OSU08 Morphosemantics Notes 6

Emmon Bach, SOAS, UMass(Amherst)
OSU Linguistics
e m a i l: firstinitialsurname (at) linguist (dot) umass (dot) edu
© Emmon Bach 2008. All rights reserved.
Office hrs: M W 1-3 and by appointment, Oxley 201a
Notes for classes will be posted at / linked to "http://www.people.umass.edu/ebach/courses/osu08-pl.htm"

(16 April) Finale: Addenda; Some Questions and Some Answers

Part A: Theory: Addenda*

*id est:

(id: addenda
ortho: addenda
morph: [cn w]
syn: CN
phon: ədéndə
root: addend-
(sg: -um)
(pl: -a (= pl(-um)))
sem: PL(〚 addend 〛)
implicature: something has gone before
register: semi-sniffy
...)
)

1. Reprise on Features and Values
1. Features.
Features are functions from linguistic signs to elements in various value spaces. For example, the feature Case is defined for signs in the nominal categories CN, DP,... There is room for variation here, for example, Case determines or checks case only for pronouns in English and Haisla, for DP's and CN's in Latin, DP's in Japanese. The value space for Case is a set of cases: 6 in Latin, perhaps 17 in Finnish, and so on.

There are a number of variations in how morphosyntactic features may be and have been viewed and used.

2. Strict lexicalist:
Linguistic signs come fully inflected from the lexicon -- viewed as a repository of all lexemes (see below). An inflected form has everything specified, including values for all the features defined for its category. The feature mechanisms of the grammar are used just to check agreement and government. For example, trying to combine a Preposition governing a certain Case value with an argument showing an incompatible case value will fail.
3. Constructivist:
Linguistic signs come in their base forms from the lexicon. As part of the construction of complex forms, these base forms are subject to morphological operations which contribute to the phonological, syntactic, morphological, semantic representations or interpretations. For example, a Nominative(Case) operation, along with whatever it does to the other elements of a complex sign, specifies the value Nominative for the feature (function) Case.
4. Traditional paradigms
display the forms and values for various morphosyntactic features.
5. Regular and irregular:
We need some way to deal with regular forms, such as the plural form for the CN, the past and participial forms for the regular (weak) verb ” ring (2). One way to do this is to incorporate something like an "elsewhere" condition: if an item is not prespecified for a value for a given feature, then it gets the "regular" treatment.
6. Syncretism
is dealt with by assigning unions of values (or "OR" values). So in German, for example, the value for Case of an inflected word like • Herrn is (LISPily speaking) a list (GEN DAT ACC).
7. Government
means this: a functor category checks or assigns values on an argument for a government feature such as Case.
8. Agreement
means this: a functor category checks or assigns values for an agreement feature on itself according to its argument.
9. Percolation of features
is dealt with according to general principles: features are defined for the various syntactic categories.

Given now a functor X/Y:

if X = Y, all feature values are passed from the argument to the resultant expression;

if X and Y share no features, no feature values are passed to the resultant expression;

if there is overlap in the feature spaces between X and Y, the resultant expression gets the union of the features and values for the functor and the argument.

These principles are almost automatic from the architecture of the system. An implementation or "execution" does require spelling out procedures, for example, for a parser or constructor.

(See Bach, 1983, for one (pre-unification) working out of all this formally. I have implemented some of this in LISP (actually SCHEME) for a simple parser and morphological constructors for a number of languages: English (most detail), Haisla, morphological fragments for Czech, Classical Arabic, Yup'ik, Modern Irish.)

10. Features and the core relations of CG.

There are two primary possibilities in pure categorial systems. Given a functor of category X/Y (or Y\X ), if X = Y: we have X/X ( X\X henceforth I'll ignore the directionality) we have a pure endocentric construction:

X/X X ==> X.

Otherwise, that is when X and Y are different, we have an exocentric constructions:

X/Y Y ==> X.

Given a feature system like that outlined above, there are two further possibilities:

X and Y share no features: This is a pure exocentric relation.

X and Y share some but not all features: This is a mixed endo-exocentric relation.

11. Ungoverned (Choice) features;

Some features are not governed overtly by functor elements. This situation is one where in some frameworks Functional Categories are posited, which may or may not have any segmental realization. In categorial systems, we can use unary categories (with the operation UP). (We expect to publish a paper on this: Bach and Chao In preparation,s but it is still pretty much "in preparation.!)

