Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations

Herce, Borja

doi:10.1515/lingvan-2022-0028

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…At the same time, 'soft' semantic boundaries (i.e. person-number values) are often ignored, even when these correspond to morphomic boundaries (see also Herce, 2022). Most violations of morphomic structure that cannot be explained by semantic factors can be explained via token frequency, with highly frequent forms from the present indicative capable of resisting assimilation to their morphomic and semantic neighbours.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Herce

2023

Morphology

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Morphologists of different backgrounds disagree with respect to the degree of autonomy of the morphological component of language from syntax and semantics. A precise and objective quantification of the diachronic productivity of Romance morphomes is the piece of evidence most crucially missing from this debate. On the basis of 502 morphophonological innovations associated with the loss of stem-final consonants across 63 Romance varieties, this paper quantifies the degree of productivity of different morphomes (the N pattern is found to be the most productive one) and of morphomic templates generally (15% of novel stem alternations are found to abide by them). Although a strong attraction effect is detectable for morphomes, the numbers suggest that the morphological autonomy and longevity of stem alternations in the family might have been somewhat overstated. For an optimal account of the morphological innovations observed, reference to inherited morphomic structure, semantic structure, and to frequency of use are needed in similar proportions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The alternative type of productivity that could be evaluated through the number of verbs that have an L, N, etc. of any kind is a similarly interesting and relevant one to study (see Cathcart et al, 2022;Herce, 2022) but will not be addressed here.…”

Section: The Phenomenon Explored: Cvc>c(v) Stemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Herce

2023

Morphology

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The cognitive reality of morphomes. Evidence from Italian

Cappellaro,

Dumrukcic,

Fritz

et al. 2023

Morphology

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This study reports and discusses the results of a pilot psycholinguistic investigation into the morphome – a term created (Aronoff 1994) to indicate systematic relations between form and meaning in morphology which lack synchronic semantic, functional, or phonological determinants and are thereby purely morphological.Despite a general consensus (cf. Bermúdez-Otero and Luís 2016) on the need to approach the question of the existence and nature of morphomic structures experimentally and interdisciplinarily, there has been no study beyond Nevins, Rodrigues, and Tang (2015), which focused on the morphomic structure in Romance verb morphology identified by Maiden (1992) and labelled (arbitrarily) the ‘L-pattern’ and concluded that in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese this structure is no longer part of native speakers’ grammar.The present study has replicated, for Italian, the basic experimental design of Nevins et al. It has obtained behavioural measurements (from two experiments) including eyetracking measures (from one experiment). All these measurements converge in showing (i) a statistically significant preference for target items that are consistent with the L-/U-pattern distribution and (ii) a faster decision-making process when the L-item was chosen. We conclude that (pace Nevins et al.) this morphomic structure is part of the internalized grammar of Italian adult speakers.

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The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations

Herce,

Allassonnière-Tang

2024

Linguistics Vanguard

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Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged, while their autonomously morphological nature has never been tested quantitatively or experimentally. This is the purpose of the present study. We use context-based embeddings to explore the semantic profile of Spanish verb stem alternations. At the paradigmatic level, our findings suggest that Spanish morphomes’ cells are characterized by significantly above-chance distributional-semantic similarity. At the lexical level, similarly, verbs that show more similar patterns of alternation have also been found to be closer in meaning. Both of these findings suggest that these structures may have an extramorphological function. Using gradient distributional-semantic similarity offers a way to objectively assess the degree of (un)naturalness of a set of forms and meanings, something which has been lacking from most discussions on the structure of features and the architecture of paradigms.

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Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations

Cited by 3 publications

References 23 publications

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

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

The cognitive reality of morphomes. Evidence from Italian

The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations

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