The semantics of derivational morphology

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Ingo Plag
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 440512447

Many derivational processes in English (but also in other languages) are highly polysemous, often exhibiting a whole range of meanings. For example, -er encodes agents (writer), instruments (opener), inhabitants (Londoner) and many more kinds of concept. The project deals with this central problem of derivational morphology, the polysemy of derivational processes and the compositionality of word-formation processes. It aims at describing and modeling the potentially diverse interpretations of derived words. The main research questions are the following:- Which kinds of interpretation are principally possible given the meaning of the base and the affix? - Is there a restricted set of semantic mechanisms that can account for derivational readings in a principled way? - What is the role of world knowledge and how can it be integrated into a theory of derivational semantics? The project continues a previous project in which we have investigated a number of derivational categories (-ment, -er and -al nominalizations, stereotype negation and diminutives). We devised frame-based semantic representations of the base words undergoing nominalizations and established a framework in which to couch our frame-based analyses of word-formation patterns, combining elements from HPSG with inheritance hierarchies of lexical rules. In a frame-semantic approach polysemy arises from the possibility to reference different attributes in the representations. Impossible reference either emerges through impossible inheritance or via affix-specific constraints. In the new funding period the project will extend the domain of investigation to include the morphological categories of (a) non-deverbal event-related nominalizations and (b) prefixes that give rise to scalar or degree-based interpretations. This will allow us to focus on both category-altering and category-maintaining affixation and at the same time deal with both suffixation and prefixation. The inclusion of morphological processes with these characteristics is crucial in order to develop a comprehensive model for word-formation semantics. Furthermore, we will use computational implementation of our semantic models (in XMG and Analogical Modeling) to test their validity and productivity.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants