Verb morphology cross-linguistically?

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Verb morphology cross-linguistically?

Post by psygnisfive »

Does anyone know of a good resource on verb morphology cross linguistically, or, perhaps more usefully, a corpus that has glosses for many non-English languages?
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Post by Radagast »

Payne: Describing Morphosyntax?
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Post by psygnisfive »

Radagast wrote:Payne: Describing Morphosyntax?
How comprehensive is it? I want as many example sentences as humanly possible (tens to hundreds of thousands, if possible), or barring that, a reliably complete description (tho I'd really prefer raw data if possible).
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Post by Radagast »

It has a lot of breadth but not a lot of depth - there is an example sentance of most kinds of morphology, but only one of each.
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Post by Salmoneus »

psygnisfive wrote:
Radagast wrote:Payne: Describing Morphosyntax?
How comprehensive is it? I want as many example sentences as humanly possible (tens to hundreds of thousands, if possible), or barring that, a reliably complete description (tho I'd really prefer raw data if possible).
Say three hundred thousand examples, for, say, five hundred languages, at, say, an average of 10 words a sentence... 1.5 billion words. That's 1,000 copies of "À la recherche du temps perdu"!

Even if you only meant one sentence for each language, a hundred thousand ten-word sentences, unsurprisingly, is a million words. If we say, for example, that there's 130,000 examples of 10 words each, you're looking for a book twice as long as Atlas Shrugged. And 130k is on the very, very low side of 'hundreds of thousands', if it even counts at all. And that's just the examples, leaving aside the text that introduces them!
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Post by psygnisfive »

Salmoneus wrote:
psygnisfive wrote:
Radagast wrote:Payne: Describing Morphosyntax?
How comprehensive is it? I want as many example sentences as humanly possible (tens to hundreds of thousands, if possible), or barring that, a reliably complete description (tho I'd really prefer raw data if possible).
Say three hundred thousand examples, for, say, five hundred languages, at, say, an average of 10 words a sentence... 1.5 billion words. That's 1,000 copies of "À la recherche du temps perdu"!

Even if you only meant one sentence for each language, a hundred thousand ten-word sentences, unsurprisingly, is a million words. If we say, for example, that there's 130,000 examples of 10 words each, you're looking for a book twice as long as Atlas Shrugged. And 130k is on the very, very low side of 'hundreds of thousands', if it even counts at all. And that's just the examples, leaving aside the text that introduces them!
Actually 1.5 billion words would be a nice size. It's smaller than the NYT gigaword corpus. Tho granted, the gigaword corpus is unglossed, just parsed with the Stanford Parser.

But really, I don't need sentences so much as just verbs. I'm trying to answer a typology question and I want to do it on raw data as much as possible.
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Post by psygnisfive »

Radagast wrote:It has a lot of breadth but not a lot of depth - there is an example sentance of most kinds of morphology, but only one of each.
I'll take a look. I need as many examples of verbs with multiple inflections as possible. Basically I'm trying to confirm or disconfirm claims about the universal ordering of morphemes on verbs, in this case from a hierarchical perspective as opposed to mere linear ordering, so I need lots of combinations of morphemes.
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Post by Mecislau »

psygnisfive wrote:
Radagast wrote:It has a lot of breadth but not a lot of depth - there is an example sentance of most kinds of morphology, but only one of each.
I'll take a look. I need as many examples of verbs with multiple inflections as possible. Basically I'm trying to confirm or disconfirm claims about the universal ordering of morphemes on verbs, in this case from a hierarchical perspective as opposed to mere linear ordering, so I need lots of combinations of morphemes.
Well, if you'd be more specific about what you're looking for, maybe some of us would you able to provide you with specific examples or counterexamples from languages we're familiar with?

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Post by psygnisfive »

Mecislau wrote:Well, if you'd be more specific about what you're looking for, maybe some of us would you able to provide you with specific examples or counterexamples from languages we're familiar with?
"a good resource on verb morphology cross linguistically, or, perhaps more usefully, a corpus that has glosses for many non-English languages"

:P

Examples and counter examples won't do, tho. I need data. I'm going to run it through a script to try and extract all the within-language hierarchies (or lack thereof).
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Post by merijn »

I take it that you are familiar with Marit Julien's PhD dissertation? Because she tried to see if the combination of the Cartographic approach to verbal functional categories, combined with Kayne's antisymmetry combined with "all morphology is in the syntax" approach is viable from a typological point of view. (It is not what you're looking for but she may be doing what you want to do and there are probably quite a few morpheme-order universals proposed in her book that you want to check out, though admittedly those universals are always based on a sample)

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Post by psygnisfive »

merijn wrote:I take it that you are familiar with Marit Julien's PhD dissertation? Because she tried to see if the combination of the Cartographic approach to verbal functional categories, combined with Kayne's antisymmetry combined with "all morphology is in the syntax" approach is viable from a typological point of view. (It is not what you're looking for but she may be doing what you want to do and there are probably quite a few morpheme-order universals proposed in her book that you want to check out, though admittedly those universals are always based on a sample)
I don't buy antisymmetry, tho cartographic stuff I'm more on the fence about. I don't know if HOPs will perfectly mirror, cross linguistically, but I do suspect that there will be certain universal patterns in the ordering of morphemes. The question is, does it hold in the verbal morphology domain as well. I've heard from some people that it doesn't, that morphology is just a hogdepodge mess, unlike syntax, but I'm not sure I believe this without some data. Cinque, for instance, tried to explain the whole nominal modifier ordering thing by making reference to certain kinds of roll-up movement, but noone, it seems, stopped to ask whether or not the list of possible orderings could be gotten instead by category-specific head direction. Surprise, surprise, it can, and you only need NP-fronting movement to get the entirety of known-to-exist structures, as opposed to the excess of movement that Cinque proposed. Had Cinque not provided the list of possible orders he's found, I couldn't've gone through and figured this out. So I'm skeptical about any of these ordering claims that come without data.

