Abstract
Constructional approaches to morphology and syntax are based on the idea that the Saussurean sign is not only a powerful device for modeling the relationship between the form and meaning of morphemes, but, if appropriately adapted, it can be usefully extended to any kind of morphological and syntactic structure. Such approaches have been shown to be able to effectively account for a wide range of morphosyntactic phenomena, but an underexplored area is how different kinds of signifiers become associated with both lexical and constructional meanings. This article considers this issue by exploring the range of variation found in the shapes of signifiers in morphological constructions. A particular focus will be signifiers that deviate from a canonical linear ideal and the role of templates in constraining the realization of signifiers. The kinds of meanings that specific kinds of signifiers can be associated with in signs will also be briefly considered. The primary goal of this article is to establish the study of possible signifier shapes as an important issue for Construction Morphology. It will also be argued that constructional approaches are especially well suited for analyzing generalizations holding among the signifiers in a given language.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
I would like to thank Geert Booij, Larry Hyman, and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier version of this article.
- 2.
The problem of developing theories and formal models of the relationships between parallel structures is explored in syntactic frameworks such as Lexical Functional Grammar (see e.g., Bresnan (2001: 50–56)) or the automodular approach developed by Sadock (2012: 30). So, the recognition of the problem is not new to this work. Rather, the intended contribution is to explore the problem in a domain not yet closely examined from this perspective: the linkage of phonological form to other grammatical properties.
- 3.
I use the term signifier to emphasize that the domain of interest are the forms associated with morphosyntactic constituents rather than full morphological constructions in and of themselves. Related terms, such as exponent or formative, could also be used, but these tend to be primarily used for specific kinds of morphology (e.g., inflection in the case of exponent) or emphasize specific ways that form does (or does not) pair with meaning (in the case of formative). The use of the term signifier also reflects a conscious attempt to relate work on constructional approaches to grammar to the Saussurean sign, the conceptual forebearer of the construction.
- 4.
In a morphological context, Bye and Svenonius (2012: 429) refer to this as the “concatenative ideal”.
- 5.
- 6.
Transformationalist frameworks also frequently make use of elements resembling zero morphemes, so-called null operators (see, e.g., Browning 1987). These devices are used to analyze certain kinds of phrasal syntactic relations. While they can occupy positions in a syntactic tree that can also be occupied by signs, they do not seem to be signs in the Saussurean sense. See also Baker (1990) on the distinction between two kinds of zero, one more morphological in orientation and the other more syntactic in orientation, as well as Lemaréchal (1997) for consideration of the role of “zeros” in linguistic analysis more broadly. Rhodes (1992: 413–414) provides an early discussion of zero morphemes from a constructional perspective, and Trommer (2012b) contains a recent overview of zero morphology from a theoretical perspective. The term significative absence is used here to make clear that a specific kind of zero morphology is in focus where a sign that is otherwise canonical lacks an overt signifier of any kind.
- 7.
- 8.
The opposite pattern where a sign has a signifier that does not clearly signify anything is found as well in the form of various dummy elements which appear for formal reasons but do not encode any specific semantics. An example of this can be found in Ndebele where a dummy morpheme with shape yi- appears in cases where a disyllabic templatic restriction must be satisfied in certain verbal forms but cannot be met automatically for verb roots whose signifiers do not have enough phonological material (see Hyman (2009: 186), Good (2016: 71–73), and Sect. 3.2.4).
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
The work of Gurevich (2006: 54–57) within Construction Morphology employs templates to characterize ordering relations among morphemes, though the role of templates within the framework is not a central issue to the discussion.
- 12.
- 13.
Rhodes (1992: 418), in an early proposal for a constructional approach to morphology, suggests that a special feature can be associated with morphological constructions to specify the way the phonological material associated with the construction should be combined. The CVTVK schema could be viewed as a language-specific instantiation of such a feature.
- 14.
The abbreviations for the position class labels in Fig. 1 are interpreted as follows (see Inkelas 1993: 561): pl.sbj, Plural Subject marker; du.sbj, Dual Subject marker; pl.obj, Plural Object marker; m.obj, Masculine Object marker; inc.du.sbj, Inclusive Dual Subject marker; loc, Directional–Locational markers; iter, Iterative marker; tns, Tense markers; sbj.pers, Subject Person (and gender) markers.
- 15.
There is some controversy in the theoretical literature as to whether or not linguistic treatments relying on complex position class systems of the sort developed by Inkelas (1993) should be considered valid as analytical devices (see, e.g., Downing and Stiebels 2012: 416–416). As discussed in Good (2016: 31–34), there are methodological reasons to consider how such analyses compare to other analyses of ordering restrictions at present.
- 16.
The details of the form and function of augment morphemes can be somewhat complicated. See Katamba (2003: 107–108) for overview discussion and de Blois (1970) for a detailed survey. For present purposes, we can treat nouns with and without the augment in a way comparable to the declension classes associated with segmental case systems.
