I admit it: until very recently when I heard “morphology” I
reached for my pillow. I knew that I was
supposed to find it all very interesting, but like cod liver oil, knowing this
did not make ingesting it any more pleasant. Moreover, I even developed a spiel
that led to the conclusion that I did not have
to be interested in it for it was at right angles to those questions that
gripped me (and you all know what these are, viz. PP and DP and
Empiricism/Rationalism, and FL and UG etc.). Morphology was not as obviously
relevant to these questions because much of it dealt with finite (often small) exception-full
paradigms. So many rules, so many exceptions, so many data points. Is there
really a PoS problem here? Not obviously. So, yes morphology exists and is
abundant, but does language really need morphology or is it just an excrescence?
At any rate, despite some questions at a very general level (here
and here),
I was able to divert my gaze and convince myself that I had reason to do so.
Then along came Omer thrusting Bobaljik into my hands and I am here to admit
that I
was completely wrong and that this stuff is great. You may know all
about it, but partly as penance, let me say how and why I was wrong and why
this stuff is very interesting even for someone with my interests.
Those of you that are better read than I am already know
about Jonathan Bobaljik’s (JB) work on the morphology of superlatives. He has a
book (here)
and a bunch of papers (e.g. here).[1]
I want to talk a little about one discovery that he has made that provides a
novel (as JB himself notes) take on the classic PoS argument. It should be part
of anyone’s bag of PoS examples that gets trotted out when you want to impress
family, friends, students, and/or colleagues. It’s simple and very compelling.
I have road tested it, and it works, even with those that know nothing about
linguistics.
The argument is very simple. The fact concerns morphological
patterns one finds when one examines
morphological exceptions. In other
words, it rests on the discovery that exceptions can be regular. A bunch of
languages (though by no means all) can form comparatives and superlatives from
base adjectival forms with affixes. English is a good example of one such
language. It provides trios such as big,
bigg-er, bigg-est and tall, tall-er,
tall-est. Note that in these two examples, big and tall are part of
the comparative er form and the
superlative est form. This is the
standard pattern in languages that do this kind of thing. Interestingly, there
are exceptions. So in English we also find trios like good bett-er, be-st and bad,
worse, wor-st where the comparative and superlative forms are not based on
the same base as the simple adjectival form. In other words, the comparative
and superlative are suppletive. There’s lots of technical ways of describing this,
but for my purposes, this suffices.
Here’s what JB established (of course, based on the work of others that
JB copiously cites): that if the comparative is suppletive, then so is the
superlative. More graphically, if we take the trio of forms as Adj/Comp/Super,
we find AAA patterns, ABB patterns and even ABC patterns but we find no ABA
patterns and very very few (maybe no?) AAB patterns.[2]
JB’s question is why not? And a very good questions this is.
JB argues that this follows from how superlatives are
constructed and how suppletion reflects the Elsewhere Principle. The interested
reader should read JB, but the basic proposal is that superlatives have
comparatives as structural subparts.[3]
How one pronounces the subpart then has an effect on how one can pronounce the larger structure. So,
in effect, if the comparative is suppletive and it is part of the structure of
the superlative, then the superlative must be suppletive as well given
something like the Elsewhere Principle. This accounts for the absence of the
ABA pattern. Explaining the absence of the AAB pattern takes a few more
assumptions concerning the locality of morphological operations.[4]
All of this may or may not be correct (I am no expert) but
it is all very interesting and very plausible. Let’s return to the PoS part of
the argument. JB notes several very
interesting properties of these patterns.
First, the pattern (especially the *ABA) is linguistically
very robust. It occurs in languages where the morphology makes it clear that
comparatives are part of superlatives (Czech) and those where this is not at
all evident on the surface (English). Thus, whatever is responsible for the
*ABA pattern cannot be something that is surface detectable from inspecting morphologically overt morphemic forms. Thus, that it holds in languages like English does not
follow from the fact that the comparative-within-superlative structure is
evident in English forms. It isn’t. So that *ABA holds quite generally, even
when there is no surface evidence suggesting that the superlative contains a
comparative subpart, suggests that the postulated nested relationship between
comparatives and superlatives drives the overt morphology, rather than the
other way around. And this, JB notes,
strongly suggests that this gap in the possible patterns points to *ABA
implicating some fundamental feature of FL/UG.
Note, incidentally, this is an excellent example where the G
of language A can ground conclusions concerning the G of language B, something
that only makes sense in the context of a commitment to some form of Universal
Grammar. The G of Czech is telling us something about the G of English, which
borders on the absurd unless one thinks that human Gs as such can have common
properties (viz. a commitment to UG in some form).[5]
Second, suppletion of the relevant sort is pretty uncommon
within any single language. So, in
English there are only two such suppletive trios (for good and bad). So too in
other languages (e.g. Hungarian, Estonian, Persian, Sanskrit, Modern Greek and
Portuguese have one suppletive form each).[6]
Consequently, the *ABA pattern only emerges if one takes a look across a large variety of languages and notes that the rather suppletive *ABA pattern never appears
in any.
Let me stress these two points: (i) the pattern is surface invisible in many languages (e.g.
