Representations of multiply suffixed words: Implications for grammatical and psychological models of the lexicon.
Item
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Title
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Representations of multiply suffixed words: Implications for grammatical and psychological models of the lexicon.
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Identifier
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AAI9009747
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identifier
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9009747
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Creator
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Kane, Kathleen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: John Moyne
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Date
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1989
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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In the tradition of generative morphology it is assumed that a speaker's knowledge of complex word formation is encoded in the word structure rules of the lexical component. Minimally, the rules and principles must define the ordering of both derivational and inflectional affix morphemes. Despite the dominance of the level-ordered model of the lexicon, in which phonological rules interact with morphological applications in a series of strata, its predictions fail to explain large classes of counterexamples. This thesis holds that morphology is not extrinsically ordered and proposes that strings of multiple suffixes are generated by one single affix concatenation rule: Affix {dollar}\to{dollar} Affix*. In conjunction with selectional restrictions, this rule permits the generation of morphological patterns, or schema, which reflect the relationships among members of a morphological family.;Once the rules for generating the schema are incorporated into grammar, the empirical question for psycholinguistic theory concerns the form in which complex words are represented in the mind. Two lexical decision experiments using multiply suffixed words are conducted. The results of Experiment I suggest that the mental lexicon is organized according to a grammatical property--affix boundary type--and predicts that lexical processing proceeds from left to right until a word boundary is detected. The findings in Experiment II refute the claim that type frequency alone is a reliable predictor of speakers' acceptance of potential complex words; morphological and phonological factors must be considered in conjunction with type frequency in determining linguistic judgements.;Psychological experimentation, linguistic intuition, and corpus-based distributional data together argue for a morphological theory that is both rule-governed and analogical.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
