In:Morphological Metatheory
Edited by Daniel Siddiqi and Heidi Harley
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 229] 2016
► pp. 271–302
Morphology as an adaptive discriminative system
Published online: 29 June 2016
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.229.10ble
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.229.10ble
The past decade has witnessed a productive convergence of a number of historically separate research strands. One strand explores the implicational models that grew out of classical WP approaches to inflection (e.g., Wurzel 1984; Maiden 2005; Blevins 2006; Ackerman et al. 2009). A second strand extends the information-theoretic perspectives on ‘morphological information’ developed originally in the processing models of Kostić et al. (2003), Moscoso del Prado Martín et al. (2004), and Milin et al. (2009a, b). A third strand investigates a ‘complex systems’ approach to grammatical organization (Ackerman & Blevins 2008; Ackerman et al. 2008; Beckner et al. 2009). The fourth strand develops a cohesive discriminative perspective on language learning and use (Ramscar & Yarlett 2007; Ramscar & Dye 2010; Ramscar et al. 2010, 2013; Ramscar 2013; Arnon & Ramscar 2012; Baayen et al. 2011). This chapter considers how the interaction of these distinct components has produced a general conception of the structure and function of morphological systems which opens significant points of contact with research in other domains.
References (104)
Ackerman, Farrell & Blevins, James P. 2008. Syntax: The state of the art. In Unity and Diversity of Languages, Piet van Sterkenberg (ed.), 215–229. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ackerman, Farrell, Blevins, James P. & Malouf, Robert. 2009. Parts and wholes: Implicative patterns in inflectional paradigms. In Analogy in Grammar: Form and Acquisition, James P. Blevins & Juliette Blevins (eds), 54–81. Oxford: OUP.
Ackerman, Farrell, Bonami, Olivier & Nikolaeva, Irina. 2012. Systemic polyfunctionality and morphology-syntax interdependencies. Defaults in Morphological Theory, Lexington KY.
Ackerman, Farrell & Malouf, Robert. 2013. Morphological organization: The Low Conditional Entropy Conjecture. Language 89: 429–464.
Ackerman, Farrell, Malouf, Robert & Blevins, James P. 2008. Inflectional morphology as a complex adaptive system. Paper presented at the First Annual Complex Systems and Language Workshop, University of Arizona, Tucson.
Ackerman, Farrell & Stump, Gregory T. 2004. Paradigms and periphrasis: A study in realization-based lexicalism. In Projecting Morphology, Louisa Sadler & Andrew Spencer (eds), 111–157. Stanford CA: CSLI.
. 2015. The morpheme: Its nature and use. In The Oxford Handbook of Inflection, Matthew Baerman (ed.), 11–33. Oxford: OUP.
Arnon, Inbal & Ramscar, Michael. 2012. Granularity and the acquisition of grammatical gender: How order-of-acquisition affects what gets learned. Cognition 122: 292–305.
Aronoff, Mark. 1994. Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Baayen, R. Harald, McQueen, James M., Dijkstra, Ton & Schreuder, Robert. 2003. Frequency effects in regular inflectional morphology: Revisiting Dutch plurals. In Morphological Structure in Language Processing, R. Harald Baayen & Robert Schreuder (eds), 355–370. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Baayen, R. Harald, Milin, Petar, Filipović Ðurđević, Dusica, Hendrix, Peter & Marelli, Marco. 2011. An amorphous model for morphological processing in visual comprehension based on naive discriminative learning. Psychological Review 118: 438–481.
Baerman, Matthew, Brown, Dunstan & Corbett, Greville G. (eds). 2015. Understanding and Measuring Morphological Complexity. Oxford: OUP.
Bateson, Patrick & Gluckman, Peter. 2011. Plasticity, Robustness, Development and Evolution. Cambridge: CUP.
Beard, Robert & Volpe, Mark. 2005. Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology. In Handbook of English Word-Formation, Pavel Štekauer & Rochelle Lieber (eds), 189–205. Dordrecht: Springer.
