Morphome interactions

Abstract

How morphological elements interact with one another is a major concern for both morphological theory and typological research. Morphemes, for example, are usually said to block each other when they are in subset-superset relations to one another. Little is known, by contrast, of how morphomes (i.e. forms with unnatural morphosyntactic distributions) interact with one another. This paper provides an initial typology of morphome interactions, based on whether their forms overlap in the paradigm or not, or whether the distribution of one constitutes a subset of the other or not. In addition, special attention will be paid to the outcome or the resolution of morphome orthogonalities. Focusing on the interaction between the L-and N-morphomes of Romance, the analogical changes related to their orthogonality are surveyed and a constraint isproposed that limits the possibilities of morphome interaction.

Morphological autonomy and the long-term vitality of morphomes: stem-final consonant loss in Romance verbs and paradigmatic analogy

“…When the paradigmatic distribution does not match any of the morphomes, we will need to know how severe the deviation is from the established patterns (e.g. if it respects, at least, their so-called 'stem-space', see Pirelli & Battista, 2000;Boyé, 2000;Bonami & Boyé, 2002, Boyé & Cabredo-Hofherr, 2006, Montermini & Bonami, 2013Herce, 2019) and in which cells exactly it occurs. The overall goal, thus, is to generate a sound quantitative estimation of the relative degree of productivity of (the different) morphomic structures over phonologically heterogeneous objects, long after morphomes first appeared in the language, and after the split of Proto-Romance into largely independent local varieties.…”

“…Many authors (e.g. Boyé & Cabredo-Hofherr, 2006, Herce, 2019 have noted that, taken across lexemes, some morphomes cross-classify because they span disjoint sets of cells. This gives rise to various zones of interpredictability in the paradigm, within which stems will always be identical and mutually predictable, but between which stems may differ.…”

“…1SG "bev-u "bev-u be"v-Ejam be"j-ur "kok-∅ "kok-∅ ko"ţ-Ejam kop"s-er 2SG "bej-i "bej-i be"v-Ejaj be"j-uri "koţ-i "koţ-i ko"ţ-Ejaj kop"s-eri 3SG "bEj-e "bej-e be"v-Eja be"j-ure "koţ-e "koţ-e ko"ţ-Eja kop"s-ere 1PL be"j-en be"j-en be"v-Ejan be"j-urno ko"ţ-en ko"ţ-en ko"ţ-Ejam kop"s-erno 2PL be"j-eţ be"j-eţ be"v-Ejaţ be"j-ureţ ko"ţ-eţ ko"ţ-eţ ko"ţ-Ejaţ kop"s-ereţ 3PL "bev-u "bev-u be"v-Eja be"j-uru "kok-u "kok-u ko"ţ-Eja kop"s-eru why IV tends to merge with its (semantic/syntactic) neighbours I (to form L), or III (to form III+IV), or both (to form I+III+IV). IV is never found, however, to merge with non-neighbouring II, for example, probably because this would give rise to a semantically very odd pattern of stem alternation (see Herce, 2019). Despite the various morphome and/or stem-space-compliant changes described so far, the majority (240, 56%) of the innovations identified here split the paradigm in ways that, like the Spanish example in Table 3, match neither morphomes nor morphome-derived stem domains.…”

Stress and stem allomorphy in the Romance perfectum: emergence, typology, and motivations of a symbiotic relation

“…status of the emerging paradigmatic patterns, and the exact relation of rhizotony and stem allomorphy in different varieties has been a recurrent topic for research (see Anderson 2011;Herce 2019;Maiden 2011;O'Neill 2014, etc.). There are, however, two important caveats to everything that has been mentioned here so far.…”

Paradigmatic restructuring and the diachrony of stem alternations in Chichimec

“…LANGUAGE, VOLUME 97, NUMBER 1 ( 2021) 30 Given the nature of Chichimec stem alternations, whereby it is the stem onset that is affected in all cases (except in the case of suppletive stems-see §4.2), morphomes in Chichimec cannot, by definition, overlap, as they have been shown to do in other languages (see Herce 2019). As such, if a verb has the C2 morphome, it cannot have the B morphome (note: we treat verbs that are precluded from having a stem B purely on phonological grounds as still incorporating, underlyingly, the B morphome and C1 morphome).…”