Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism; Gereon Muller

Gereon Müller [+–]

Universität Leipzig

Gereon Müller is Professor of General Linguistics at Universität Leipzig.

Harmonic serialism is an active research programme in phonology and syntax but has so far not been pursued in morphology. This book delivers a proof of concept: It shows that harmonic serialism can be substantiated as a viable approach to inflectional morphology, covering roughly the same ground as standard models like Distributed Morphology or Paradigm Function Morphology. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence from a variety of typologically different languages, Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism offers a fresh perspective on the composition of inflected words that is made possible by a strictly derivational orientation incorporating repeated optimization procedures. This gives rise to new and convincing solutions to some recalcitrant problems in inflectional morphology, related to phenomena like affix order, extended exponence, disjunctive blocking, non-local stem allomorphy, *ABA patterns, impoverishment effects, deponency, and paradigm gaps.

The book introduces harmonic serialism from scratch and develops morphological analyses against the background of applications of the theory in phonology and syntax. It will be of use to students and scholars interested in morphology, phonology, syntax, and grammatical theory more generally.

Series: Advances in Optimality Theory

Preliminaries

Acknowledgements [+–] ix-x

Harmonic serialism is an active research programme in phonology and syntax but has so far not been pursued in morphology. This book delivers a proof of concept: It shows that harmonic serialism can be substantiated as a viable approach to inflectional morphology, covering roughly the same ground as standard models like Distributed Morphology or Paradigm Function Morphology. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence from a variety of typologically different languages, Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism offers a fresh perspective on the composition of inflected words that is made possible by a strictly derivational orientation incorporating repeated optimization procedures. This gives rise to new and convincing solutions to some recalcitrant problems in inflectional morphology, related to phenomena like affix order, extended exponence, disjunctive blocking, non-local stem allomorphy, *ABA patterns, impoverishment effects, deponency, and paradigm gaps. The book introduces harmonic serialism from scratch and develops morphological analyses against the background of applications of the theory in phonology and syntax. It will be of use to students and scholars interested in morphology, phonology, syntax, and grammatical theory more generally.

Chapter 1

Background [+–] 1-32

Harmonic serialism is an active research programme in phonology and syntax but has so far not been pursued in morphology. This book delivers a proof of concept: It shows that harmonic serialism can be substantiated as a viable approach to inflectional morphology, covering roughly the same ground as standard models like Distributed Morphology or Paradigm Function Morphology. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence from a variety of typologically different languages, Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism offers a fresh perspective on the composition of inflected words that is made possible by a strictly derivational orientation incorporating repeated optimization procedures. This gives rise to new and convincing solutions to some recalcitrant problems in inflectional morphology, related to phenomena like affix order, extended exponence, disjunctive blocking, non-local stem allomorphy, *ABA patterns, impoverishment effects, deponency, and paradigm gaps. The book introduces harmonic serialism from scratch and develops morphological analyses against the background of applications of the theory in phonology and syntax. It will be of use to students and scholars interested in morphology, phonology, syntax, and grammatical theory more generally.

Chapter 2

From Optimality Theory to Harmonic Serialism [+–] 33-92

The first chapter lays out standard parallel optimality-theoretic approaches to inflectional morphology (based on work like Grimshaw (2001), Trommer (2001; 2003; 2006), Wunderlich (2004), Don & Blom (2006), Ortmann (2002; 2004), Stiebels (2000; 2002; 2006)). A main result of standard parallel optimality theoretic approaches to inflectional morphology is that the two basic principles of morphological realization by underspecified exponents - viz., compatibility and specificity – do not have to be stipulated (as they are. e.g., in the Subset Principle in Distributed Morphology, or in Panini’s Principle in Paradigm Function Morphology) but follow from the interaction of IDENT and MAX contstraints, respectively.

Chapter 3

Extended Exponence [+–] 93-160

Extended exponence (Matthews (1972; 1974)) poses a challenge for many theories of inflectional morphology, including optimality theory: If one exponent α satisfies two faithfulness constraints C1, C2, and another exponent β only satisfies one of them (say, C1), then, other things being equal, β should be blocked due to harmonic bounding. I argue that this problem can be solved by integrating a constraint MinimizeSatisfaction (MinSat), which requires outputs to gradually improve the constraint profile of their inputs (by requiring a minimization of new satisfactions of constraints in outputs), and which is independently motivated both for phonology (it derives otherwise unexplained counter-bleeding effects in harmonic serialism; see McCarthy (2007)) and syntax (it derives Merge over Move effcts; see Chomsky (2000; 2015)). On this view, optimization is slowed down: Extended exponence can arise because β is locally optimal (minimizing constraint satisfaction), and α is ultimately also optimal because it can later satisfy an additional constraint (again, in accordance with MinSat). This result cannot be achieved in standard parallel OT.