Beckner, Clay, Blythe, Richard, Bybee, Joan L., Chrisiansen, Morton H., Croft, William, Ellis, Nick C., Holland, John, Ke, Jinyun, Larsen-Freeman, Diane & Schoenemann, Thomas. 2009. Language is a complex adaptive system: Position paper. Language Learning 59: 1–26.
Blazej, Laura J. & Cohen-Goldberg, Ariel M. 2015. Can we hear morphological complexity before words are complex? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 41(1): 50–68.
. 2013b. Word-based morphology from Aristotle to modern WP. In Oxford Handbook of the History of Linguistics, Ch. 16, Keith Allan (ed.), 396–417. Oxford: OUP.
Blevins, James P., Milin, Petar & Ramscar, Michael. 2016. The Zipfian Paradigm Cell Filling Problem. In Morphological paradigms and functions, Ferenc Kiefer, James P. Blevins & Huba Bartos (eds), in press. Leiden: Brill.
Bloch, Bernard. 1947. English verb inflection. Language 23: 399–418. Reprinted in Joos 1957, 243–254.
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1914[1983]. An Introduction to the Study of Language, new edn [Classics in Psycholinguistics 3]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
. 1926. A set of postulates for the science of language. Language 2: 153–164. Reprinted in Joos 1957, 26–37.
. 1929. Review of Konkordanz Panini-Candra by Bruno Liebich. Language 5: 267–276. Reprinted in Hockett 1970, 219–226.
Boeckx, Cedric, Leivada, Evelina & Tiago Martins, Pedro. 2013. Language and complexity considerations: A biolinguistic perspective. Llengua, Societat i Comunicació 11: 20–26.
Bonami, Olivier & Henri, Fabiola. 2010. Assessing empirically the inflectional complexity of Mauritian Creole. Paper presented at workshop on Formal Aspects of Creole Studies, Berlin. <[URL]>
Bonami, Olivier & Samvelian, Pollet. 2015. The diversity of inflectional periphrasis in Persian. Journal of Linguistics 51(2): 327–382.
Börjars, Kersti, Vincent, Nigel & Chapman, Carol. 1997. Paradigms, periphrases, and pronominal inflection: A featurebased account. In Yearbook of Morphology 1996, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 155–180. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Brown, Dunstan, Chumakina, Marina, Corbett, Greville, Popova, Gergana & Spencer, Andrew. 2012. Defining ‘periphrasis’: Key notions. Morphology 22(2): 233–275.
Cable, Seth. 2014. Average conditional entropy of the Tlingit verbal inflection paradigm: A brief report. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Dahl, Östen. 2004. The Growth and Maintenance of Linguistic Complexity [Studies in Language Companion Series 71]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Davis, Matthew H., Marslen-Wilson, William D. & Gaskell, M Gareth. 2002. Leading up the lexical garden-path: Segmentation and ambiguity in spoken word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance 28: 218–244.
Elman, Jeffrey L., Bates, Elizabeth A., Johnson, Mark H., Karmiloff-Smith, Annette, Parisi, Domenico & Plunkett, Kim. 1996. Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Erelt, Tiu, Leemets, Tiina, Mäearu, Sirje & Raadik, Maire (eds). 2013. Eesti keele õigekeelsussõnaraamat ÕS 2013. Tallinn: Eesti Keele Sihtasutus.
Evans, Nicholas & Levinson, Stephen C. 2009. The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(5): 429–492.
Gilbert, Scott F. & Epel, David. 2008. Ecological Developmental Biology. Sunderland MA: Sinauer Associates.
Gottlieb, G. 1997. Synthesizing Nature-nurture: The Prenatal Roots of Instinctive Behavior. Hove: Psychology Press.
Gukhman, M.M. 1955. Glagolnye analaticheskie konstruksii kak osobyj sochetanij chastichnogo i polnogo slova (na materiale istorii nemetskogo iazyka). In Voprosy grammatischeskogo stoia, V.V. Vonogradov (ed.). Moscow: Academic Sciences.
