1. Hungarian speakers use morphological dependencies in inflecting novel formsGuy Tabachnick, 2024, original scientific article Abstract: Theories of morphology must account for lexicalized variation: lexical items that differ unpredictably in their inflection must be memorized individually and differ in their stored representation. When tested on such cases, adult speakers usually follow the Law of Frequency Matching (Hayes et al. 2009), extending gradient phonological patterns from the lexicon. This paper looks at lexicalized variation in the Hungarian possessive: first, I show that a noun’s choice of possessive is partially predicted by its plural form as well as its phonological shape. Then, using a novel nonce word paradigm, I show that Hungarian speakers productively apply this cooccurrence pattern between the plural and possessive. I handle lexicalized variation with diacritic features marking lexical entries and propose that Hungarian speakers have learned a gradient cooccurrence relation between diacritic features indexing their plural and possessive forms, extending the sublexicon model of Gouskova et al. (2015). In this proposal, morphological knowledge is distributed across rules in a generative grammar, individual lexical items indexed for their morphological properties, and pattern-matching grammars storing generalizations over those indexed lexical items. Keywords: frequency matching, diacritic features, inflectional paradigms, productivity, wug test, Hungarian Published in RUNG: 18.06.2024; Views: 1244; Downloads: 7 Full text (1,75 MB) This document has many files! More... |
2. Speakers apply morphological dependencies in the inflection of novel forms : lecture at the University of Connecticut, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Linguistics, Ling Lunch, 18. 4. 2023Guy Tabachnick, 2023, invited lecture at foreign university Abstract: Theories of morphology must account for lexicalized variation: lexical items that differ unpredictably in their inflection must be memorized individually and differ in their stored representation. When tested on such cases, adult speakers usually follow the “law of frequency matching” (Hayes et al. 2009), extending gradient phonological patterns from the lexicon. In this talk, I present results from two wug tests showing that Hungarian and Czech speakers likewise extend gradient morphological patterns from the lexicon: that is, they productively imply correlations between inflected forms of the same word. I handle lexicalized variation using diacritic features marking lexical entries and propose that Hungarian and Czech speakers have learned a gradient cooccurrence relation between diacritic features, extending the sublexicon model of Gouskova et al. (2015). This approach also allows for a flexible analysis of traditional inflection classes (in languages like Russian) as emergent clusters of frequently cooccurring features. Keywords: morphology, psycholinguistics, inflection classes, nonce word study, frequency matching, morphological dependencies, Hungarian, Czech Published in RUNG: 05.03.2024; Views: 1302; Downloads: 2 Link to file This document has many files! More... |
3. Speakers apply morphological dependencies in the inflection of novel forms : lecture at the Linguistic Society of America 97th Annual Meeting, January 6, 2023Guy Tabachnick, 2023, unpublished conference contribution Abstract: Since Berko (1958), nonce word studies have shown that speakers exhibit morphological productivity: they can create morphologically complex forms of unfamiliar lexical items. Speakers are known to use a word’s phonology in morphological productivity (e.g. Bybee, 2001; Albright and Hayes, 2003; Hayes and Londe, 2006). Using a novel nonce word paradigm in Hungarian, I show that speakers can also be sensitive to a word’s morphological behavior: specifically, Hungarian speakers take a novel word’s plural allomorph into account in selecting its possessive, reflecting the distribution of plural and possessive allomorphs in the lexicon. This experimental paradigm thus sheds light on how speakers use morphological dependencies: correlations between members of an inflectional paradigm (see Ackerman and Malouf, 2013). Keywords: Morphology, Psycholinguistics, nonce word study, productivity, morphological dependencies, Hungarian Published in RUNG: 04.03.2024; Views: 1609; Downloads: 8 Full text (1,00 MB) This document has many files! More... |