Cover image for The Evolution of Morphology.
The Evolution of Morphology.
Title:
The Evolution of Morphology.
Author:
Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew.
ISBN:
9780191559624
Personal Author:
Physical Description:
1 online resource (267 pages)
Series:
Studies in the Evolution of Language
Contents:
Contents -- Preface and acknowledgements -- 1 Design in language and design in biology -- 1.1 A difficulty faced by human linguists -- 1.2 How to overcome the difficulty: The power of abductive reasoning -- 1.3 Narrowing the focus: Why does morphology exist? -- 1.4 Design in biology: What it does and does not mean -- 1.4.1 'Design' does not mean 'intelligent design' -- 1.4.2 'Good design' is not tautologous -- 1.4.3 Examples of bad design in vertebrates -- 1.5 Back to language: Williams and Chomsky -- 1.6 Advice to readers -- 2 Why there is morphology: Traditional accounts -- 2.1 A puzzle as viewed from Mars -- 2.2 The two systems within grammar: Are they genuinely distinct? -- 2.3 Morphology as syntax below the word level -- 2.3.1 Lieber and the sing-sang question -- 2.3.2 Lieber and the pig-hunter question -- 2.4 Morphology as a driver for syntactic displacement -- 2.5 Morphology as the grammar of bound items -- 2.6 Morphology as lexical structure -- 2.7 Morphology as the detritus of linguistic change -- 2.7.1 Linguistic change and the pig-hunter question -- 2.7.2 Linguistic change and the sing-sang question -- 2.8 The puzzle remains -- 3 A cognitive-articulatory dilemma -- 3.1 Setting the scene: Speech with vocabulary but no grammar -- 3.2 Synonymy avoidance: A broader-than-human trait -- 3.2.1 The elusiveness of exact synonymy in human language -- 3.2.2 Synonymy avoidance among animals -- 3.3 A dilemma: The development of 'synonyms' due to assimilation -- 3.3.1 The speed of speech production in protolanguage -- 3.3.2 Assimilatory effects of fluent speech -- 3.3.3 Cliché patterns and the loss of phonological conditioning -- 3.4 Isolated synonymies versus systematic synonymy patterns -- 3.4.1 Two obvious ways of resolving synonymy dilemmas -- 3.4.2 Systematic synonymy patterns and how they might evolve -- 3.5 The way ahead.

4 Modes of synonymy avoidance -- 4.1 Syntagmatic synonymy avoidance -- 4.2 Paradigmatic synonymy avoidance -- 4.2.1 Individual multilingualism -- 4.2.2 Community multilingualism: The Vaupés case -- 4.2.3 Multivocabulism: Two Australian cases -- 4.2.4 'High', 'middle', 'low', honorific, and belittling vocabularies in Javanese -- 4.2.5 A common characteristic: Vocabular clarity -- 5 The ancestors of affixes -- 5.1 Preliminaries: 'Distinct items' and 'distinct forms of the same item' -- 5.2 Multivocabulism among unselective items: The origin of inflection classes -- 5.2.1 Case study 1: Hungarian verbs and the role of phonological context -- 5.2.2 Case study 2: Latin nouns and the role of gender -- 5.2.3 Case study 3: German noun inflection and the role of 'elsewhere' -- 5.2.4 Case study 4: Italian verbs and the irrelevance of stem alternation -- 6 The ancestors of stem alternants -- 6.1 Differentiation by semantic or syntactic function -- 6.2 Differentiation by syntagmatic phonological factors, and a note on suppletion -- 6.3 Differentiation by paradigmatic predictability -- 6.3.1 Case study 5: Italian verbs: Stem alternants with uniform distribution -- 6.3.2 Case study 6: Dhaasanac: Another instance of uniform distribution -- 6.3.3 Case study 7: Nesting in Russian nominal stress patterns -- 6.3.4 Case study 8: German verbs and implicational paradigm structure conditions -- 6.3.5 Case study 9: Stem and affix interactions in Polish -- 6.4 Summing up: The importance of non-affixal morphology -- 7 Derivation, compounding, and lexical storage -- 7.1 Two gaps in coverage -- 7.2 Clichés outside cliché patterns -- 7.3 Individually memorized collocations -- 7.4 The link between derivation and individual memorization -- 7.5 A puzzle partly solved: Phrases inside compound words -- 8 Morphological homonymy and morphological meanings -- 8.1 Homonymy.

8.2 The decomposition of morphological meanings -- 8.3 Drawbacks of binary features in describing inflection classes -- 9 Conclusions -- 9.1 Evaluating the abductive argument -- 9.2 A novel prediction: Inflection classes as 'vocabularies' -- 9.2.1 Possible counterevidence from Sanskrit -- 9.2.2 Possible counterevidence from Icelandic nouns -- 9.3 Summing up: Morphology, the spine, and the peacock's tail -- References -- Language Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- P -- R -- S -- T -- Z -- Name Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z -- Subject Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Z.
Abstract:
This book considers the evolution of the grammatical structure of words in the contexts of human evolution and the origins of language. The author challenges the conventional views of the relationship between syntax and morphology, the adaptationist view of language evolution, and the notion that language in some way reflects 'laws of form'.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
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