Implicative paradigmatic structure and morphological processing

Mardi 25 Juin 2019, 14:00 to 16:00
Invité: 
Andrea Sims (Ohio State University, invitée UFR-L)
Organisation: 
Olivier Bonami (LLF)
Lieu: 

LLF – Bât. ODG – 3e étage – Salle 357

Andrea Sims (Ohio State University)
Implicative paradigmatic structure and morphological processing

Some recent work that seeks to model the implicative structure of paradigms has implicitly or explicitly assumed that morphological organization discoverable with information-theoretic, set-theoretic, or graph-theoretic tools constitutes an adequate model of an adult speaker’s knowledge. However, it is unclear that this assumption is valid. I examine the connection between typological and theoretical studies of the implicative structure of paradigms on the one hand, and morphological processing and cognitive representations of word structure on the other. I will draw partly on Russian experiments by Parker (2016). Time allowing, I will additionally examine the role of case syncretism (as a particular kind of implicative paradigmatic relationship) in resolving morphosyntactic conflicts at the sentence level. Overall, the picture that emerges is one in which speakers are sensitive to some aspects of the implicative structure of inflectional paradigms and utilize it for cognitive organization and morphological processing, but often at a more coarse-grained level than is captured by metrics employed in typological and theoretical studies.