A postsyntactic morphome cookbook

Abstract

In this tutorial, I introduce methods to implement morphomes (i.e., systematisc patterns of unnatural syncretism, Aronoff 1994) in Distributed Morphology (DM, Halle & Marantz 1993). Whereas proponents of DM have virtually completely ignored the morphome concept, I show that the theory provides a crucial formal mechanism to transfer morphomes into a postsyntactic setting: “parasitic” morphological features which are not interpretable by syntax, but depend in their distribution on other features. I discuss two canonical methods in DM to make such features available to morphological spellout, postsyntactic rules, and decomposition of syntactic features, and show that parasitic features allow for a formalization of the classical morphome cases and for capturing restrictions imposed by morphomic categories on specific morphological systems.

What 1sg forms tell us about Spanish theme vowels

“…(76) nazc-o nac-e-s nac-e nac-e-mos nac-é-is nac-e-n nazc-a nazc-a-s nazc-a nazc-a-mos nazc-a-is nazc-a-n ii) Verbs that are formed with the verbal stem -ducir and a prefix (Aronoff 1976) also add an extra /k/ under the same conditions: producir 'to produce', reducir 'to reduce', conducir 'to drive', etc. there is almost complete agreement in the literature that the existence of irregularity models that define specific patterns across cells in a paradigm support a morphomic approach (Aronoff 1994;Trommer 2016). In a morphomic approach, grammar contains specifically morphological features that have no role in syntax or semantics, and whose only function is to determine the morphological shape of some forms.…”

Romance Root Suppletion and Cumulative Exponence: Fusion, Pruning, Spanning

“…These features have a metalinguistic value, but are indeed observable to have their relevance in the derivation of morphomic rules. What is needed according to Trommer (2016), is a redundancy rule that makes a metafeature The problem now is how to circumvent the fact that [sg/3pl] is not a natural class, but rather a morphomic pattern (the N-pattern) as identified by Maiden in his work (e.g., Maiden 2004Maiden , 2009Maiden , 2018. 19 We would like to go back to a solution proposed by Trommer (2016) in his "postsyntactic morpheme cookbook": he proposes that in order to explain morphomic patterns in inflection, there are "hidden parasitic features", or "meta-features on markedness".…”

“…What is needed according to Trommer (2016), is a redundancy rule that makes a metafeature The problem now is how to circumvent the fact that [sg/3pl] is not a natural class, but rather a morphomic pattern (the N-pattern) as identified by Maiden in his work (e.g., Maiden 2004Maiden , 2009Maiden , 2018. 19 We would like to go back to a solution proposed by Trommer (2016) in his "postsyntactic morpheme cookbook": he proposes that in order to explain morphomic patterns in inflection, there are "hidden parasitic features", or "meta-features on markedness". These features have a metalinguistic value, but are indeed observable to have their relevance in the derivation of morphomic rules.…”

“…These features have a metalinguistic value, but are indeed observable to have their relevance in the derivation of morphomic rules. What is needed according to Trommer (2016), is a redundancy rule that makes a metafeature [m] visible to VI. In the case of Italian GO-suppletion in the present tense, this redundancy rule would look like this:…”

Borja Herce, The typological diversity of morphomes: A cross-linguistic study of unnatural morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. x + 303.

“…With this purpose, a working definition of ‘morphome’ is therefore required. Herce adopts Trommer’s (2016: 60) definition of morphomes: A morphome is ‘a systematic morphological syncretism which does not define a (syntactically or semantically) natural class’. This means that the identification of morphomes is determined by three main concepts – syncretism, (un)naturalness, and systematicity, which are discussed extensively in Chapter 2.…”