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Abstract: This dissertation investigates morphological dependencies: correlations between two lexically specific patterns, such as selection of inflectional affixes. Previous work has established that such correlations exist in the lexicon of morphologically rich languages (Ackerman et al., 2009; Wurzel, 1989), but has not systematically tested whether speakers productively extend these patterns to novel words. I present a series of corpus and nonce word studies—in Hungarian, Czech, and Russian—testing whether speakers vary their selection of suffixed forms of novel words based on the forms of that word that are presented to them. In all three cases, speakers vary their responses in accordance with the provided stimuli, demonstrating that they have learned and productively apply morphological dependencies from the lexicon. I present a theoretical account of morphological dependencies that can account for my experimental results, based on the sublexicon model of phonological learning (Allen & Becker, 2015; Becker & Gouskova, 2016; Gouskova et al., 2015). In this model, speakers index lexically specific behavior with diacritic features attached to underlying forms in lexical entries, and learn generalizations over sublexicons defined as words that share a feature. These generalizations are stored as constraints in phonotactic grammars for each sublexicon, enabling speakers to learn phonological and morphological dependencies predicting words that pattern together. This model provides a unified treatment of morphological dependencies and generalizations that are phonological in nature. My studies show a wide range of learned effects, not limited to those that follow an organizational principle like paradigm uniformity. The sublexicon model assumes that speakers can learn arbitrary generalizations without restrictions, giving it needed flexibility over more restrictive models which rely on notions of morphophonological naturalness.
Keywords: inflectional affixes, nonce word study, lexical productivity, morphological dependencies, diacritic features, dissertations
Published in RUNG: 04.03.2024; Views: 299; Downloads: 6
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