Wolfgang U. Dressler

Leitmotifs in Natural Morphology

Natural Morphology is the term the four authors of this monograph agreed on to cover the leitmotifs of their common and individual approaches in questions of theoretical morphology. The introduction summarizes the basic concepts and strategies of Natural Morphology, to be followed by Mayerthaler who deals with universal properties of inflectional morphology, and Wurzel with typological ones which depend on language specific properties of inflectional systems, and Dressler with universal and typological properties of word formation. The final chapter by Panagl is an indepth study of diachronic evidence for productivity in word formation and for the overlap of word formation with inflectional morphology.

On the predictiveness of Natural Morphology

i. Natural Morphology as represented in the forthcoming volume by Dressler, Mayerthaler, Panagl & Wurzel (I985) came into being about 19772 as an attempt to create a counter-part to Stampean Natural Phonology and to develop and systematize Jakobsonian reflections on morphological universals. In this paper I will present and exemplify some ideas and findings of Natural Morphology, of course from my own specific point of view.

On the role of morphological richness in the early development of noun and verb inflection

This study proposes a new methodology for determining the relationship between child-directed speech and child speech in early acquisition. It illustrates the use of this methodology in investigating the relationship between the morphological richness of child-directed speech and the speed of morphological development in child speech. Both variables are defined in terms of mean size of paradigm (MSP) and estimated in a set of longitudinal spontaneous speech corpora of nine children and their caretakers. The children are aged 1;3–3;0, acquiring nine different languages that vary in terms of morphological richness. The main result is that the degree of morphological richness in child-directed speech is positively related to the speed of development of noun and verb paradigms in child speech.

Explaining Natural Phonology

Natural Phonology (henceforth NP), founded by Stampe (1969, cf. 1980), and not to be confused with Natural Generative Phonology (henceforth NGP, as in Vennemann 1972 and Hooper 1976) and other ‘natural’ and ‘concrete’ trends in process phonologies (as in Bruck et al. 1974, cf. §3·3), has been well expounded in Donegan & Stampe (1979b) and, in terms of its application to language acquisition, in Edwards & Shriberg (1983). Important differences from Generative Phonology (henceforth GP) have been enumerated by Wojcik (1981). It is not my intention to repeat these expositions, but rather to answer those criticisms that have so far been answered only partially, such as the objections to NP discussed in Anderson (1981), Dinnsen (1978), Dinnsen & Eckmann (1977, 1978), Drachman (1978, 1981), Dressler (1974a), Hellberg (1980), Kodzasov & Krivnova (1981: 145ff), Lass (1980, 1981).

Sociophonological methods in the study of sociolinguistic variation in Viennese German

This paper surveys and illustrates ten years of research done on sociophonological variation in Viennese German from a methodological point of view. It shows how variants of the same word form are collected and analyzed and how two types of rules are differentiated: (1) phonostylistic (optional) phonological rules of the fast/casual and formal hyperarticulate speech, both of Standard Austrian German and Viennese German Dialect; and (2) bidirectional input switch rules between these two strata. Psycholinguistic lab experiments are summarized, which vouch for the psychological reality of sociolinguistic concepts used. A theory of sociopsychological speech situations is described as well as the application of quantitative and qualitative sociolinguistic methods used. A major illustration of our approach is taken from the sociolinguistic study of defendants at court. The conclusion summarizes major claims. (Courtroom discourse, hermeneutics, phonological theory, phonological variation, psycholinguistic experiments, qualitative and quantitative methods, sociophonology, speech situations, style repertoires, switching, text linguistics, therapeutic discourse; Standard Austrian German, Viennese German.)

Early Acquisition of Verb Grammar and Lexical Development: Evidence from Periphrastic Constructions in French and Austrian German

This paper takes a functionalist approach to the acquisition of verb morphology in French and Austrian German. The development of periphrastic constructions using auxiliaries and modal verbs (compound past, modal constructions and analytic future) was examined in two French and two Austrian children’s spontaneous speech samples from the onset of production until 3;0. Crosslinguistic comparisons showed both similarities and differences in the development of periphrastic constructions (e.g., compound past was the first structure to emerge in French but not in Austrian German, analytic future was the last in both languages), suggesting an interplay between general cognitive and language-specific factors. In the four children, developmental analyses showed precursors, such as bare infinitives and past participles and preverbal fillers, which denote a gradual and continuous acquisition process. They also showed temporal relations between grammaticization and lexical production of verbs, which is an argument for the ‘critical lexical mass’ hypothesis and for interdependencies between lexical and grammatical developments. These analyses support a constructivist and interactive view of language acquisition.

