Table Of ContentSimplicity in Generative Morphology
Publications in Language Sciences 37
Editors
Leo Wetzels
Wim Zonneveld
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Simplicity in
Generative Morphology
by
Harry Bochner
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York 1993
Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague)
is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.
© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of
the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bochner, Harry, 1954 —
Simplicity in generative morphology / by Harry Bochner.
p. cm. — (Publications in language sciences ; 37)
Includes bibliographical references.
Includes index.
ISBN 3-11-013594-9
1. Grammar, Comparative and general —Morphology.
2. Generative grammar. I. Title. II. Series.
P243.B63
415 —dc20 92-28365
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bochner, Harry:
Simplicity in generative morphology / by Harry Bochner. —
Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1993
(Publications in language sciences ; 37)
ISBN 3-11-013594-9
NE: GT
© Copyright 1992 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this
book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printing: Gerike, Berlin. — Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin.
Printed in Germany.
Contents
Introduction
1.0. Overview 1
1.1. Productivity and blocking 3
1.2. Possible words versus acceptable words 7
1.3. Inflection and derivation 12
Redundancy in the lexicon
2.0. Introduction 15
2.1. Simplicity and redundancy 16
2.2. The morpheme-based model 21
2.2.1. Mechanics of the morpheme-based model 21
2.2.2. Morphemes and the evaluation metric 23
2.2.3. The definition of the morpheme 25
2.3. Idiosyncratic properties of words 30
2.3.1. Proposals for handling idiosyncrasies 31
2.3.2. Idiosyncrasies of distribution 34
2.4. The word-based model 39
2.4.1. Mechanics of the word-based model 39
2.4.2. The approaches to the lexicon contrasted 43
2.4.3. The measurement of regularity 48
2.4.4. Mismatching 49
2.5. Remarks on lexical representations 58
2.5.1. Listing of predictable words 58
2.5.2. Compromise models 61
2.5.3. A preliminary note on the status of morphemes 62
Patterns in the rule system
3.0. Introduction 65
3.1. Cumulative-pattern formation 66
3.2. Subset matching in the lexicon 75
3.2.1. Word isolates 75
3.2.2. Subsets of cumulative patterns 78
3.2.3. Implied patterns 80
3.3. Subset rules: subset matching applied to the rule system 87
3.3.1. The -abil-ity rule 88
3.3.2. *abil-ity 93
vi Contents
3.4. Subrules: subsets with variable substitution 97
3.4.1. Proper subrules and comparative-er 98
3.4.2. Improper subrules, and the truncation of -ous 102
3.4.3. The subrules of-ion 108
3.4.4. The parallelism between -ion nouns and -ive adjectives 113
Paradigms and related patterns
4.0. Introduction 119
4.1. Paradigms as patterns with more than two elements 120
4.2. Passamaquoddy possessed forms 134
4.3. Prefix+root+ion nouns 142
4.3.1. Prefix+root+ion nouns as a paradigmatic structure 144
4.3.2. Semantics 149
4.3.3. Latinate roots and the distribution of -ion 153
4.3.4. Allomorphy and mismatching 162
4.3.5. Irregular back-formations 166
4.3.6. Summary 170
Alternations in phonological form
5.0. Introduction 171
5.1. Morphological and phonological alternations 172
5.2. Alternations with multiple contexts 183
5.3. Paradigm levelling 188
5.4. Alternations and derived environments 195
5.5. Allomorphy and cyclicity 199
Against level-ordering and lexical phonology
6.0. Introduction 203
6.1. The historical perspective 205
6.2. #abil+ity 210
6.3. Bracketing paradoxes and blends 211
6.4. Lexical phonological phenomena 220
Summary
7.1. Restrictiveness of theories 227
7.2. On rejecting the morpheme 230
7.3. Overview 231
Notes 233
References 239
Index 245
Chapter 1
Introduction
1.0. Overview
Perhaps confusion about this matter can be traced to the use of the
term "Simplicity Measure" for particular proposed evaluation mea-
sures, it being assumed that "simplicity" is a general notion some-
how understood in advance outside of linguistic theory. This is a
misconception, however.
Chomsky (1965: 37)
The primary concern of this work is the notion of simplicity in a generative theory
of morphology. I make explicit the assumptions behind the prevailing morphologi-
cal model, and argue that any model that adheres rigorously to these assumptions is
empirically inadequate. I argue further that the essential insight behind these as-
sumptions can be captured in another way, and that this leads to a radically different
morphological model. I propose, as one implementation of this model, a theory
called Lexical Relatedness Morphology, henceforth LRM.
As an introduction to the issues, consider the word redness. I suggest that the
fundamental problem for a morphological model is to provide a formalization of
the intuition that knowledge of the word redness does not contribute to the com-
plexity of an English speaker's grammar. There are basically two ways this can be
done.
The familiar approach, going back to Halle (1962), assumes that the complexity
of the grammar should be measured by counting the number of symbols it con-
tains. This means that redness cannot have any representation in the grammar,
since any representation would contain some symbols, and so contribute to the
complexity of the grammar. This in turn means that the grammar must derive
redness rather than listing it, and leads to the morpheme-based model, in which we
have lexical entries for /red/ and /ness/, from which redness will be derived.
