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Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2013: Selected papers from 'Going Romance' Amsterdam 2013
Edited by Enoch O. Aboh, Jeannette Schaeffer and Petra Sleeman
[Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 8] 2015
► pp. 175–202

Productivity and Portuguese morphology

How experiments enable hypothesis-testing

| University College London

This paper examines to what extent, as evidenced by productivity studies, just as the robustness and learnability of phonological patterns may be grounded and biased by naturalness considerations, so may morphology. Four case studies (L-morphomes, competing nominalizing affixes, athematic participles, and defective verbs), that are carried out with experimental tasks using wug-words, jointly demonstrate that choices in the realization of morphological categories may depend on submorphemic (features) and supramorphemic (phrasal syntax) principles, and show that both morphology-internal and interface considerations may modulate the extent of productivity of generalizations.

Published online: 2 December 2015
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rllt.8.10nev
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