[PLing] Talk by Guy Tabachnick on November 23

[Madeleine Butschety]

Dear colleagues,

we cordially invite you to a talk by dr. Guy Tabachnick (University of Nova Gorica) as part of the Jezik & Linguistics Colloquia series. His talk entitled "Czech speakers learn and apply morphological dependencies" (abstract see below) will take place this Thursday, November 23, 1:15 CET at lecture room P5 at the University of Nova Gorica, and on Zoom. If you would like to join via Zoom, please use the following link: 

Join Zoom Meeting
https://ungsi.zoom.us/j/65808613233
Meeting ID: 658 0861 3233

We hope to see many of you there!

Best,
Madeleine Butschety (on behalf of the Center for Cognitive Science of Language, UNG)


>>dr. Guy Tabachnick
ABSTRACT: Czech speakers learn and apply morphological dependencies

Theories of morphology must account for lexicalized variation: lexical items that differ unpredictably in their inflection must be memorized individually and differ in their stored representation. When tested on such cases, adult speakers usually follow the “law of frequency matching” (Hayes et al. 2009), extending gradient phonological patterns from the lexicon. In this talk, I present results from two wug tests showing that Czech speakers likewise extend gradient morphological patterns from the lexicon: that is, they productively apply correlations between inflected forms of the same word. I handle lexicalized variation using diacritic features marking lexical entries and propose that Czech speakers have learned a gradient cooccurrence relation between diacritic features, extending the sublexicon model of Gouskova et al. (2015). This approach accounts for phonological and morphological patterns with a unified mechanism. This approach provides an account of morphological dependencies in generative grammar compatible with a piece-based, syntactic theory like Distributed Morphology, responding to Ackerman and Malouf (2013) and others who criticize such theories for being unable to account for these morphological correlations.