12. Examples:

1. big houses: CN/CN CN so all features are shared
2. see him: IV and DP share no features
3. every fish: DP and CN share some features (language dependent?)
4. G: der junge Herr
`the young gentleman'
An interesting case: mixed agreement and government? Kase values (NOM) are expressed all the way through, the functor der agrees with the noun in gender but governs the form of the adjective.
2. Heads
(This section owes a great deal to David Dowty (p.c), who raised the initial question in class and then sent me a detailed note about the issues. Much of the following is paraphrased from his email.)

There is a problem with the way that Verb was defined in class (Session 4) as anything that ended up with the final category IV (IV$): the problem was that according to this definition in a sentence like John slowly walked slowly would be a Verb. The problem is also inherent in early definitions of the operation RightWrap that was supposed to account for the positioning of the object with complex transitive verb phrases like persuade - to go (cf. Bach 1979, 1980) which appealed to structures like this: [_XP X Y] with the niche after the X. (This is sorta OK if you think of X as a word.)

Chierchia (1984) and Hoeksema (1984) tangled with this problem, seeking to define the concept of Head on a categorial basis: so that for both in an X/X X structure (ignore directionality) X is the head, but you have to add the notion "lexical head" (i.e. word in the morphological sense) (Dowty p.c.). [Note: I haven't had a chance to check the exact details of Chierchia's dissertation on this point.]

The upshot of this is that you need to keep track of both morphological categories and syntactic ones. For some kinds of cliticization you need to have information corresponding to descriptions like "the first word" and "the first major [?] constituent" (cf. Wackernagel's position phenomena) [illustrations on "black"-board].

References: on RightWrap and Heads: Chomsky early work (1957 et seq.) found - studying in the library as a transitive verb phrase, Thomason, Partee on persuade - to go [need exact references: see Bach 1979, 1980], Pollard and Sag 1994 (and early HPSG work going back to Pollard's dissertation), Chierchia 1984, Hoeksema 1984, Corbett et al. 1993, Zwicky 1985, 1993, Nichols 1986, 1992.

3. More on Number
4. Word internal government?

Part B: Questions

1. Lia's question

Is there any reason to want to compose morphemes together before applying them to a root or stem?

So, in some theories, you have to have a word at every step in the derivation, and even if that might not be the case, there's an explicit or implicit assumption that (compounding aside) you build words from some core outwards. Does that necessarily have to be the case, though?

For instance, I can imagine a system where you might put affixes together first, to make uberaffixes, and then apply those as a unit to the starting point, and I can imagine how to implement it in a categorial sort of system. What I'm wondering, then, is would there ever be a reason to want such a system? And are there compelling reasons to forbid such a system?

2. Melvin's question

One topic I would like to explore in more detail is the morphosemantics of Tense, Mood, and Aspect in some indigenous languages. For example, in Rukai stativity is marked morphologically with the prefix –ma, e.g. ma-rav?rav?r? (lit. to be happy). I was wondering if, for instance, Haisla has this same phenomenon, ie. if Aktionsarten is marked morphologically in Haisla or other indigenous languages you know.

3. Pilar's question
Chung and Ladusaw (2004) claim that object incorporation in the Chamorro verbs gäi- (have) and not have is a process of multiple linking in which the expression composed with the incorporated argument must be composed via Restrict. They claim that the incorporated object is semantically incomplete (it denotes a property rather than an individual) and that the extra object is not a syntactic complement of V, but an adjoined constituent. Do they make the claim that the incorporated object is semantically incomplete because it is reduplicated with an extra NP? What does ‘adjoined constituent’ mean? Is this object incorporation of type IV: N +TV > TV Classificatory Noun Incorporation, in which the valence of the verb does not change (from your handout #4)? Is it assumed cross-linguistically that incorporated objects are semantically incomplete (i.e., denote a property)?
4. Chris's question

If I'm understanding correctly, you seem to conceptualize word formation operations (both derivational and inflectional) in the same way, namely, not strictly lexical. I'm curious how you conceptualize these formally -- do you typically treat each morpheme as a function in a CG sense? What does this approach buy us (other than obviously, the ability to make some generalizations) as opposed to one which views morphology as ENTIRELY lexical?

5. Rachel's question

Could you go over how to formalize a sentence in one of the languages we have been talking about? I know you have gone over how you formalize things, but I was wondering if you could apply that formalism to a specific sentence, and go through it, almost like one would for a problem set in English in an introductory formal semantics course.

Here's a partial answer from a transcript of a Scheme session warts and all.

6. Emmon's question
Is Semantics universal?

References