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Chiara Melloni (University of Verona) and I are planning to propose a workshop on “Derivational zero affixes : to have or not to have them ?” (see attached preliminary description) as part of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 53), which will take place in Bucharest, Romania, August 26-29, 2020.
On this occasion, we are writing to invite you to consider submitting a contribution, if you have related research on this topic and would like to participate.
If you are not familiar with the SLE conference procedure, here is a short summary (see also http://sle2020.eu/call-for-papers). Workshop organizers must submit a workshop proposal by November 20, 2019, which should include a workshop description and a list of potential contributions, each with a 300-word abstract. If the workshop gets accepted by the SLE committee (which we should know by December 15), then these potential workshop participants (and possibly others) must submit a longer abstract by January 15, 2020, which will be reviewed by the workshop organizers and 2-3 further reviewers. The decision for acceptance of the individual papers will be taken by the SLE committee after this general reviewing process.
It is for the purpose of our workshop proposal that we are now writing to you. If you are interested in participating, please send us a 300-word abstract for your talk *by November 9, 2019*.
Please feel free to forward this call to other colleagues for whom this topic may be relevant !
We hope that you will be able to follow our invitation and thank you very much for sharing this announcement with your possibly interested colleagues !
Derivational zero affixes : to have or not to have them ?
Convenors : Gianina Iordăchioaia and Chiara Melloni
(University of Stuttgart & University of Verona)
Since the early days of Sanskrit grammars, zero affixes, i.e., phonologically null morphology with
syntactic and semantic content, have proved instrumental in describing language and have
constantly been employed in modern structuralist linguistics and their later adherent theories (see
Bergenholz & Mugdan 2000 for an overview).
If the absence of a signifiant challenges the traditional conception of the Saussurean sign, the
postulation of zero morphemes facilitates a way to maintain the one-to-one-mapping between form
and meaning in puzzling cases in which a change in meaning is not accompanied by a visible one
in form. These phenomena are widespread across languages and they can be found in both
inflection and derivation. Zero affixes have been postulated for inflectional paradigms (see
English singular sheep – plural sheep-Ø ; I walk-Ø – she walk-s), category change morphology (see
a table > to table-Ø ; to walk > a walk-Ø ; clean > to clean-Ø), labile verb alternations (see
inchoative – causative verb forms in English : The vase broke – John broke the vase), and other
cross-linguistic phenomena. In some languages, like Italian or German, zero affixation seems more
limited in scope for reasons that may relate to the morphological typology of the language,
language specific morphophonological constraints and the status of the base (root vs. word),
especially for some conversion phenomena studied across typologically related languages (Don
2005).
While inflectional zero affixes seem to be widely accepted by various theoretical frameworks,
there is an unsettled debate concerning the legitimacy of the derivational ones (e.g., Myers 1984,
Pesetsky 1995, Plag 1999, Lieber 1992, Lieber 2004, Borer 2013). In general, positing a contentful
zero morpheme confronts us with a theoretical indeterminacy in differentiating it from the lack of
a morpheme altogether : how do we know where there is a zero affix and where there is nothing ?
This problem concerns both derivational and inflectional zero, and a reasonable condition to
positing a zero affix is the existence of an overt affix with a similar function (i.e., its ‘overt
analogue’). In inflectional paradigms one easily finds such evidence (cf. I walk-Ø – she walk-s),
but for derivation it is not always straightforward, given the selectional restrictions of these affixes
and the various theoretical ways to conceptualize the relationship between word pairs where a
derivational zero affix could be conceived of. For conversion from verbs to nouns in English, for
instance, we find pairs such as to climb > the climb-Ø / the climb-ing, but it is debatable whether
this zero affix has a coherent enough meaning to be retrieved from all such deverbal nouns : the
noun climb-Ø denotes an event but also a path, break-Ø may describe an event, a state or a result
entity, and cook-Ø unambiguously denotes an agent. Therefore, Ø emerges here as a nominalizer
suffix with very vague meaning. Following a strong interpretation of the ‘overt analogue criterion’
(Sanders 1988), it has been argued that a zero suffix that forms verbs in English, for instance,
would be semantically too diverse to form a lexical entry by comparison to the overt suffixes (Plag
1999, Lieber 2004). Another reservation about allowing zero affixes in morphological theory
comes from the undesired effect of zero proliferation, in that we may need to distinguish endlessly
many zero suffixes and prefixes without being able to establish a sensible limit or sound criteria
for their existence (Bergenholz & Mugdan 2000).