English) in that the words that are relevant to finding it do not wear the
pattern on their morphological sleeves. (ii) Moreover, the absent pattern
occurs in an exceptional part of the
language, suppletions being exceptions to the more clearly rule governed part
of the morphology. And (iii) suppletions are rare both within a language and across languages. The numbers we are
looking at are roughly 200 forms over 50 or so languages. Nonetheless, when all of these exceptions from
across all of these languages is examined, the absence of ABA patterns shines
through clearly. So, there is a kind of three fold absence of relevant data for
the child: the pattern is surface invisible in many languages, suppletion
triplets are rare in any given language and the pattern is only really well
grounded when one considers these small number of exceptional cases across a
good number of languages. The PoSity (haha) of relevant evidence is evident. As
JB rightly concludes, this begs for a FL/UG explanation.
Third, as JB notes, the absence really is the absence of a pattern. Here’s what I mean. Even among
languages in close contact the pattern cannot be accounted for by pointing to
roots and morphemes that express these patterns shared across the languages.
The reason is that the relevant roots and morphemes in language A are not those
that express it in language B even in cases where A and B are geographical and
historical neighbors. So there is no plausible account of *ABA in terms of
borrowing forms across Gs either geographically or historically local to one
another.[7]
As JB eloquently sums things up (here:
p 16):
…a growing body of
research…finds…order in chaos – robust patterns of regularity that emerge as
significant in their cross-linguistic aspect. Systematic gaps in these attested
patterns…point to the existence of grammatical principles that abstract away
from the peculiarities of individual words in specific languages and restrict
the class of possible grammars.
This argument combines classic PoS themes with one important
innovation. What’s classic is zeroing in on the absence of some grammatical possibility. UG is invoked to explain
the gaps, exceptions the observed general patterns. UG is not generally invoked
to explain what is visible, but what fails to bark. What is decidedly new, at
least to me, is that the relevant pattern is only really detectable across Gs.
This is the data the linguist needs to establish *ABA. There is no plausible
world in which this kind of data is available in any child’s PLD. Indeed, given the rarity of thee forms overall, it is hard to see how this pattern could be detected by linguists in the absence of extensive comparative work.
As noted, JB provides a theory of this gap in terms of the
structure of superlatives as containing comparatives plus the Elsewhere
Principle. If UG requires that superlatives be built from the comparative and
UG adopts the Elsewhere Principle then the *ABA hole follows. These assumptions
suffice to provide an explanatorily adequate theory of this phenomenon.
However, JB decides to venture into territory somewhat beyond explanatory adequacy and asks why this should be true. More
particularly, why must superlatives be built on top of comparatives? He
speculates, in effect, that this reflects some more general property;
specifically a principle
… limiting the (semantic)
complexity of functional morphemes. Perhaps the reason there can be no true
superlative (abstract) morpheme combining directly with adjectives without the
mediation of a comparative element is that the superlative meaning “more X than
all others” contain two semantically rich elements: the comparative operator
and a universal quantifier. Perhaps UG imposes a condition that such
semantically rich elements must start out as syntactic atoms (i.e. X0
nodes). (here p. 6)
It is tempting to speculate that this proposal is related to
the kind of work that Hunter, Pietroski, Halberda and Lidz have done on the semantic
structure of most (discussed here).
They note that natural language meanings like to use some predicates but not
others in expressing quantificational meanings. Their analysis of most critically involves a comparative and
a universal component and shows how this fits with the kinds of predicates that
the analog number + visual system prefer. One can think of these, perhaps, as
the natural semantic predicates and if so this might also relate to what JB is
pointing to. At any rate, we are in deep waters here, just the kind of ideas
that a respect for minimalist questions would lead one to explore.
Let me end with one more very interesting point that JB
makes. He notes that the style of explanation developed for the *ABA gap has
application elsewhere. When one finds these kind of gaps, these kinds of
part-whole accounts are very attractive. There seem to be other morphological
gaps of interest to which this general kind of account can be applied and they
have very interesting implications (e.g. case values may be highly structured).
At any rate, as JB notes, with this explanatory schema in hand, reverse
engineering projects of various kinds suggest themselves and become interesting
to pursue.
So let me end. To repeat, boy was I wrong. Morphology
provides some gorgeous examples of PoS reasoning, which, moreover, are easy to
understand and explain to neophytes. I would suggest adding the *ABA MLG to
your budget of handy PoS illustrations. It’s great stuff.
[1]
I also have a copy of an early draft of what became part of the book that I
will refer to here. I will call this JB-draft.
[2]
Is Latin the only case of an ABC pattern? JB probably said but I can’t recall
the answer.
[3]
This is a classical kind of GG explanation: why do A and B share a property?
Because A is a subpart of B. OR why if B then A? Because A is A is part of B.
Note that this only really makes sense as an explanatory strategy if one is
willing to countenance abstract form that is not always visible on the surface.
See below.
[5]
David Pesetsky made just this point forcefully in Athens.
[6]
See JB-draft:15.
[7]
JB-draft (15-16) notes that neither roots nor affixes that induce the
suppletion are preserved across neighboring or historically related languages.
