Grammatical Strength in Prosodic Morphology: Typology and Theory

• Applicant: Dr. Eva Zimmermann
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 418008359

The speech sounds of languages have gradient phonetic properties. The final sound of the English word ‘bad’, for example, has arguably different acoustic properties in contexts like ‘bad times’ and ‘bad guys’ for most speakers: It is partially devoiced in the former context but not in the latter (Zsiga, 2013, 49). The phonological representation that encodes speakers’ grammatical knowledge, however, abstracts away from this particular gradient difference and the same phonemic representation of a voiced obstruent /d/ is standardly assumed in both contexts. This neutralization is a consequence of the fundamental assumption that linguistic representations are categorical: An element is present or not and either has a certain property or not (Chomsky and Halle, 1968). This research group investigates the hypothesis that such asymmetries where apparently identical grammatical elements behave differently is indeed due to differences in their gradient strength (Smolensky and Goldrick, 2016; Rosen, 2016; Zimmermann, to appear). It hence challenges the view of categorical linguistic representations and argues that grammatical computation is sensitive to gradient differences.This research group will develop a typology of the three strength-based patterns of competition, lexical under- and overapplication, and lexical cooperation. The expectation is that they are restricted in systematic ways that follow from a formalization of strength in phonological theory but remain coincidental under alternative models of grammar without reference to strength. In addition, most alternative accounts of these phenomena rely on morpheme-specific phonological constraints or sub-grammars (Inkelas et al., 2004; Inkelas and Zoll, 2007; Pater, 2009) whereas the assumption of strength in phonological representations allows a modular organization of grammar where the phonology has no direct access to morphological information. The area that is best suited for this study is Prosodic Morphology and thus the broad empirical domain of changes in the suprasegmental properties of words (=length, accent, tone) that are not predictable from the phonological structure alone but refer to morpho-syntactic information. Prosody is not only the empirical domain where most implicit or explicit notions of strength have been proposed in the literature (Halle and Vergnaud, 1987; Vaxman, 2016b), the main aim of Prosodic Morphology is to connect morphology and phonology via phonological representations, which is exactly the main goal of a theory of phonological strength as well.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups