Cover not available
Part of
Morphological Metatheory
Edited by Daniel Siddiqi and Heidi Harley
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 229] 2016
► pp. 479–512

Affix ordering in Optimal Construction Morphology

| University of California, Berkeley

This paper sketches an integrated approach to affix ordering within Optimal Construction Morphology, a bottom-up, competition based model of word production in which each step of affixation is the optimal choice among competing possibilities (Caballero & Inkelas 2013). Optimalitytheoretic models are natural fits for affix ordering, a complex phenomenon governed by a mix of conflicting universal and language-specific factors which interact differently in every language. This study covers familiar, global cross-linguistic principles such as semantic relevance (e.g., Bybee 1985) and scope (e.g., Baker 1988; Rice 2000), integrating them with local lexical selectional restrictions (e.g., Fabb 1988); it also incorporates usage-based factors such as Complexity-Based Ordering (e.g., Hay & Plag 2004). The study innovates in adding affix informativity to the mix.

Published online: 29 June 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/la.229.16ink
References
Ackerman, Farrell & Malouf, Rob
2013 Morphological organization: The low conditional entropy conjecture. Language 89(3): 429–464. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alsina, Alex
1999 Where’s the Mirror Principle? The Linguistic Review 16(1): 1–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Stephen R
1992 A-morphous Morphology. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Aronoff, Mark
1994 Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Aronoff, Mark & Xu, Zheng
2010 A realization Optimality-Theoretic approach to affix order. Morphology 20(2): 381–411. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Mark
1988 Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. Chicago ILI: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Balling, Laura Winther. & Baayen, R. Harald
2012 Probability and surprisal in auditory comprehension of morphologically complex words. Cognition 125(1). 80–106. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beesley, Kenneth & Karttunen, Lauri
2003 Finite State Morphology. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Bell, Melanie & Plag, Ingo
2012 Informativeness is a determinant of compound stress in English. Journal of Linguistics 48: 485–520. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blevins, James
2003 Stems and paradigms. Language 79(4): 737–767. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 The information-theoretic turn. Psihologija 46(3): 355–375. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Booij, Geert
2010 Construction Morphology. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan
1985 Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form [Typological Studies in Language 9]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Caballero, Gabriela & Inkelas, Sharon
2013 Word construction: Tracing an optimal path through the lexicon. Special issue New theoretical tools in the modeling of morphological exponence. Morphology 23: 103–143. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cohen Priva, Uriel
2012 Sign and Signal: Deriving Linguistic Generalizations from Information Utility. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.
Eyigöz, Elif, Gildea, Daniel & Oflazer, Kemal
2013 Simultaneous word-morpheme alignment for statistical machine translation. Proceedings of the 2013 meeting of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL-13).
Fabb, Nigel
1988 English suffixation is constrained only by selectional restrictions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6(4): 527–539. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fulmer, S. Lee
1991 Dual-position affixes in Afar: an argument for phonologically-driven morphology. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Aaron Halpern (ed.), 189–203. Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Gahl, Susanne & Garnsey, Susan
2004 Knowledge of grammar, knowledge of usage: syntactic probabilities affect pronunciation variation. Language 80(4): 748–775. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hankamer, Jorge
1986 Finite state morphology and left to right phonology. In Proceedings of the Fifth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Mary Dalrymple, Jeffrey Goldberg, Kristin Hanson, Michael Inman, Chris Piñon & Stephen Wechsler (eds), Stanford CA: Stanford Linguistics Association.Google Scholar
Hargus, Sharon
1993 Metathesis and Domain Membership in Sekani. Berkeley CA: Department of Linguistics, UC Berkeley.Google Scholar
Harley, Heidi & Rolf Noyer
1999 Distributed Morphology. GLOT International 4(4): 3–9.Google Scholar
Harris, Alice
2000 Where in the word is the Udi clitic? Language 76(3): 593–616. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hayes, Bruce & Wilson, Colin
2008 A maximum entropy model of phonotactics and phonotactic learning. Linguistic Inquiry 39: 379–440. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer
2002 From speech perception to morphology: Affix ordering revisited. Language 78(3): 527–555. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer & Baayen, R. Harald
2002 Parsing and productivity. In Yearbook of Morphology 2001, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 203–235. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer & Harald Baayen
2005 Shifting paradigms: Gradient structure in morphology. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9(7): 342–348. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hay, Jennifer & Plag, Ingo
2004 What constrains possible suffix combinations? On the interaction of grammatical and processing restrictions in derivational morphology. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22(3): 565–596. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hirschberg, Julia & Pan, Shimei
2000 Modeling local context for speech accent prediction. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Hyman, Larry M
2003 Suffix ordering in Bantu: A morphocentric approach. In Yearbook of Morphology 2002, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 245–281. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon
1989 Prosodic Constituency in the Lexicon. Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University.
1993 Nimboran position class morphology. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 11: 559–624. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon & Orgun, Cemil Orhan
1998 Level (non)ordering in recursive morphology: Evidence from Turkish. In Morphology and its Relation to Phonology and Syntax, Steven Lapointe, Diane Brentari & Patrick Farrell (eds). Stanford CA: CSLI.Google Scholar
Inkelas, Sharon & Orgun, Jem
2015 Informativity and affix ordering: A pilot study of Turkish. Portland OR. [URL]
Itô, Junko, Mester, Armin & Padgett, Jaye
1995 Licensing and underspecification in Optimality Theory. Linguistic Inquiry 26(4): 571–614.Google Scholar
Kim, Yuni
2008 Topics in the Phonology and Morphology of San Francisco del Mar Huave. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Kiparsky, Paul
1982a Lexical morphology and phonology. In Linguistics in the Morning Calm, Linguistic Society of Korea (eds), 3–91. Seoul: Hanshin.Google Scholar
1982b Word-formation and the lexicon. In 1982 Mid-America Linguistics Conference Papers, Frances Ingemann (ed.), 3–32. Lawrence KS: University of Kansas.Google Scholar
Kuperman, Victor, Pluymaekers, Mark, Ernestus, Mirjam & Baayen, R. Harald
2007 Morphological predictability and acoustic duration of interfixes in Dutch compounds. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 12(4): 2261–2271. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Legendre, Geraldine, Miyata, Yoshiro & Smolensky, Paul
1990 Harmonic Grammar: A Formal Multi-level Connectionist Theory of Linguistic Well-formedness. Theoretical Foundations. Boulder CO: Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado.Google Scholar
Levy, Roger
2008 Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106: 1126–1177. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lieber, Rochelle
1980 On the Organization of the Lexicon. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Luutonen, Jorma
1997 The Variation of Morpheme Order in Mari Declension. Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura.Google Scholar
Maiden, Martin
2005 Morphological autonomy and diachrony. In Yearbook of Morphology 2004, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 137–75. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Manova, Stella & Aronoff, Mark
2010 Modeling affix order. Morphology 20: 109–131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Marle, Jaap
1998 Review of Jorma Luutonen, The Variation of Morpheme Order in Mari Declension. In Yearbook of Morphology 1997, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 307–308. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John
2002 A Thematic Guide to Optimality Theory. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
2010 An introduction to harmonic serialism. Language and Linguistics Compass 4(10): 1001–1018. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCarthy, John & Prince, Alan
1993 Generalized alignment. In Yearbook of Morphology 1993, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 79–153. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1995 Faithfulness and reduplicative identity. In University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18: Papers in Optimality Theory, Jill Beckman, Laura Dickey & Suzanne Urbanczyk (eds), 249–384. Amherst MA: GLSA.Google Scholar
McFadden, Thomas
2004 The Position of Morphological Case in the Derivation: A Study on the Syntax-morphology Interface. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.
