Patrick Farrell

Morphology and Its Relation to Phonology and Syntax

Introduction Steven G. Lapointe, Diane K. Brentari, Patrick M. Farrell The suffix-ize in English: implications for morphology, Rochelle Lieber Comments on the paper by Lieber Patrick M. Farrell Discussion of the papers by Lieber and Farrell Deriving passive without theta roles Hagit Borer Comments on the paper by Borer Andrew Spencer The function of voice markers in the Philippine languages Peter Sells Comments on the paper by Sells Margaret Speas Discussion of the papers by Sells and Speas On the autonomy of compounding morphology Jerrold M. Sadock Comments on the paper by Sadock Mark C. Baker Discussion of the papers by Sadock and Baker Identity avoidance in phonology and morphology Moira Yip Comments on the paper by Yip Diane K. Brentari Discussion of the papers by Yip and Brentari Impoverishment theory and morphosyntactic markedness Rolf Noyer Comments on the paper by Noyer Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy Discussion of the papers by Noyer and Carstairs-McCarthy Interfaces: explanation of allomorphy and the architecture of grammars David M. Perlmutter Comments on the paper by Perlmutter Richard D. Janda Level (non)ordering in recursive morphology: evidence from Turkish Sharon Inkelas and C. Orhan Orgun Comments on the paper by Inkelas and Orgun Gregory Stump Discussion of the papers by Inkelas/Orgun and Stump Isomorphism and monotonicity: or the disease model of morphology Mark Aronoff Some remarks on the morphology-syntax interface Steven G. Lapointe.

Functional shift as category underspecification

Focusing on words such as bag , hammer , kiss , and dance , which are subject to functional shift, i.e. alternate between noun and verb, this article argues against the traditional view that a category-changing rule derives verbs from nouns and vice versa. The alternative proposal is that root lexemes in general, and words like these in particular, are semantically underspecified with respect to the noun/verb distinction. The lexical semantic representations of such words include event schemas that are compatible with either noun or verb meanings. The verb vs. noun aspect of the meanings is supplied by the morphosyntactic contexts in which they appear. This analysis is shown to account straightforwardly for the general properties of functional shift, such as its ubiquity, productivity, and semantic regularity, and to be supported by both standard kinds of distributional evidence and neurolinguistic evidence.

Lewis Carroll's Doublets Net of English Words: Network Heterogeneity in a Complex System.

Lewis Carrolls English word game Doublets is represented as a system of networks with each node being an English word and each connectivity edge confirming that its two ending words are equal in letter length, but different by exactly one letter. We show that this system, which we call the Doublets net, constitutes a complex body of linguistic knowledge concerning English word structure that has computable multiscale features. Distributed morphological, phonological and orthographic constraints and the languages local redundancy are seen at the node level. Phonological communities are seen at the network level. And a balancing act between the languages global efficiency and redundancy is seen at the system level. We develop a new measure of intrinsic node-to-node distance and a computational algorithm, called community geometry, which reveal the implicit multiscale structure within binary networks. Because the Doublets net is a modular complex cognitive system, the community geometry and computable multi-scale structural information may provide a foundation for understanding computational learning in many systems whose network structure has yet to be fully analyzed.