Morphology-Semantics Mismatches and the Nature of Grammatical Features

Morphology-Semantics Mismatches and the Nature of Grammatical Features PDF Author: Peter W. Smith
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501511122
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Hybrid nouns have a morphological shape that doesn’t match their semantic interpretation. Such nouns pose clear and interesting questions for the nature of grammatical features. For instance, how does a single feature contribute distinct information values to different components of the grammar? Furthermore, what does this observation reveal about the syntax, often taken to mediate between the morphology and the semantics? This book studies hybrid nouns and argues that a single grammatical feature is comprised of two halves, a semantic half and a morphological half, that coexist in the syntax before being sent to the respective interfaces. Viewing features in this way allows us a new look at numerous types of hybrid nouns, such as Imposter constructions, nouns of collection, as well as nouns like ‘furniture’ that straddle the mass-count distinction. Moreover, the study of the agreement patterns of hybrid nouns shows that semantic features behave differently to morphological features under agreement, providing a novel insight into the nature of the mechanism that underlies morphosyntactic agreement.

Morphology-Semantics Mismatches and the Nature of Grammatical Features

Morphology-Semantics Mismatches and the Nature of Grammatical Features PDF Author: Peter W. Smith
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 1501511122
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Hybrid nouns have a morphological shape that doesn’t match their semantic interpretation. Such nouns pose clear and interesting questions for the nature of grammatical features. For instance, how does a single feature contribute distinct information values to different components of the grammar? Furthermore, what does this observation reveal about the syntax, often taken to mediate between the morphology and the semantics? This book studies hybrid nouns and argues that a single grammatical feature is comprised of two halves, a semantic half and a morphological half, that coexist in the syntax before being sent to the respective interfaces. Viewing features in this way allows us a new look at numerous types of hybrid nouns, such as Imposter constructions, nouns of collection, as well as nouns like ‘furniture’ that straddle the mass-count distinction. Moreover, the study of the agreement patterns of hybrid nouns shows that semantic features behave differently to morphological features under agreement, providing a novel insight into the nature of the mechanism that underlies morphosyntactic agreement.

Feature Mismatches

Feature Mismatches PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description


Feature Mismatches

Feature Mismatches PDF Author: Peter William Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Grammar as Processor

Grammar as Processor PDF Author: Roland Pfau
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027289638
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Spontaneous speech errors provide valuable evidence not only for the processes that mediate between a communicative intention and the articulation of an utterance but also for the types of grammatical entities that are manipulated during production. This study proposes an analysis of speech errors that is informed by grammar theory. In particular, it is shown how characteristic properties of erroneous German utterances can be accounted for within Distributed Morphology (DM). The investigation focuses on two groups of errors: Errors that result from the manipulation of semantic and morphosyntactic features, and errors which appear to involve the application of a post-error repair strategy. It is argued that a production model which incorporates DM allows for a straightforward account of the attested, sometimes complex, error patterns. DM mechanisms, for instance, render unnecessary the assumption of repair processes. Besides providing an account for the attested error patterns, the theory also helps us in explaining why certain errors do not occur. In this sense, DM makes for a psychologically real model of grammar.

Nouns and the Morphosyntax / Semantics Interface

Nouns and the Morphosyntax / Semantics Interface PDF Author: Laure Gardelle
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031445619
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Morphology and Lexical Semantics

Morphology and Lexical Semantics PDF Author: Rochelle Lieber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139454048
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Morphology and Lexical Semantics explores the meanings of morphemes and how they combine to form the meanings of complex words, including derived words (writer, unionise), compounds (dog bed, truck driver) and words formed by conversion. Rochelle Lieber discusses the lexical semantics of word formation in a systematic way, allowing the reader to explore the nature of affixal polysemy, the reasons why there are multiple affixes with the same function and the issues of mismatch between form and meaning in word formation. Using a series of case studies from English, this book develops and justifies the theoretical apparatus necessary for raising and answering many questions about the semantics of word formation. Distinguishing between a lexical semantic skeleton that is featural and hierarchically organised and a lexical semantic body that is holistic, it shows how the semantics of word formation has a paradigmatic character.

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics PDF Author: Berthold Crysmann
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961103070
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories.

Semantics and Morphosyntactic Variation

Semantics and Morphosyntactic Variation PDF Author: Itamar Francez
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198744587
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book explores a key issue in linguistic theory, the systematic variation in form between semantic equivalents across languages. Two contrasting views of the role of lexical meaning in the analysis of such variation can be found in the literature: (i) uniformity, whereby lexical meaning is universal, and variation arises from idiosyncratic differences in the inventory and phonological shape of language-particular functional material, and (ii) transparency, whereby systematic variation in form arises from systematic variation in the meaning of basic lexical items. In this volume, Itamar Francez and Andrew Koontz-Garboden contrast these views as applied to the empirical domain of property concept sentences - sentences expressing adjectival predication and their translational equivalents across languages. They demonstrate that property concept sentences vary systematically between possessive and predicative form, and propose a transparentist analysis of this variation that links it to the lexical denotations of basic property concept lexemes. At the heart of the analysis are qualities: mass-like model theoretic objects that closely resemble scales. The authors contrast their transparentist analysis with uniformitarian alternatives, demonstrating its theoretical and empirical advantages. They then show that the proposed theory of qualities can account for interesting and novel observations in two central domains of grammatical theory: the theory of syntactic categories, and the theory of mass nouns. The overall results highlight the importance of the lexicon as a locus of generalizations about the limits of crosslinguistic variation.

The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology

The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology PDF Author: Andrew Hippisley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316712451
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1442

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Book Description
The Cambridge Handbook of Morphology describes the diversity of morphological phenomena in the world's languages, surveying the methodologies by which these phenomena are investigated and the theoretical interpretations that have been proposed to explain them. The Handbook provides morphologists with a comprehensive account of the interlocking issues and hypotheses that drive research in morphology; for linguists generally, it presents current thought on the interface of morphology with other grammatical components and on the significance of morphology for understanding language change and the psychology of language; for students of linguistics, it is a guide to the present-day landscape of morphological science and to the advances that have brought it to its current state; and for readers in other fields (psychology, philosophy, computer science, and others), it reveals just how much we know about systematic relations of form to content in a language's words - and how much we have yet to learn.

Mismatch

Mismatch PDF Author: Elaine Francis
Publisher: Stanford Univ Center for the Study
ISBN: 9781575863849
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 430

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Book Description
Linguistic mismatch phenomena involve semiotic functions that attach to forms in defiance of grammatical design features. Noun phrases, when used as predicates, provide one example: how do predicate nominals correspond to our theories of what nouns mean? How do such phenomena challenge traditional conceptions of grammar? How do competing theories of the syntax-semantics interface stand up when confronted with mismatch phenomena? Mismatch addresses these questions through the efforts of some of the most original thinkers in syntactic and semantic theory, exploring a wide variety of mismatch phenomena in a broad sampling of languages.