Mohanan, Karuvannur P
1986 Lexical Phonology. Dordrecht: Kluwer.Google Scholar
1995 The organization of the grammar. In The Handbook of Phonological Theory, John Goldsmith (ed.). Malden MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Moscoso del Prado Martín, Fermín, Kostic, Aleksandar & Baayen, R. Harald
2004 Putting the bits together: An information theoretical perspective on morphological processing. Cognition 94: 1–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Noyer, Rolf
1993 Optimal Words: Towards a declarative theory of word formation. Rutgers University. [URL]
1994 Mobile affixes in Huave: Optimality and morphological wellformedness. In Proceedings of the TwelfthWest Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Erin Duncan, Donka Farkas & Philip Spaelti (eds), 67–82. Stanford CA: Stanford Linguistics Association.Google Scholar
Oflazer, Kemal
1994 Two-level description of Turkish morphology. Literary and Linguistic Computing 9(2): 137–148. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Parker, Jeff & Sims, Andrea
2012 Affix ordering constraints and processing in Russian: A look at Complexity-Based ordering. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.Google Scholar
Paster, Mary
2005 Pulaar verbal extensions and phonologically driven affix order. In Yearbook of Morphology, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 155–199. Dordrecht: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006 Phonological Conditions on Affixation. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
Plag, Ingo
2002 The role of selectional restrictions, phonotactics and parsing in constraining suffix ordering in English. In Yearbook of Morphology 2001, Geert Booij & Jaap van Marle (eds), 285–314. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Plag, Ingo & Baayen, R. Harald
2009 Suffix ordering and morphological processing. Language 85(1): 109–152. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prince, Alan & Smolensky, Paul
1993 Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University.Google Scholar
2004 Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rice, Keren
2000 Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope: Word Formation in the Athapaskan Verb. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2011 Principles of affix ordering: An overview. Word Structure 4: 169–200. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ryan, Kevin
2010 Variable affix order: Grammar and learning. Language 86: 758–791.Google Scholar
Saarinen, Pauliina & Hay, Jennifer
2014 Affix ordering in derivation. In Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, Rochelle Lieber & Pavol Stekauer (eds), 370–383. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Sak, Haşim, Güngör, Tunga & Saraçlar, Murat
2008 Turkish language resources: Morphological parser, morphological disambiguator and web corpus. Proceedings of GoTAL 2008 , 417–427. DOI logo
Selkirk, Elisabeth
1982 The Syntax of Words. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
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), 480–494. Berkeley CA: BLS. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shannon, Claude
1948 A mathematical theory of communication. Bell System Technical Journal 27: 379–423, 623–656. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simpson, Jane & Withgott, Margaret
1986 Pronominal clitic clusters and templates. In Syntax and Semantics, 19: The Syntax of Pronominal Clitics, Hagit Borer (ed.). New York NY: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Spencer, Andrew
2003 Putting some order into morphology; Reflections on Rice (2000) and Stump (2001). Journal of Linguistics 39: 621–646. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2013 Lexical Relatedness: A Paradigm-Based Model. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steriopolo, Olga
2013 Diminutive affixes in the number domain: A syntactic variation. Questions and Answers in Linguistics 1(2): 33–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stump, Gregory
2001 Inflectional Morphology: A Theory of Paradigm Structure. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wolf, Matthew
2008 Optimal Interleaving: Serial Phonology-Morphology Interaction in a Constraint-based Model. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Xu, Zheng & Aronoff, Mark
2011 A realization Optimality-Theoretic approach to extended morphological exponence. Journal of Linguistics 47(3): 673–707. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Yu, Alan C.-L
2007 A Natural History of Infixation. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Caballero, Gabriela & Sharon Inkelas
2018. A Construction-Based Approach to Multiple Exponence. In The Construction of Words [Studies in Morphology, 4], ► pp. 111 ff. DOI logo
Hahn, Michael, Rebecca Mathew & Judith Degen
2022. Morpheme Ordering Across Languages Reflects Optimization for Processing Efficiency. Open Mind 5 ► pp. 208 ff. DOI logo
Lai, Yunfan
2021. Betrayal through obedience: on the history of the unusual inflectional chain in Siyuewu Khroskyabs. Linguistic Typology 25:1 ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo
Manova, Stela
2023. Ordering Restrictions between Affixes. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 21 april 2024. 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.