In chapter 2 I develop the logic behind the morpheme-based model more fully,
and show that it leads to a clear prediction that polymorphemic words like redness
cannot have any properties that cannot be predicted from their constituent mor-
phemes. I show in some detail that this prediction is false, and argue further that
the mechanisms available to reconcile the morpheme-based model with the facts are
ultimately inconsistent with the symbol-counting evaluation metric. This creates a
dilemma.
2 Introduction
I suggest that the solution to this dilemma can be found in a deeper examination
of the logic behind the symbol-counting evaluation metric. I will argue that the es-
sential insight behind this evaluation metric is that the complexity of a description
should be measured by what, following Jackendoff (1975), I call its independent-
information content. Symbol-counting provides a measure of independent-informa-
tion content only if representations in the grammar are redundancy-free, and this
leads to the morpheme-based model and its attendant difficulties. Crucially, there
are other ways to measure independent-information content that do not rely on
redundancy-free representations (cf. Stanley (1967)). In chapter 2 I develop an alter-
native I call the pattern-matching evaluation metric.
This alternative essentially characterizes morphological simplicity as conformity
with patterns of the grammar, rather than as brevity. This means that we can have a
lexical representation /redness/, as long as we also have a statement in the grammar
that describes the pattern of relationship we see in red and redness. This pattern al-
lows us to predict the information in redness on the basis of red\ as long as the
lexical entry /redness/ does not differ from the predictions of the grammar, it does
not contribute to its complexity. More precisely, if we take morphological rules to
be patterns for sets of lexical items, we can express the fact that a lexicon contain-
ing both /red/ and /redness/ contains no more independent information than one
containing just /red/. This approach to simplicity provides the theoretical underpin-
nings for the word-based models of Jackendoff (1975) and Aronoff (1976). I show
in chapter 2 that the empirical problems that are fatal for the morpheme-based
model do not arise in this approach, and develop LRM as a refinement of
Jackendoff s theory.
Chapter 3 extends the discussion of simplicity to the morphological rule sys-
tem. I argue that the rule system is not minimally redundant; instead, like the
lexicon, it contains systematic patterns of predictable information. This is the pri-
mary innovation that distinguishes LRM from all previous theories, including
Jackendoff's. For instance, I argue that in addition to a rule attaching -ity to any
sort of adjective, English also has a more specific rule that attaches -ity to adjec-
tives ending in -able. The latter rule is necessary to express the fact that -ity is
productive in this environment, while it isn't in general. I argue further that we do
not need a new type of rule to express the relationships among these very similar
rules; instead I show that, with some extensions to the pattern-matching evaluation
metric, morphological rules of the sort needed to express patterns among lexical
items can express patterns among other rules as well. So, for instance, the informa-
tion expressed in the rule that attaches -ity to adjectives in -able can all be predicted
from the general rules for -ity and for -able; as a result the only independent infor-
mation the speaker has to learn in order to include the more specific rule in the rule
system is the fact that it is productive.
The basic mechanisms for expressing patterns in the rule system are built up in
chapter 3 using rules that relate two lexical items. Some morphological patterns,
1.0. Overview 3
however, cannot be broken down satisfactorily into a system of rules relating just
two lexical items; the most obvious example of this is the problem of analyzing
inflectional paradigms in any highly inflected language. Chapter 4 demonstrates
that the mechanisms of chapter 3 can be readily extended to handle such configura-
tions of facts: the necessary mechanisms are introduced by sketching out an analy-
sis of part of the Latin verb system, concentrating on showing how systems of
partially redundant rules can be used to express the relationships between
paradigms. I then discuss the morphology of possession in Passamaquoddy, an
example where an unusually strong case can be made for a word-based analysis.
Finally, to show that the mechanisms needed for inflection are also needed for
derivation, supporting the LRM position that inflection and derivation form a uni-
fied system, I apply these mechanisms in a detailed study of the distribution and
form of English nouns like reception consisting of a prefix, a Latinate root, and
-ion.
Chapter 5 examines the interface between morphology and phonology. I argue
that morphological rules should not be limited to simple operations of concatena-
tion or substitution, but should also be able to make other changes in the phono-
logical shape of words. So, for instance, I take the [f]/[v] alternation in leaf/leaves
to be handled directly by a special subrule of the English plural rule, rather than by
the phonological component. I propose that such morphophonemic alternations are
integrated into the morphological rule system in a way that is possible only if we
accept the notion of systematic redundancy in the rule system proposed in chapter
3.1 argue further that if a broad range of phenomena, approximately that handled by
"Lexical Rules" in the theory of Lexical Phonology, is handled in this way by the
morphological component, then we can provide a more explanatory account for cer-
tain properties of these phenomena.
A different, widely accepted account of the interface between morphology and
phonology is provided by the theory of lexical phonology. Chapter 6 criticizes this
theory, primarily by attacking the notion of level-ordering, on which it is based. I
argue that the evidence that has been adduced to support Level Ordering in English
is better explained in another way, and that attempts to handle the well known
classes of counterexamples have not been successful.
Chapter 7 makes some concluding remarks on the restrictiveness of theories, the
status of the morpheme, and the results of this work.
1.1. Productivity and blocking
Productivity is a term that has been used in several different senses in the literature
on morphology. A large part of the issue is simply terminological; there are a vari-
ety of distinctions that can be made, and the most important thing is that it be clear