Halle, Morris & Marantz, Alec. 1993. Distributed Morphology and the pieces of inflection. In The View from Building 20. Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Silvain Bromberger, Kenneth Hale & Samuel Jay Keyser (eds), 111–176. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Harris, Zelig S. 1942. Morpheme alternants in linguistic analysis. Language 18: 169–180. Reprinted in Joos 1957, 109–115.
Hay, Jennifer B. & Baayen, R. Harald. 2005. Shifting paradigms: Gradient structure in morphology. Trends in Cognitive Science 9(73): 342–348.
Hockett, Charles F. 1947. Problems of morphemic analysis. Language 23: 321–343. Reprinted in Joos 1957, 229–242.
. 1987. Refurbishing our Foundations: Elementary Linguistics from an Advanced Point of View [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 56]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hofstadter, Douglas & Sander, Emmanuel. 2014. Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking. New York NY: Basic Books.
Jablonka, Eva & Lamb, Marion J. 2006. Four Dimensions of Evolution: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Kaplan, Ronald M. & Bresnan, Joan. 1982. Lexical-functional grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, Joan Bresnan (ed.). Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Karttunen, Lauri. 2003. Computing with realizational morphology. In Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing [Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 2588], Alexander Gelbukh (ed.), 205–216. Heidelberg: Springer.
Kemps, Rachèl, Ernestus, Mirjam, Schreuder, Robert & Baayen, R. Harald. 2005. Prosodic cues for morphological complexity: The case of Dutch plural nouns. Memory & Cognition 33(3): 430–446.
Koskenniemi, Kimmo Matti. 1983. Two-level morphology: A general computational model for word-form recognition and production. Technical Report 11, Department of General Linguistics, University of Helsinki.
Kostić, Aleksandar, Marković, Tania & Baucal, Aleksandar. 2003. Inflectional morphology and word meaning: Orthogonal or coimplicative domains? In Morphological Structure in Language Processing, R. Harald Baayen & Robert Schreuder (eds), 1–44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Langendoen, D. Terence. 1981. The generative capacity of word-formation components. Linguistic Inquiry 12(2): 320–322.
Lounsbury, Floyd. 1953. Oneida Verb Morphology [Yale University Publications in Anthropology 48]. New Haven CT: Yale University Press. Chapter 1 reprinted in Joos 1957, 379–385.
Maiden, Martin. 2005. Morphological autonomy and diachrony. In Yearbook of Morphology 2004, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 137–175. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Marantz, Alec. 2013. No escape from morphemes in morphological processing. Language and Cognitive Processes 28(7): 905–916.
Matthews, Peter H. 1965. The inflectional component of a word-and-paradigm grammar. Journal of Linguistics 1: 139–171.
. 1970. Recent developments in morphology. In New Horizon in Linguistics, John Lyons (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Michel, George F. & Moore, Celia L. 1995. Developmental Psychobiology. Cambridge MA: Bradford Books.
Milin, Petar, Filipović Ðurđević, Dusica & Moscoso del Prado Martín, Fermín. 2009a. The simultaneous effects of inflectional paradigms and classes on lexical recognition: Evidence from Serbian. Journal of Memory and Language 60: 50–64.
Milin, Petar, Kuperman, Victor, Kostić, Aleksandar & Baayen, R. Harald. 2009b. Words and paradigms bit by bit: An information-theoretic approach to the processing of inflection and derivation. In Analogy in Grammar: Form and Acquisition, James P. Blevins & Juliette Blevins (eds), 214–253. Oxford: OUP.
Morpurgo Davies, Anna. 1978. Analogy, segmentation and the early Neogrammarians. Transactions of the Philological Society 76(1): 36–60.
Moscoso del Prado Martín, Fermín, Kostić, Aleksandar & Baayen, R. Harald. 2004. Putting the bits together: An information-theoretical perspective on morphological processing. Cognition 94: 1–18.