I will definitely take a look at Julien's thesis tho.
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Post by merijn »

There are two schools of thought about morphology. One treats morphemes as basic and pareadigms as epiphenomena (distributed morphology is probably the best known of these approaches) and the other treats paradigms as basic and morphemes as epiphenomena (so-called word-and-paradigm approaches). The first view is in line with the idea that morphology is in the syntax, that syntactic constraints and universals also hold for morphology and that there is little about morphology that is a "hodgepodge mess". However, there may be a functional explanation for the similarities between morphology and syntax; a lot of morphology is, as the slogan goes, "yesterday's syntax". Proponents of the word-and-paradigm approach are more likely to stress the uniqueness and weirdness of morphology.
I know next to nothing about word-and-paradigm morphology due to two factors: 1) I am a Bantuist and Bantu languages, being mostly agglutinative languages, don't have many difficulties that morpheme based approaches can't easily handle. On the other hand there is quite some uncertainty about what a word constitutes in Bantu languages so any boundary between morphology and syntax seems artificial. 2) I haven't found any basic introduction on the internet to word-and -paradigm morphology. I know Aranoff and Anderson have done something about the word-and-paradigm approach within mainstream generative grammar, and I planning to read them. But I haven't found a short introduction that gives me any idea more than wikipedia or what their critics tell me.

Anyway, if you can find that verbal morphology is bound to similar or even the same constraints as syntax, it would certainly be a big win for the morpheme-based approaches. But if Marit Julien didn't win the other side over, you probably won't as well (since you are doing something very similar to Marit Julien). There are in their eyes to many other things that are difficult to explain in a morpheme base approach (syncretism, non-concatenative morphology). DM tries to explain these all away but as a result is in my opinion a bit messy.

I have the opposite position as you. I am on the fence about antisymmetry, but I am sceptical about Cartography, though the typological work done by the Cartographic people is quite convincing. I am just sceptical about a large UG. A universal order of functional categories is in my opinion not likely to be part of it unless it is based on a simpler principle. The same is true for universal category-specific head-complement order, but I would be very interested if it gets the work done.

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Post by psygnisfive »

I actually think that if there's a universal order of constituents, it's not as rigid as cartography supposes, but also that its origins are in the semantics, so that it's not so much part of UG but rather an emergent phenomena that results from UG + structure of semantic objects. But then, I also think UG is more about the constraints on the interfaces, than on anything purely syntactic.
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Post by Radius Solis »

psygnisfive wrote: I'll take a look. I need as many examples of verbs with multiple inflections as possible. Basically I'm trying to confirm or disconfirm claims about the universal ordering of morphemes on verbs, in this case from a hierarchical perspective as opposed to mere linear ordering, so I need lots of combinations of morphemes.
Is this to do with a conversation we recently had?

Also: in that case Describing Morphosyntax probably isn't what you're looking for. There's maybe three to ten verb examples each, average, given for perhaps twenty-odd languages, and not all of them are fully glossed. For answering your question you need lots more and better data than that.

Pirahã and the various Eskimo langs have morphology of a very obviously hierarchical nature though, if that fact is of any interest.

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Post by merijn »

psygnisfive wrote:I actually think that if there's a universal order of constituents, it's not as rigid as cartography supposes, but also that its origins are in the semantics, so that it's not so much part of UG but rather an emergent phenomena that results from UG + structure of semantic objects. But then, I also think UG is more about the constraints on the interfaces, than on anything purely syntactic.
Then we are on the same page re:cartography. Many people within mainstream generative grammar who are not Cartographists believe that there are several fields in the extended projections of verbs. The highest field is the complementizer field, where complementizers reside, as well as functional categories regulating topic and focus, a second inflectional field where TAM functional categories reside, and the little v field where functional categories reside introducing arguments. I have always suspected that this general hierarchy could be based on semantic principles or other independent principles, but I have always felt that I don't have the knowledge, both about semantics and about the theoretical side of syntax, to formulate exactly how. But to me it makes sense that tense for instance has scope over all arguments, and that complementizers, which regulate how a clause interacts with the rest of the sentence, reside at the outside of a clause.

It is my impression that there is a movement going on within the field of Generative Grammar to a smaller UG (minimalism is called minimalism for a reason) and thus becoming more in line with non-generative frameworks (quite a few of them more indebted to Generative Grammar than they give credit for), but that most of the non-generative people fail to notice. But when they do it might result in a new body of frameworks that combines the rigor of generative grammar and some of the central insights of GG about the architecture of syntax (as well as a lot of specific analyses of problems within GG) with ideas from non-generative frameworks.

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Post by psygnisfive »

Well, with regards to "being indebted to generative grammar", its important to point out that HPSG, LFG, CCG, etc. are all generative grammar, they're just not transformational, broadly speaking. The more functionalist grammars aren't, tho, thos is definitely true.
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