Dissecting Morphological Theory 3: Diminutivization, Allomorphy and the Architecture of Grammar

Autor(en)
Stela Manova, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Olga Steriopolo
Abstrakt

Diminutive morphology presents a number of challenges to morphological theory and various issues have been discussed extensively: whether diminutivization is derivation or inflection (Dressler 1989; Scalise 1988; Stump 1993; Manova 2011; Grandi & Körtvélyessy 2015); are diminutive suffixes heads and/or modifiers (Wiltschko and Steriopolo 2007; Steriopolo 2009, 2015, 2016; Gouskova & Bobaljik, to appear); do they attach “low” or “high” in the syntactic tree (De Belder et al. 2014; Cinque 2015); which meanings are associated with diminutive morphology (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 1994; Jurafsky 1996) and so on. Nevertheless, there are still issues that have remained unaddressed:

1) Why do some languages have large sets of diminutive affixes, while others have very limited sets?

2) What is a diminutive allomorph? (Should allomorphs have the same semantic-pragmatic function, e.g. could they have different readings, either positive or negative, depending on the situation? Should allomorphs be associated with the same inflection class? Should allomorphs have the same syntactic function: are they either heads or modifiers or could they be both; could they attach at different “heights” in the syntactic tree, resulting in “high” vs. “low” allomorphs?)

3) How does allomorph selection take place in diminutivization? (Is it based on semantics, on form, on syntactic structure, on linearization, or on extragrammatical information?)

4) Are gender and inflection class encoded in the same way in diminutive and non-diminutive nouns? (If diminutive affixes impose gender and inflection class, what does this mean for our understanding of the morphology-syntax interface?)

5) What architecture of grammar best captures the peculiarities of diminutive morphology?

(a) Phonology after morphology, i.e. morphologically conditioned phonology (and consequently phonology-free syntax)

(b) Phonology before morphology, i.e. phonologically conditioned morphology (and maybe also syntax)

(c) A mixture of (a) and (b)

Organisation(en)
Institut für Philosophie, Institut für Germanistik
Externe Organisation(en)
Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS)
Publikationsdatum
2021
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
602004 Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
Link zum Portal
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/f6ab887d-3461-46b1-a889-b22ab2015e70