- 17.
In the transcription system used for Umbundu for the data presented here, a vowel without a tone mark has the same tone as that found in the preceding syllable. Further details on the interpretation of the tone transcription can be found in Schadeberg (1986: 427–428).
References
Akinlabi, Akinbiyi. 2011. Featural affixes. In The Blackwell companion to phonology, vol. II, ed. Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice, 1945–1971. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Anceaux, J. C. 1965. The Nimboran language: Phonology and morphology. ’s-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff.
Aronoff, Mark. 1992. Segmentalism in linguistics: The alphabetic basis of phonological theory. In The linguistics of literacy, ed. Pamela Downing, Susan D. Lima, and Michael Noonan, 71–82. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by itself: Stems and inflectional classes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baerman, Matthew. 2010. Introduction: Defectiveness: Typology and diachrony. In Defective paradigms: Missing forms and what they tell us, 1–18. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baker, Mark C. 1990. Pronominal inflection and the morphology-syntax interface. In Papers from the 26th regional meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Volume 1: The main session, ed. Michael Ziolkowski, Manuela Noske, and Karen Deaton, 25–48. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Bearth, Thomas. 1971. L’énoncé toura (Côte d’Ivoire). Norman, OK: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Blanchon, Jean Alain. 1998. Semantic/pragmatic conditions on the tonology of the Kongo noun-phrase: A diachronic hypothesis. In Theoretical aspects of Bantu tone, ed. Larry M. Hyman and Charles Kisseberth, 1–32. Stanford: CSLI.
de Blois, Kees F. 1970. The augment in the Bantu languages. Africana Linguistica 4: 85–165.
Booij, Geert. 2010. Construction morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Booij, Geert. 2016. Construction morphology, Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics. http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/.
Booij, Geert, and Jenny Audring. 2017. Construction morphology and the parallel architecture of grammar. Cognitive Science 41(S2): 277–302.
Bresnan, Joan. 2001. Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
Broadbent, Sylvia M. 1964. The Southern Sierra Miwok language. Berkeley: UC Press.
Brown, Dunstan, and Marina Chumakina. 2012. What there might be and what there is: An introduction to Canonical Typology. In Canonical morphology and syntax, ed. Dunstan Brown, Marina Chumakina, and Greville G. Corbett, 1–19. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Browning, Marguerite. 1987. Null operator constructions. Ph.D. dissertation. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Bye, Patrik, and Peter Svenonius. 2012. Non-concatenative morphology as epiphenomenon. In The morphology and phonology of exponence, ed. Jochen Trommer, 427–495. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Caballero, Gabriela, and Alice C. Harris. 2012. A working typology of multiple exponence. In Current issues in morphological theory: (Ir)regularity, analogy, and frequency, ed. Ferenc Kiefer, Mária Ladányi, and Péter Siptár, 163–188. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Caballero, Gabriela, and Sharon Inkelas. this volume. A construction-based approach to multiple exponence.
Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. ’s-Gravenhage: Mouton.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 2005. Deriving Greenberg’s Universal 20 and its exceptions. Linguistic Inquiry 36: 315–332.
Davis, Stuart, and Natsuko Tsujimura. 2014. Non-concatenative derivation: Other processes. In The Oxford handbook of derivational morphology, ed. Rochelle Lieber and Pavol Štekauer, 190–218. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davis, Stuart, and Natsuko Tsujimura. this volume. Arabic nonconcatenative morphology in construction morphology.
Downing, Laura J., and Barbara Stiebels. 2012. Iconicity. In The morphology and phonology of exponence, ed. Jochen Trommer, 379–426. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dryer, Matthew S. 2006. Descriptive theories, explanatory theories, and basic linguistic theory. In Catching language: The standing challenge of grammar writing, ed. Felix Ameka, Alan Dench, and Nicholas Evans, 207–234. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dryer, Matthew S. 2013. Position of case affixes. In The World Atlas of Language Structures online, ed. Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/chapter/51.
Efere, Emmanuel Efereala. 2001. The pitch system of the Bumo dialect of Izon. In Current research on African languages and linguistics (University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics 4), ed. Suzanne Gessner, Sunyoung Oh, and Kayono Shiobara, 115–259. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Department of Linguistics.
Ellington, John. 1977. Aspects of the Tiene language. Ph.D. dissertation. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin.
Fortune, Reo. 1942. Arapesh. New York: J.J. Augustin.
Freeland, L. S. 1951. Language of the Sierra Miwok. Baltimore: Waverly.
Goldsmith, John A. 1976. An overview of autosegmental phonology. Linguistic Analysis 2: 23–68.