The Theoretical Relevance of Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition

The aim of this contribution is to show the relevance of a theory-guided study of the very first phases of morphological acquisition (pre- and protomorphology, cf. 2.2) for linguistic theory in general and for the concept of modularity in particular. Our approach is based on (1) naturalness theory (particularly the model of Natural Morphology, cf. Kilani-Schoch 1988) with its distinction of (a) grammatical rules vs. extragrammatical operations and (b) prototypical vs. non-prototypical morphology (cf. Dressler & Merlini 1994a), (2) the model of self-organizing processes (autopoiesis, cf. Karpf 1991) and (3) the use of functional explanation (cf. Dressler 1994a). The discussion will be illustrated by examples drawn from the first samples of data collected in an incipient international project on “The Acquisition of Pre- and Protomorphology”.1 This project is an attempt to compare the acquisition of morphology in about two dozen languages by children from the age of 14 months onward.

Early noun plurals in German: regularity, productivity or default?

The acquisition of German plurals has been the focus of controversy in the last decade. In this paper we claim that degree of productivity (i.e. the capacity of nouns to form potential plurals) plays a key role in determining pace of acquisition. A plural elicitation task was administered to 84 Viennese German-speaking children aged 2;6 to 6;0. Analyses of correct responses showed that the highest scores were obtained with -e plurals, followed by the plural markers -e + U, -er + U, -s and -(e)n. The lowest score was observed for pure Umlaut (U) plurals. Analyses suggested an impact of productivity on the number of correct scores: fully productive and productive plural patterns obtained higher correct scores than weakly productive and non-productive ones. The results of the study support our productivity scale and are compatible both with single-route models and with a race-model variant of the dual-route view.

Analogical effects on linking elements in German compound words

This paper examines whether the selection of linking elements for novel German compounds can be better explained in terms of a single or a dual-route model. Previous studies had focused on the predictability of linking elements by rules. We investigate a single-route model by focusing on the paradigmatic analogical effect of the compounds sharing the left (right) constituent with the target compound, i.e., the left (right) constituent family. A production experiment reveals an effect of the left, but not of the right constituent family. Simulation studies of the responses, using a computational model of paradigmatic analogy, show that the left constituent and its phonological and morphological properties (rime, gender, and inflectional class) simultaneously codetermine the selection of linking elements. We show how these results can be accounted for by a single-route approach, and we outline a symbolic interactive activation model that merges the factors into one psycholinguistically motivated processing mechanism.

The processing of interfixed German compounds

This postulate by Goethe (*1749), the first protagonist of a new discipline of morphology (albeit first only within biology), confronts us with the main problem of processing studies of morphology: Are morphological constructions processed as wholes or with regard to their parts or, if both, under which conditions? This question has been of central concern in the psycholinguistic literature on lexical processing over the past quarter century. The debate in this area was initiated by the provocative claim put forward by Taft and Forster (1975; 1976) that multimorphemic words are represented in the mental lexicon in terms of their constituents and that multimorphemic word recognition routinely involves a morphological decomposition procedure. Subsequent experimentation, however, has pointed to the view that neither this strong position nor the strong contrary position advocated by Butterworth (1983) accounts for the performance of language users across languages, task types, and stimulus categories (see McQueen and Cutler (1998) for a recent review). Even within individual categories of morphological construction, experimental results have led to a rather complex view of the role of morphology in lexical processing. Compound word processing, for example, has been shown to provide evidence for both whole word representation and constituent activation. In general, semantically transparent compounds show constituent activation, whereas semantically opaque compounds show greater evidence of whole word activation (Libben 1998; Sandra 1990; Zwitserlood 1994). Recent work by Libben, Derwing and de Almeida (1999) has also suggested that the processing of compounds may involve the creation of multiple representations that are simultaneously computed and evaluated. Libben et al. (1999) claim that the processing of compounds is not guided by a principle of parsing efficiency but rather by a mechanism that uncovers the maximum number of morphemes within a multimorphemic string.