Morphology part 2 Andrew Hippisley Department of Computing, University of Surrey

Plan agreement, a case study in morphology challenging morphology suppletion syncretism deponency Please refer to handout!

What is agreement? inherent inflection: not required by the syntactic context contextual inflection: dictated by syntax (Booij 1996)

What is agreement? (See Corbett forthcoming for figure)

What is agreement? Discussion points elements involved nature of relationship: asymmetric features involved domain NP clause expression of agreement

What is agreement? Is agreement a matter of… syntax? semantics? morphology?

What is agreement? agreement versus government both characterised by an asymmetric relationship only agreement is a relationship of covariance features different agreement: gender, number, person government: case

Possible agreement Canonical versus non-canonical (Corbett forthcoming) redundancy controller marks same number of features as target (canonical) target marks more agreement features than controller (non-canonical)

Possible agreement Canonical versus non-canonical (Corbett) feature matching controller and target features have matching values; syntactic agreement (canonical) controller’s features differ in value from target; semantic agreement (non- canonical)

Possible agreement Canonical versus non-canonical (Corbett) Consistency in agreement pattern controller is consistent (canonical) controller is a hybrid (non-canonical)

Possible agreement Canonical versus non-canonical (Corbett) how many controllers target agrees with single controller (canonical) target agrees with multiple controllers (non-canonical) imbwa na-v-ana v-a-dz-o dogs(9/10) and- Pl -young(1/2) 2- ASSOCIATIVE -10- ASSOCIATIVE

Possible agreement Canonical versus non-canonical (Corbett) opacity of expressions controller and target agreements expressions are alliterative (canonical) controller and target agreements expressions are opaque (non-canonical)

Concluding agreement Agreement hard to generalise BUT covariance of features between target and controller asymmetry: target agrees with noun for a feature set noun never accommodates target’s features

Suppletion

Suppletion: a definition “a relation between signs X and Y such that the semantic difference...between X and Y is maximally regular...while the phonological difference is maximally irregular.” Mel’čuk (1994) Russian ‘child’ reb´onok (sg) / det´-i (pl) Russian ‘girl’ devušk(a) (sg) / devušk-i (pl)

Suppletion: a definition

Property A: frequency Suppleting items anomalously highly frequent absolute frequency relative frequency

PROPERY B: Inherent Inflection inherent inflection: not required by the syntactic context contextual inflection: dictated by syntax (Booij 1996) c.f. Bybee’s (1985) relevance of categories

PROPERTY C: Morphologically Systematic Latin stems

PROPERTY C: Morphologically Systematic Suppletion in Latin

PROPERTY C: Morphologically Systematic Slovene as an exception

Syncretism 'A single inflected form may correspond to more than one morphosyntactic description' (Spencer 1991: 45)

Example: Syncretism in Russian Russian has syncretism of dative singular and locative singular, because one form has more than one function... and because for other items there is a formal distinction.

A Slovene Referral

Deponency Greek verbs

Regular verb Meaningform presentfutureaorist Activeactive Passivepassive Middlemiddle

Deponency Type A Meaningform presentfutureaorist Activepassive Passive Middle

Deponency Type B Meaningform presentfutureaorist Activemiddle Passivepassive Middle

Deponency Type C Meaningform presentfutureaorist Passiveactive Active Middlemiddle

Deponency Type D Meaningform presentfutureaorist Passivemiddle Activeactive Middle

Deponency Type E1 Meaningform presentfutureaorist Passivepassivemiddleactive Active(forms from another paradigm) Middle