LingLunch : Mae Caroll

Mae Caroll (ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language/ School of Culture, History and Language)
Morphological exponence from the hearer's perspective: theory and typology

Morphological exponence is the relationship between inflectional meanings and the component elements of words. While this is typically defined as bidirectional, most morphological theories only model linguistic production, i.e. how speakers construct words from lexemes and inflectional meanings. In this talk, I will present a formal model of exponence which takes a comprehension perspective on exponence focusing on asking 'what are the recurrent patterns in words that language users could use to discriminate between inflectional meanings?' This approach fills a gap in the theoretical literature but also appears promising for cross-linguistic comparison as it is computationally implemented allowing for large scale automatic typologies and it provides equivalent analyses across languages while remaining agnostic to any model of cognition.