Lexical Matters

Lexical Matters is a class given by Olivier Bonami and dedicated to discussing the state of the art in morphology and related fields, including lexical semantics, as well as computational and psycholinguistic work on morphology and the lexicon. Most sessions will be devoted to presenting a recent piece of research, either published or in progress. Exact topics will be decided on the basis of the individual interests of the students.

The class has a double audience: doctoral students at ED622, and motivated M2 students with a strong background in morphology (e.g. those who successfully tool advanced morphology in their first year).

Participants are intended to proactively contribute to the class by reading the materials in advance, participating in discussions, and volunteering to make presentations. For those master students who are officially enrolled in the class and need a grade, evaluation will be based on a combination of oral presentation(s) and a final written report. Work can be carried out in groups of up to 3 students. The content of the work can consist either of a research project or of reporting on research by others.

Sessions take place on Wednesdays 15:30-17:30 from September 27, 2022, in room 310, Olympe de Gouges.

Documents can be downloaded here by registered participants. Please write to Olivier Bonami to get the password.

Participants please fill in this form by September 29.

2023 Program:

• September 27
  • General presentation of the group
  • Presentation of recent research on derivational paradigms.
• October 4
  • Derivational paradigms, continued (updated slides)
• October 11: Overabundance in Estonian
  • Presentation by Jules based on : Aigro and Vihman (in press), Realised overabundance in Estonian noun paradigms: A corpus study. Word Structure 16.
  • Presentation by Olivier based on: Vihman et al. (2021), Many ways to decline a noun: elicitation of children’s novel noun inflection in Estonian. Language and Cognition 13.4.
• October 18
  • Introduction to grammatical gender (Olivier)
• October 25
  • Nazanin and Nina on gender assignment
  • Olivier on gender and agent nouns in French
• November 1st: no class
• November 8
• • Alexandr on overabundance?
  • Viktoriia on co-lexification
• November 15: discriminative learrning (Olivier)
  • Olivier on discriminative learning, based on
    • M. Ramscar, A discriminative account of the learning, representation and processing of inflection systems. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 38.4 (slides)
    • Tomaschek et al. Phonetic effects of morphology and context: Modeling the duration of word-final S in English with naïve discriminative learning.” In: Journal of Linguistics 57.1, pp. 123–161 (slides)
    • Baayen et al. 2019. The discriminative lexicon. Complexity 2019. (slides)
• November 22
• November 29
  • Louis on compounding in Ancient Greek
• December 6
  • Irene on implicative structure in Malayalam
  • Jules on modelling overabundance and the PCFP
• December 13
  • Luiz Artur on rivalry in European Portuguese
  • Thomas
• December 20