Goldsmith, John A. 1990. Autosegmental and metrical phonology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Good, Jeff. 2016. The linguistic typology of templates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Good, Jeff, and Jesse Lovegren. 2017. Remarks on the nasal classes in Mungbam and Naki. In Mechthildian approaches to Afrikanistik: Advances in language based research on Africa—Festschrift für Mechthild Reh, ed. Raija Kramer and Roland Kießling, 83–99. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.
Gurevich, Olga I. 2006. Constructional Morphology: The Georgian version. Ph.D. dissertation. Berkeley: UC Berkeley.
Gussenhoven, Carlos. 2004. The phonology of tone and intonation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haiman, John. 1983. Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59: 781–819.
Hall, T. Alan. 1999. The phonological word: A review. In Studies on the phonological word, ed. T. Alan Hall and Ursula Kleinhenz, 1–22. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Harris, Alice C. 2000. Where in the word is the Udi clitic? Language 76: 593–616.
Harris, Alice C. 2002. Endoclitics and the origins of Udi morphosyntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harris, Alice C. 2017. Multiple exponence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harry, Otelamate, and Larry M. Hyman. 2014. Phrasal construction tonology: The case of Kalabari. Studies in Language 38: 649–689.
Hockett, Charles F. 1954. Two models of grammatical description. Word 10: 210–234.
Hoffmann, Thomas, and Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Construction grammar: Introduction. In The Oxford handbook of construction grammar, ed. Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale, 1–12. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hombert, Jean-Marie. 1980. Noun classes of the Beboid languages. In Noun classes in the Grassfields Bantu borderland, ed. Larry M. Hyman, 83–98. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Department of Linguistics.
Hopper, Paul J., and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hyman, Larry M. 1981. Noni grammatical structure: With special reference to verb morphology. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Department of Linguistics.
Hyman, Larry M. 2009. The natural history of verb-stem reduplication in Bantu. Morphology 19: 177–206.
Hyman, Larry M. 2010. Affixation by place of articulation: The case of Tiene. In Rara and rarissima: Collecting and interpreting unusual characteristics of human languages, ed. Jan Wohlgemuth and Michael Cysouw, 145–184. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Hyman, Larry M. 2011. Tone: Is it different? In The handbook of phonological theory, ed. John A. Goldsmith, Jason Riggle, and Alan C. L. Yu, 2nd ed., 197–239. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hyman, Larry M. 2013. Issues in the phonology-morphology interface in African languages. In Selected Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics, ed. Ọlanikẹ Ọla Orie and Karen W. Sanders, 16–25. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.
Hyman, Larry M. 2016. Morphological tonal assignments in conflict: Who wins? In Tone and inflection: New facts and perspectives, ed. Enrique L. Palancar and Jean Léo Léonard, 15–39. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Hyman, Larry M., and Sharon Inkelas. 1997. Emergent templates: The unusual case of Tiene. In University of Maryland Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 5, ed. Viola Miglio and Bruce Morén, 92–116. College Park, MD: University of Maryland Department of Linguistics.
Hyman, Larry M., Sharon Inkelas, and Galen Sibanda. 2009. Morphosyntactic correspondence in Bantu reduplication. In The nature of the word: Essays in honor of Paul Kiparsky, ed. Kristin Hanson and Sharon Inkelas, 273–309. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hyman, Larry M., and Florian Lionnet. 2018. Phonology. In The languages and linguistics of Africa: A comprehensive guide, ed. Tom Güldemann. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Idiatov, Dmitry. 2005. The exceptional morphology of Tura numerals and restrictors: Endoclitics, infixes and pseudowords. Journal of African Languages and Linguistics 26: 31–78.
Iggesen, Oliver A. 2013. Number of cases. In The World Atlas of Language Structures online, ed. Matthew S. Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://wals.info/chapter/49.
Inkelas, Sharon. 1993. Nimboran position class morphology. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 11: 559–624.
Inkelas, Sharon. 2014. The interplay of morphology and phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Inkelas, Sharon, and Cemil Orhan Orgun. 1995. Level ordering and economy in the lexical phonology of Turkish. Language 71: 763–793.
Jakobson, Roman, and Linda Waugh. 1979. The sound shape of language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jenks, Peter, and Sharon Rose. 2015. Mobile object markers in Moro: The role of tone. Language 91: 269–307.
Katamba, Francis X. 2003. Bantu nominal morphology. In The Bantu languages, ed. Derek Nurse and Gérard Philippson, 103–120. London: Routledge.
Kavari, Jekura U., Lutz Marten, and Jenneke van der Wal. 2012. Tone cases in Otjiherero: Head-complement relations, linear order, and information structure. Africana Linguistica 18: 315–353.
Kießling, Roland. 2010. Infix genesis and incipient initial consonant mutations in some lesser known Benue-Congo languages. In Form und Struktur in der Sprache: Festschrift für Elmar Ternes, ed. Armin R. Bachmann, Christliebe El Mogharbel, and Katja Himstedt, 188–220. Tübingen: Narr.
König, Christa. 2008. Case in Africa. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lemaréchal, Alian. 1997. Zéro(s). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Mayerthaler, Willi. 1987. System-independent morphological naturalness. In Leitmotifs in natural morphology, ed. Wolfgang U. Dressler, Willi Mayerthaler, Oswald Panagl, and Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel, 25–58. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
McCarthy, John. 1979. Formal problems in Semitic morphology and phonology. Ph.D. dissertation. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
McCarthy, John. 1981. A prosodic theory of nonconcatenative morphology. Linguistic Inquiry 12: 373–418.
McCarthy, John, and Alan S. Prince. 1995. Prosodic morphology. In The handbook of phonological theory, ed. John A. Goldsmith, 318–366. Oxford: Blackwell.
McCawley, James D. 1998. The syntactic phenomena of English, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mithun, Marianne. 2000. The reordering or morphemes. In Reconstructing grammar: Comparative linguistics and grammaticalization, ed. Spike Gildea, 231–255. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Müller, Stefan. 2002. Complex predicates: Verbal complexes, resultative constructions, and particle verbs in German. Stanford: CSLI.
Nichols, Johanna. 2007. What, if anything, is typology? Linguistic Typology 11: 231–238.
Paster, Mary. 2009. Explaining phonological conditions on affixation: Evidence from suppletive allomorphy and affix ordering. Word Structure 2: 18–37.
Rhodes, Richard A. 1992. What is a morpheme? A view from construction grammar. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General session and parasession on the place of morphology in a grammar, ed. Laura Buszard-Welcher, Lionel Wee, and William Weigel, 409–423. Berkeley: Berkeley Linguistics Society.
Sadock, Jerrold M. 2012. The modular architecture of grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sag, Ivan A. 2012. Sign-based construction grammar: An informal synopsis. In Sign-based construction grammar, ed. Hans C. Boas and Ivan A. Sag, 69–202. Stanford: CSLI.
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1916/1959. Course in general linguistics (translated by Wade Baskin). New York: McGraw Hill.
Schadeberg, Thilo C. 1986. Tone cases in Umbundu. Africana Linguistica 10: 423–447.
Sibanda, Galen. 2004. Verbal phonology and morphology of Ndebele. Ph.D. dissertation. Berkeley: UC Berkeley.
Simpson, Jane, and Meg Withgott. 1986. Pronominal clitic clusters and templates. In Syntax and semantics 19: The syntax of pronominal clitics, ed. Hagit Borer, 149–174. New York: Academic.
Smith, Jennifer L. 2011. Category-specific effects. In The Blackwell companion to phonology: Volume IV: Phonological interfaces, ed. Marc van Oostendorp, Colin J. Ewan, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren Rice, 2439–2463. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Smith, Norval. 1985. Spreading, reduplication and the default option in Miwok nonconcatenative morphology. In Advances in non-linear phonology, ed. Harry van der Hulst and Norval Smith, 363–380. Dordrecht: Foris.
Štekauer, Pavol, Salvador Valera, and Lívia Kortvélyessy. 2012. Word-formation in the world’s languages: A typological survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stump, Gregory T. 1997. Template morphology and inflectional morphology. In Yearbook of Morphology 1996, ed. Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle, 217–241. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Trommer, Jochen. 2012a. Introduction. In The morphology and phonology of exponence, ed. Jochen Trommer, 1–7. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trommer, Jochen. 2012b. Ø-exponence. In The morphology and phonology of exponence, ed. Jochen Trommer, 326–354. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tsujimura, Natsuko, and Stuart Davis. 2011. A construction approach to innovative verbs in Japanese. Cognitive Linguistics 22: 799–825.
Tsujimura, Natsuko, and Stuart Davis. this volume. Japanese word formation in Construction Morphology.
Ussishkin, Adam. 2000. The emergence of fixed prosody. Ph.D. dissertation. Santa Cruz: UC Santa Cruz.
Voll, Rebecca. 2017. A grammar of Mundabli [boe], a language of the Lower Fungom region of North-West Cameroon. Ph.D. dissertation. Leiden: University of Leiden.
Welmers, William E. 1962. The phonology of Kpelle. Journal of African languages 1: 69–93.
Yu, Alan C. L. 2007. A natural history of infixation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zec, Draga, and Sharon Inkelas. 1990. Prosodically constrained syntax. In The phonology-syntax connection, ed. Sharon Inkelas and Draga Zec, 365–378. Stanford: CSLI.
Zimmermann, Eva. 2017. Morphological length and prosodically defective morphemes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Good, J. (2018). Modeling Signifiers in Constructional Approaches to Morphological Analysis. In: Booij, G. (eds) The Construction of Words. Studies in Morphology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74394-3_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74394-3_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-74393-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-74394-3
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)