorie de l'apophonie et organization des schèmes en
sémitique' (Source: Jacqueline Lecarme, Jean Lowenstamm and Ur
Shlonsky (eds), Research in Afroasiatic Grammar, Papers from the
Third conference on Afroasiatic Languages, Sophia Antipolis, 1996,
Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000, pp. 263-299.), Philippe Ségéral
explores the regularities that lie beneath the surface in the apophony
exhibited as part of the nonconcatenative morphology of Semitic
languages. In an analysis inspired in part by government phonology
and in part by autosegmental phonology he shows that there exist
phonological regularities in vowel alternations across tense-aspect
paradigms in Akkadian.
In chapter 40 'Re reduplication' (Source: Linguistic Inquiry 13(3)
(1982): 435-482.), Alec Marantz presents an account of reduplication
that is based on McCarthy's proposals for template morphology. He
claims that reduplication is best analyzed as the affixation of a skeletal
morpheme to a stem. Such an analysis explains the otherwise
puzzling interaction of reduplication with certain phonological
processes. The fact that reduplication processes can generally be
characterized by a fixed consonant-vowel shape, a fact captured in
the identification of reduplicating morphemes as C-V skeletal, provides
considerable support for McCarthy's autosegmental representation of
words on different tiers including a phonemic melody and a C-V
skeleton. Given that reduplication is simply affixation, this article also
supports Halle's (1979) interpretation of the phonological cycle and
Lieber's (1980) morpholexical theory dealing with the interaction of
reduplication and phonological processes.
In chapter 41, 'Faithfulness and identity in prosodic
morphology'(Source: Rene Kager, Harry van der Hulst and Wim
Zonneveld (eds), The Prosody- Morphology Interface, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 218-309.), focusing on
reduplication, infixation, root-pattern morphology and constraints on
the canonical shape (e.g. of the minimal word) McCarthy and Prince
use Optimality Theory to argue for a Prosodic Morphology approach,
which claims that morphological templates are defined in terms of
authentic units of the prosodic hierarchy (e.g. syllable, foot).
[Part 2 of this review appears in a subsequent issue
http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-1352.html
see the Editors' note at the beginning of this Part.]
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Kalyanamalini Sahoo has extensively worked on morphosyntactic
investigations in the South-Asian language Oriya, including
applicational fields like computational morphology. She received her
Ph.D. from Norwegian University of Science & Technology,
Trondheim, Norway, in the year 2001 and is primarily interested in
computational morphology and syntax.
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