Word formation rules in a default inheritance framework: a Network Morphology account of Russian personal nouns

Abstract

The notion of Word Formation Rule (WFR) has been central to approaches to derivational morphology since Chomsky’s Remarks on Nominalization (Chomsky 1970), and his emphasis on a structured lexicon. Following on the heals of Chomsky a number of different versions were offered (Halle 1973, Jackendoff 1975, Aronoff 1976) all with the common two-fold aim On the one hand derivational morphology must be restricted to the lexicon, because in terms of regularity its behaviour is clearly at odds with the syntactic and phonological components; and on the other hand, in the spirit of the generative programme what regularity there is must certainly be captured. This was met by locating any redundancy in the lexicon and reducing it where possible. Redundancy was located by observing repeated patterns in the set of derived words (the combination of affix and syntactico-semantic properties is repeated for a group of items); it was reduced by creating rules relating Base lexical items to their Derivatives. This is the role of the WFR, and at its heart therefore lies the treatment of the relationship between a Base lexical item and its Derivative. These WFRs were also housed in the lexicon.

The article draws from the author’s unpublished PhD thesis (Hippisley 1997). Earlier research was in part supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. E242M) and subsequent research in part by the ESRC (grants no. R000237845 and R000237845) and the support of both bodies is gratefully acknowledged. I wish to thank Greville Corbett for his helpful comments. I also wish to thank two anonymous referees whose comments and suggestions have been gratefully received.