Mürk, Harri William. 1997. A Handbook of Estonian: Nouns, Adjectives and Verbs [Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Series 163]. Bloomington IN: Indiana University.
Overton, Willis F. 2010. Life-span development: Concepts and issues. In The Handbook of Life-span Development, Vol. 1: Cognition, Biology and Methods, Richard M. Lerner & Willis F. Overton (eds), 1–29. Hoboken NJ: Wiley and Sons.
Oyama, Susan, Gray, Russell D. & Griffiths, Paul E. 2001. Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems Theory and Evolution. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Plag, Ingo. 2014. Phonological and phonetic variability in complex words: An uncharted territory. Italian Journal of Linguistics 26(2): 209–228.
Rácz, Péter, Pierrehumbert, Janet B., Hay, Jennifer B. & Papp, Victora. 2014. Morphological emergence. In The Handbook of Language Emergence, Brian MacWhinney & William O’Grady (eds). Hoboken NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ramscar, Michael, Dye, Melody & McCauley, Stewart M. 2013a. Error and expectation in language learning: The curious absence of mouses in adult speech. Language 89(4): 760–793.
Ramscar, Michael, Hendrix, Peter, Love, Bradley & Baayen, R. Harald. 2013b. Learning is not decline: The mental lexicon as a window into cognition across the lifespan. The Mental Lexicon 3: 450–481.
Ramscar, Michael, Yarlett, Daniel, Dye, Melody, Denny, Katie & Thorpe, Kirsten. 2010. The effects of feature-label-order and their implications for symbolic learning. Cognititive Science 34: 909–957.
Robins, Robert H. 1959. In defence of WP. Transactions of the Philological Society 58: 116–144. Reprinted in Transactions of the Philological Society 99(2001): 116–144.
Sadler, Louisa & Spencer, Andrew. 2001. Syntax as an exponent of morphological features. In Yearbook of Morphology 2001, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 71–97. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Sampson, Geoffrey, Gil, David & Trudgill, Peter (eds). 2009. Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable. Oxford: OUP.
Seyfarth, Scott, Ackerman, Farrell & Malouf, Robert. 2014. Implicative organization facilitates morphological learning. In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Herman Leung, Zachary O’Hagan, Sarah Bakst, Auburn Lutzross, Jonathan Manker, Nicholas Rolle & Katie Sardinha (eds). Berkeley CA: BLS.
Sproat, Richard. 2005. Current morphological theory. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics 2(2): 63–75.
Stankiewicz, Edward (ed.). 1972. A Baudouin de Courtenay Anthology. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.
Stump, Gregory & Finkel, Raphael. 2013. Morphological Typology: From Word to Paradigm. Cambridge: CUP.
Thelen, Esther & Bates, Elizabeth. 2003. Connectionism and dynamic systems: Are they really different? Developmental Science 6(4): 378–391.
Tuldava, Juhan. 1994. Estonian Textbook [Indiana University Uralic and Altaic Series 159]. Bloomington IN: Indiana University.
Cited by (16)
Cited by 16 other publications
Copot, Maria & Olivier Bonami
Dattner, Elitzur, Orit Ashkenazi, Dorit Ravid & Ronit Levie
Hathout, Nabil & Fiammetta Namer
Herce, Borja
Ackerman, Farrell
2021. Making sense of morphology. In All Things Morphology [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 353], ► pp. 17 ff.
Kapatsinski, Vsevolod
Kapatsinski, Vsevolod
Schmitz, Dominic, Dinah Baer-Henney & Ingo Plag
TOMASCHEK, FABIAN, INGO PLAG, MIRJAM ERNESTUS & R. HARALD BAAYEN
Wilmoth, Sasha & John Mansfield
Linke, Maja & Michael Ramscar
Boyé, Gilles & Gauvain Schalchli
Lepic, Ryan & Corrine Occhino
Lepic, Ryan
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 22 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
