Northeast Corridor Morphology

 No Meetings for Two Weeks: Alec forgot that he had arranged to take part in a medical study (don't worry -- I qualified on the basis of age, not on the basis of an ongoing condition) that requires brain scans on successive Wednesdays during our meeting time. Please continue to post in the Blog and think about the best use of our next session!

I've never posted a proper "blog entry" of this kind before, but I thought I would try at least as a way to get some thoughts down while they are still fresh in my mind. As some of you know, I gave a talk on allosemy at NELS on Friday. Some of you raised some really interesting questions, during the Q&A and later. I'll put the handout in the dropbox folder in case anyone wants to have a look.  Yesterday, two days after my talk at NELS, someone asked me a very interesting and hard question that relates to some of the things we have been discussing in this group. It's something I have thought about many times before, but I think that the range of approaches we might consider could be different now. The question was what to do about cases where an overt verbalizing or nominalizing affix seems to affect root allosemy. These kinds of cases are fairly well-known, and have been discussed by Dave Embick, Hagit Borer, etc.. These are things like cover vs. coverage , fo...

 Yes, we meet this week!  Check out my  For Oct 22 Discussion document in our DropBox folder.  Cyclicity in word formation and ordering of words is at issue.

 No meeting this week:  NELS Break, for NELS at NYU THIS WEEK.  Hope to see many of you there = here.

  We’ve been discussing ways in which a hierarchical structure of morphemes created by recursive Merge could be ordered, first to last.  A major observation is that morphemes that surface inside words seem to generally obey Brody’s “Mirror”; from stem to the right, one goes up the structural hierarchy (the mirror of the order of phrases, which go down the hierarchy as one goes from left to right = LCA).  The general approach of head movement and adjunction, as well as Brody and NanoSyntax, involves consideration of a “head projection” starting at the root of a word in the Merged tree and moving head to head up the tree to create complex heads.  However, this general approach doesn’t really deal well with the situation in English (and many other languages) in which a sequence of auxiliaries (or other functional words) have complex internal morphological structure but are ordered according to the functional sequence that governs the ordering of affixes w...