Chapter 4

Disjunctive Blocking Revisited [+–] 161-219

There has been a lot of discussion recently in the Distributed Morphology literature as to how big the local domain for allomorphy is. I argue that an approach in terms of harmonic serialism that envisages word-internal movement triggered by alignment constraints makes it possible to maintain maximal locality for allomorph selection; the reason is that the overt position of some morphological exponent does not have to correspond to its base position (which is the position where it is selected).

Chapter 5

Suppletion [+–] 221-279

Wiese (2005) and Bobaljik (2012) have suggested that stem allomorphy obeys an *ABA constraint (for ablaut and comparative/superlative formation, respectively); this issue has received a lot of attention in the recent morphological literature. *ABA can be derived in standard morphological theories by assuming morphological exponence to be governed by specificity, but only if the features involved are privative, and if the different syntactic contexts (e.g., infinitive, past participle, finite past tense; or positive, comparative, superlative) are characterized by subset-superset relations. I show that there is reason to doubt both these assumptions. Given this state of affairs, it turns out that an approach to *ABA in terms of harmonic serialism accounts for the absence of this pattern without further ado, even if binary features and non-subset-superset-related syntactic contexts are assumed: To derive an ABA pattern, a stem exponent (A) that has initially been taken out of the morphological array (emerging as optimal at an early optimization step), and that has subsequently been removed in favour of a stem exponent B (because B turns out as optimal at a later step) woul dhave to come back again, which it cannot do because it is irrevocably gone by this time. As a consequence, an unfaithful ABB pattern will be optimal in the end in this case (with Neutralization plus, possibly, input optimization occurring since the ABB pattern can also be derived in a faithful way with a different initial input).

Chapter 6

Consequences [+–] 281-318

Harmonic serialist inflectional morphology incorporating MinSat raises the question of how standard instances of disjunctive blocking (or disjunctive ordering) in morphology can be accounted for, where it would seem that it has to be the exponent that maximally satisfies faithfulness constraints that must be selected. I argue that this is also done gradually, in a series of optimization steps: Based on an initial morphological array (Kager (1996), Masaró (1996)) containing all the potential exponents for a given slot, the derivation selects an exponent in accordance with MinSat, and discards it again in the next optimization step in favour of an even more faithful exponent, and so on, until the most specific exponent satisfying Ident constraints remains as the optimal candidate on which the derivation converges. This approach necessitates two simple assumptions: First, there always is an elsewhere marker in a morphological array. And second, extended exponence scenarios differ from disjunctive blocking senarios only in that the additional, newly selected exponent removes the earlier, locally optimal exponent in the later case, but not in the former one. (See Müller (2017a;b) for arguments for an operation of structure removal in syntax.)

End Matter

References [+–] 319-345

Harmonic serialism is an active research programme in phonology and syntax but has so far not been pursued in morphology. This book delivers a proof of concept: It shows that harmonic serialism can be substantiated as a viable approach to inflectional morphology, covering roughly the same ground as standard models like Distributed Morphology or Paradigm Function Morphology. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence from a variety of typologically different languages, Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism offers a fresh perspective on the composition of inflected words that is made possible by a strictly derivational orientation incorporating repeated optimization procedures. This gives rise to new and convincing solutions to some recalcitrant problems in inflectional morphology, related to phenomena like affix order, extended exponence, disjunctive blocking, non-local stem allomorphy, *ABA patterns, impoverishment effects, deponency, and paradigm gaps. The book introduces harmonic serialism from scratch and develops morphological analyses against the background of applications of the theory in phonology and syntax. It will be of use to students and scholars interested in morphology, phonology, syntax, and grammatical theory more generally.

Index [+–] 346-350

Harmonic serialism is an active research programme in phonology and syntax but has so far not been pursued in morphology. This book delivers a proof of concept: It shows that harmonic serialism can be substantiated as a viable approach to inflectional morphology, covering roughly the same ground as standard models like Distributed Morphology or Paradigm Function Morphology. Furthermore, based on empirical evidence from a variety of typologically different languages, Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism offers a fresh perspective on the composition of inflected words that is made possible by a strictly derivational orientation incorporating repeated optimization procedures. This gives rise to new and convincing solutions to some recalcitrant problems in inflectional morphology, related to phenomena like affix order, extended exponence, disjunctive blocking, non-local stem allomorphy, *ABA patterns, impoverishment effects, deponency, and paradigm gaps. The book introduces harmonic serialism from scratch and develops morphological analyses against the background of applications of the theory in phonology and syntax. It will be of use to students and scholars interested in morphology, phonology, syntax, and grammatical theory more generally.

Reviews

Provides a welcome contribution to the landscape of both morphological theories and OT formalisms, drawing our attention to similarities and differences between frameworks, and highlighting data from a variety of understudied languages. IMHS is provocative in the best possible way: not by virtue of heavy-handed rhetoric, but through clear argumentation.
Phonology

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Inflectional Morphology in Harmonic Serialism

Gereon Müller [+–]

Universität Leipzig

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