Maria Copot

Ancien doctorant

General presentation

Interests:

• Paradigmatic morphology and the mental lexicon
• Experimental phonology and morphology
• Quantitative methods in linguistics

Teaching

2019-2020      TD and CM - Morphologie L3 (Université de Paris)

2018-2019      Supervisor - Morphology Li8 (Univerisity of Cambridge)

                         Supervisor - Phonetics, Phonology and Morphology Li1 (Univeristy of Cambridge)

   

Thèse

Title : The paradigmatic organisation of morphological knowledge

PhD Defense : 2023-06-05

Inscription : 2019 à Paris Cité

Jury :

• Olivier Bonami, Professor, Université Paris Cité, thesis supervisor
• Dunstan Brown, Professor, University of York, rapporteur
• Dagmar Divjak, Professor, University of Birmingham, member of the jury, examiner
• Barbara Hemforth, Directrice de recherche (CNRS), Université Paris Cité, member of the jury, examiner
• Fabio Montermini, Directeur de recherche (CNRS), Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès, rapporteur
• Andrea D. Sims, Professor, The Ohio State University, member of the jury, examiner

Abstract :

This thesis is about the fine implicative relationships that hold paradigms together, and their role in the structure of the mental lexicon.  It starts with an overview of key concepts such as paradigms, fine implicative relationships, memory and predictability, and subsequently features five articles on the subject, relying on methods from corpus, experimental and computational linguistics. "Behavioural evidence for implicative paradigmatic relationships" shows that speakers are aware of and make use of implicative relations in their inflectional system, and examines the relationship between paradigmatic predictability and frequency. "Baseless derivation: the behavioural reality of derivational paradigms" presents experimental evidence in favour of the hypothesis that derivational paradigms are also structured by implicative relationships. "Idiosyncratic frequency as a measure of derivation vs. inflection" operationalises the statement that inflection links words belonging to the same lexeme and derivation links words belonging to different lexemes, and places morphological processes of French along the inflection-derivation continuum based on a quantitative implementation of this criterion for the distinction. "Defectiveness in French as a product of prescriptivism" explores the relationship between defectiveness and stigmatised constructions, finding evidence in favour of the hypothesis that speakers avoid defective words for partly social reasons. "A word-and-paradigm workflow for fieldwork annotation" outlines a tool for the morphological analysis and annotation of underdocumented languages based on word-and-paradigm morphology, which makes it easier to involve the community of speakers of the language in the process of documentation. The articles are followed by a discussion outlining common themes between them, and future research directions.