Morphological Variation: Theoretical and empirical perspectives

✍ Scribed by Antje Dammel (editor), Oliver Schallert (editor)

• Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 353
• Series: Studies in Language Companion Series
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Morphological variation is a rather young, yet fascinating topic to study in its own right because it offers challenging evidence both for the autonomy of morphology (morphomic processes) as well as for its tight interconnection with other grammatical domains, notably phonology and syntax. Covering a wide range of phenomena (e.g. negation structures, form function-mismatches in the verbal and nominal domain, loss of morphosyntactic feature values, etc.), the contributions to this volume combine in-depth empirical studies with the explanatory potential of modern theories of grammar as well as approaches for capturing and modelling microtypological diversity.

✦ Table of Contents

Morphological Variation
Editorial page
Title page
Copyright page
Table of contents
Introduction: On the benefits of analyzing morphological variation by linking theory and empirical evidence
1. Preliminaries
2. A short overview on the research tradition
3. Morphological variation and its importance for linguistic theory
3.1 Another kind of morphological naturalness
3.2 Morphological variation and its importance for linguistic theory
3.3 Variation and morphological theory
4. The contributions to the present volume
5. Lessons to be learned
Acknowledgements
References
Possessive -s in German: Development, variation and theoretical status
1. Introduction
2. Empirical analysis
2.1 The development of the superstable marker -s
2.2 The current occurrences of possessive -s
2.3 A contrastive comparison with English and Dutch
3. Theoretical considerations
3.1 Morphological status of possessive -s
3.2 Consequences for synchronic syntactic modelling
3.3 Implications for diachronic modelling
4. Conclusion
Corpora
References
Analyzing language change through a formalist framework
1. Motivation and overview
2. Theory: Formal inflectional models
3. Synchronic and diachronic analysis
3.1 Traditional inflection classes
3.2 Content paradigms
3.3 Realized paradigms
3.4 Form paradigms
4. Summary
5. Outlook
References
Appendix
Variation and change of plural verbs in Salzburg’s base dialects
1. Introduction
2. Theoretical preliminaries
2.1 IAV from a theoretical perspective
2.2 IAV from an empirical perspective
3. Plural verbs in Bavarian dialects of Salzburg
4. Method
4.1 Survey procedures
4.2 Material and stimuli
4.3 Informants and locations
5. Results
5.1 Plural verb variation and change from the 1970/80s to today
5.2 Intra-individual variation over time
6. Discussion
7. Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
Appendix
Content, form and realizations of Upper German case marking: Issues in modelling corpus-based data
1. Case marking in German dialects: A challenge for formal theories
2. Corpus-based study on Upper German dialects
2.1 A corpus of spoken dialectal language
2.2 A quantitative analysis of case marking
2.3 Types and patterns in Upper German case marking: Basic findings
3. Empirical data meets formal theory
3.1 PFM and the features of Upper German case marking
3.2 Modelling case marking types
3.3 Modelling case marking patterns
4. Discussion and conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
Thoughts on morphomes, on a Scandinavian background
1. Introduction
2. Explicating the morphome
2.1 Outlining the morphome
2.2 Not useless after all: Intra-morphological meaning
2.3 Why emphasize morphomes?
3. On some recent objections against morphomic patterns
3.1 The sociological argument
3.2 The Savognin argument and a preliminary conclusion
3.3 Stability and change: And clarification of a hypothesis
4. Some examples from Scandinavian
4.1 A new inflection class in Norwegian, Swedish and Faroese
4.2 Trying to copy your new neighbor
4.3 Meat from shoulders in Meldal
4.4 Strengthening of inflection class in Swedish and in Østfold
4.5 Neuters in transition
4.6 Body part nouns
4.7 Summing up Section 4
5. Some meta-objections and how to deal with them
5.1 On white and black swans
5.2 Learnability
5.3 “Taking morphology seriously”
5.4 Form-form relations
5.5 What is autonomy?
6. Concluding remarks
6.1 Independently morphological innovations
6.2 Some other lessons to take away
6.3 Envoi
Acknowledgments
References
How to get lost: The Präteritumschwund in German dialects
1. Introduction
2. The areal distribution of the preterite loss
3. The explanation
3.1 Step 1: Grammaticalization of the present perfect form
3.2 Step 2: Semantic expansion of the present perfect
3.3 Step 3: Functional expansion of the present perfect
3.4 Step 4: Marginalization of the preterite form
4. The hierarchy of preterite loss
4.1 Frequency
4.2 Morphological irregularity
4.3 Syntactic complexity
4.4 Semantic properties
5. The principles of losing forms
Acknowledgement
References
The interaction of phonological and morphological variation in Zurich German
1. Introduction
2. Methodology and data discussion
2.1 Phonological variation
2.2 Morphological variation
3. Theoretical framework
3.1 Canonical inflectional system
3.2 Shape conditioning
3.3 Overabundance
3.4 Higher-order exceptionality
4. Results
5. Conclusions
Acknowledgements
References
Negative concord in Alemannic: An OT-approach at the syntax-morphology interface
1. Introduction
2. Data
2.1 Metalinguistic comments in the dialectal literature
2.2 Spontaneous speech data
2.3 Questionnaire
2.4 Summary
3. Towards an explanation of NC
3.1 The semantic and syntactic behavior of n-indefinites
3.2 The syntax of NC: General issues and two applications
3.3 Explaining NC in optimality theory (OT)
3.4 Summary
3.5 A side note on the classification of NC types
4. Conclusion
Acknowledgements
References
A. Appendix
Variation in non-finiteness and temporality from a canonical perspective
1. Introduction
2. Methodology and data discussion
2.1 Finiteness in German
2.2 Variation in German (non-)finiteness
3. Theoretical framework
4. Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Corpora
Used
Mentioned
References
Strong or weak?: Or: How information structure governs morphosyntactic variation
1. Introduction
2. The two definite articles in South Hessian: Form and distribution
2.1 The current research status in a nutshell
2.2 The situation in South Hessian – an empirical research
2.3 Why focus also exists in the DP – evidence for a split-DP hypothesis
3. Pronouns: Form and distribution
3.1 In general
3.2 The morphosyntax of pronouns in German dialects
3.3 Strongly vs. weakly used pronouns
4. Comparison
5. Analysis
6. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Primary sources
Secondary literature
Index