Alternative explanations have been put forward to account for these phenomena, among which
‘relisting’ and underspecification are two prominent hypotheses for conversion. Rather than an
actual grammatical phenomenon, relisting is a form of coinage triggered by pragmatic needs,
where an entry gets listed again in the lexicon with new category and associated meaning (see
Lieber 1981, 1992, 2004). In underspecification theories, the lexical category of words in
conversion pairs gets specified only in a syntactic context (Farrell 2001). However, both relisting
and underspecification fail to capture relevant morphosyntactic and phonological constraints
which would be explained under a zero derivational approach, as discussed in the literature (Don
1993, 2005, Darby 2015). Furthermore, and more importantly, the issues of meaning
indeterminacy and zero proliferation do not only concern derivationally linked words ; inflectional
zero also appears with many more facets than overt inflectional affixes do. Whether we posit
several such zero affixes with each individual meaning or a heavily underspecified one, why would
this be more legitimate in inflection than in derivation ?
In a nutshell, the literature has highlighted various theoretical and empirical advantages and
disadvantages in the use of derivational zero affixes. These often depend a lot on the foundational
principles of each framework and the methodology it employs, beyond the need of a faithful
empirical description. Thus, for separationist theories of morphology, which keep
morphophonology apart from morphosyntax and interpretation (e.g., Distributed Morphology,
Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology) zero is just a possible spell-out like any other affix. For
lexeme/word-based theories of morphology, which concentrate on words as wholes and
paradigmatic relations between them, zero affixes are nonexistent (e.g., Construction Morphology
or Paradigm Function Morphology, among others).
In this workshop we aim to gather contributions that address derivational zero affixes from the
perspective of the following research questions :
1. What are the empirical and theoretical advantages and disadvantages of positing
derivational zero affixes ? Are some theories more likely to posit such affixes and how do
they successfully implement them in the system ? Why do other theories find derivational
zero undesirable ?
2. How do derivational zero affixes differ from the inflectional ones ? Are they empirically
and/or theoretically less motivated/more difficult to implement than the latter and why ?
3. How do different theories of morphology deal with empirical phenomena for which it
would be tempting to posit a derivational zero affix ?
4. To what extent can language-specific properties and typological generalizations explain
availability or unavailability of zero affixation across languages ? What does the
crosslinguistic study of conversion phenomena bring to our understanding of zero
derivation, its empirical adequacy and theoretical status ?
We welcome contributions that deal with the questions above and other related issues from any
theory of morphology – whether of (syntactic or lexicalist) generative, construction-based, or
cognitive orientation. We aim to offer an interactive platform for discussion with input from as
diverse as possible a linguistic community. Both theoretical and empirically-focussed
contributions on particular languages are equally welcome.
Keywords : zero affixes, conversion, derivation, inflection, morphology
References :
Bergenholz, Henning & Joachim Mugdan. 2000. Nullelemente in der Morphologie (Null elements
in morphology). In : Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann & Joachim Mugdan (eds.),
Morphology. An International Handbook of Inflection and Word-Formation. Vol. 1,
435−450. Berlin/New York : de Gruyter.
Borer, Hagit. 2013. Taking Form. Oxford : Oxford University Press.
Darby, Jeannique. 2015. The processing of conversion in English : Morphological complexity and
underspecification. PhD thesis. Oxford : University of Oxford.
Don, Jan. 1993. Morphological conversion. PhD thesis, OTS Dissertation Series. Utrecht : LEd.
Don, Jan. 2005.On conversion, relisting and zero-derivation. SKASE Journal of Theoretical
Linguistics, 2(2), 2-16.
Farrell, Patrick. 2001. Functional shift as category underspecification. English Language and
Linguistics 5.1 : 109-130.
Lieber, Rochelle. 1981. On the Organization of the Lexicon. PhD thesis. University of New
Hampshire. Reproduced by IULC.
Lieber, Rochelle. 1992. Deconstructing Morphology. University of Chicago Press : Chicago.
Lieber, Rochelle. 2004. Morphology and Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press :
Cambridge.
Myers, Scott. 1984. Zero-derivation and inflection. In Speas M. & R. W : Sproat, eds., MIT
Working Papers in Linguistics 7, 53-69. Cambridge, MA : MIT Press.
Pesetsky, David. 1995. Zero Syntax : Experiencers and Cascades. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.
Plag, Ingo. 1999. Morphological Productivity, structural constraints in English derivation.
Mouton de Gruyter : The Hague.
Sanders, Gerald. 1988. Zero derivation and the overt analogue criterion. Theoretical morphology,
155-175.