Abstract
Compositionality is ordinarily conceived of as a syntagmatic notion: a complex expression is semantically compositional if its content can be computed from that of its parts and the manner of their combination. Syntactic structures are held to be largely compositional in this sense. In the same way, a word form may be seen as semantically compositional if its content can be computed from that of its parts and the manner of their morphological combination. I examine this notion in §1. I show that despite the fact that many words can be plausibly seen as semantically compositional, there are many words that plainly are not; I suggest, however, that even these words conform to a distinct, paradigmatic conception of compositionality (§2). This novel view of compositionality suggests that in paradigm-based theories of inflection, a paradigm’s cells have two distinct functions: they serve as a basis for both semantic interpretation and inflectional realization (§3). This assumption is the basis for the cell interface model of the nexus of inflectional morphology and semantics. I show, however, that the cell interface model is overly restrictive—that in cases such as that of Latin deponent verbs, the morphosyntactic property set that determines a paradigm cell’s interpretation is distinct from the set that determines its inflectional realization (§4). Such evidence instead favors the paradigm linkage model, in which semantic composition and inflectional realization proceed from cells of different types; in this model, a central task of a language’s inflectional morphology is that of relating cells of these two sorts (§5). Elaborating on this approach, I analyze a more complex mismatch between content and inflectional form in the inflection of Kashmiri verbs (§6). I briefly examine some wider applications of the paradigm linkage hypothesis (§7), summarizing my conclusions in §8.
Versions of this paper were presented at the Ninth Mediterranean Morphology Meeting, Dubrovnik, Croatia (September 15–18, 2013) and at the 11th Annual Martin Luther King Day Linguistics Symposium, the Ohio State University (January 25, 2014). My thanks to several audience members at both events and to two anonymous referees for their comments.
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Notes
- 1.
A referee questions this conclusion on the grounds that one might postulate a number of different -ē suffixes, one of which serves as an exponent of the imperfective future indicative active in capiēmus. Naturally, one can appeal to homophony to deny any imaginable instance of the phenomenon of underdetermination. But this sort of unrestrained appeal to homophony undermines the very idea of syntagmatic compositionality by rendering it unfalsifiable.
- 2.
Cf. Plautus, Amphitruo 832: iuro … Iunonem, quam me vereri et metuere est par maxume ‘I swear by Juno, whom it is especially fitting for me to venerate and fear’, where quam ‘whom’ is accusative.
- 3.
A referee questions this analysis on the grounds that it doesn’t explain how the phenomenon of deponency arose historically from the three-way contrast of the active, middle and passive voices in Proto-Indo-European. This objection is a non sequitur. The analysis proposed here does not purport to explain the historical origins of Latin deponency. It is instead an account of the kind of synchronic system that makes it possible for the phenomenon of deponency to persist long after the evaporation of its original causes. This is not to say that these causes aren’t interesting or important to investigate; but it is very questionable to claim that these causes continue to lurk in the depths of the synchronic grammar of attested Latin, where they tenuously provide an underlying semantic justification for the phenomenon of deponency.
- 4.
In a given language, constraints are members of the set ℳ of morphosyntactic property sets closed under the Boolean operations of conjunction, disjunction and complementation. The satisfies relation is recursively defined: where σ is a morphosyntactic property set and κ1, κ2 ∈ ℳ,
-
(i)
σ satisfies [κ1 ˄ κ2] iff σ satisfies both κ1 and κ2;
-
(ii)
σ satisfies [κ1 ˅ κ2] iff σ satisfies either κ1 or κ2 (or both);
-
(iii)
σ satisfies ¬κ1 iff σ doesn’t satisfy κ1; and
-
(iv)
if κ1 is a morphosyntactic property set, then σ satisfies κ1 iff κ1 ⊆ σ.
-
(i)
- 5.
A referee suggests that used to should not be seen as defective in view of its connection to the nondefective verb use. To be sure, there is an etymological connection between these two lexemes, but it is implausible to claim that this connection persists synchronically. Besides their semantic difference (one expresses a past habitual meaning, while the other relates to instrumentality), they have different phonology:
Where did you / jus | *juz / to live? What did you / juz | *jus / to repair it?
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Stump, G. (2015). The Interface of Semantic Interpretation and Inflectional Realization. In: Bauer, L., Körtvélyessy, L., Štekauer, P. (eds) Semantics of Complex Words. Studies in Morphology, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14102-2_3
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