Analogy And Morphological Change

How do learners and speakers make sense of their language and make their language make sense? Is it dived or dove? Dwarfs or dwarves? If the best students aced the test, did the pretty good students beece it? You've probably often pondered such questions yourself, but did you know that similar questions have inspired some of the most important advances in our understanding not only of how languages change but also of how children acquire grammar and how the human mind works? This book is designed to help readers make sense of morphological change and, more generally, of the concept of analogy and its role in language and in human cognition. With a critical look at the past 150 years of linguistic work on analogical change, David Fertig brings clarity to a field rife with terminological and theoretical confusion.

Ranging from tonogenesis, stress shift, and quantity readjustment to paradigmatic levelling, allomorphy, and grammaticalization, this collection covers a wide spectrum of developments, primarily in Germanic, Romance, and Indo-Aryan. A traditional umbrella category of change in systems is that of analogy. Somewhat less sanctioned, markedness is a basic relation shaping the structure of systems, in phonology as well as morphology.

After a brief survey of the perception of morphological change in the standard works of the Hispanic tradition in the 20th century, the author first attempts to refine concepts such as analogy, leveling, blending, contamination, etc. as they have been applied to Spanish. He then revisits difficult problems of Spanish historical grammar and explores the extent to which various types of morphological processes may have operated in a given change. Selected problems are examined in light of abundant textual evidence. Some include: the resistance to change of Sp. dormir 'to sleep', morir 'to die', the vocalic sequence /ee/, the reduction of the OSp. verbal suffixes -ades, -edes, -ides, -odes, and the uncertain origin of Sp. eres 'you are'. Important notions such as the directionality of leveling, phonological vs. morphological change in the nominal and verbal paradigms, the morphological spread of sound change, and the role of morphological factors in apparent syntactic change are discussed.

In A-Morphous Morphology, Stephen Anderson presents a theory of word structure which relates to a full generative grammar of language. He holds word structure to be the result of interacting principles from a number of grammatical areas, and thus not localized in a single morphological component. Dispensing with classical morphemes, the theory instead treats morphology as a matter of rule-governed relations, minimizing the non-phonological internal structure assigned to words and eliminating morphologically motivated boundary elements. Professor Anderson makes the further claim that the properties of individual lexical items are not visible to, or manipulated by, the rules of the syntax, and assimilates to morphology special clitic phenomena. A-Morphous Morphology maintains significant distinctions between inflection, derivation, and compounding, in terms of their place ina grammar. It also contains discussion of the implications of this new A-Morphous position analysis of word structure.

The present volume contains selected papers from the 14th International Morphology Meeting held in Budapest, 13–16 May 2010, organized under the auspices of the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The selection of papers presented here addresses problems of language use in one or another sense, covering issues of regularity, irregularity and analogy, as well as the role of frequency in morphological complexity, morphological change and language acquisition. The languages discussed include Dutch, German, Greek, Hungarian, Lovari (Romani) and Russian. The contributors are Anna Anastassiadis-Symeonidis, Mario Andreou, Márton András Baló, Dunstan Brown, Gabriela Caballero, Anna Maria Di Sciullo, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Roger Evans, Alice C. Harris, László Kálmán, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Sabine Laaha, Laura E. Lettner, Maria Mitsiaki, Péter Rácz, Angela Ralli, Péter Rebrus, Alan K. Scott, and Miklós Törkenczy.

This accessible, hands-on text not only introduces students to the important topicsin historical linguistics but also shows them how to apply the methods described and how to thinkabout the issues; abundant examples and exercises allow students to focus on how to do historicallinguistics. Distinctive to this text is its integration of the standard topics with others nowconsidered important to the field, including syntactic change, grammaticalization, sociolinguisticcontributions to linguistic change, distant genetic relationships, areal linguistics, and linguisticprehistory. Examples are taken from a broad range of languages; those from the more familiarEnglish, French, German, and Spanish make the topics more accessible, while those fromnon-Indo-European languages show the depth and range of the concepts they illustrate.This secondedition features expanded explanations and examples as well as updates in light of recent work inlinguistics, including a defense of the family tree model, a response to recent claims on lexicaldiffusion/frequency, and a section on why languages diversify and spread.

This book fills a gap in lexical morphology, especially with reference to analogy in English word-formation. Many studies have focused their interest on the role played by analogy within English inflectional morphology. However, the analogical mechanism also deserves investigation on account of its relevance to neology in English. This volume provides in-depth qualitative analyses and stimulating quantitative findings in this realm.

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