Lexical Matters

Lexical Matters is a doctoral-level 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.

Sessions take place on Fridays 10-12 from January 21, 2022, except on those Fridays where there is a session of the Morphology Reading Group. They will take place in person in room 533, Olympe de Gouges to the extent possible.

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

2022 Program:

• January 21
  • General presentation of the group
  • Discussion around criteria for wordhood, on the basis of: John Mansfield. 2021. The word as a unit of internal predictability. Linguistics 59(6): 1427-1472.
• January 28
  • Discussion of quantitative measures of productivity, on the basis of: Elizabeth Pankratz. 2021. Morphological productivity: A Bayesian modelling approach. Master of Science, U. Potsdam.
• February 4
  • Discussion of inflectional complexity, on the basis of: Tamar Johnson, Kexin Gao, Kenny Smith, Hugh Rabagliati and Jennifer Culbertson. 2021. Investigating the effects of i-complexity and e-complexity on the learnability of morphological systems. 97-150.
• February 11: Morphology reading group
• February 18
  • Discussion of morphological learning on the basis of: Michal Ramscar. 2021. A discriminative account of the learning, representation and processing of inflection systems. Langeuage, Cognition and Neuroscience.
• February 25
  • Discussion of morphophonetics and naïve discrimitative learning, on the basis of: Fabian Tomaschek, Ingo Plag, Mirjam Ernestus & R. Harald Baayen (2021), Phonetic effects of morphology and context: Modeling the duration of word-final S in English with naïve discriminative learning, Journal of linguistics 57(1): 123–161.
• March 4
  • Discussion of recent work by O. Bonami on morphological relatedness and distributional semantics (no reading)
• March 11: Morphology reading group
• March 18
  • Discussion of linear discriminative learning, on the basis of: R. Harald Baayen, Yu-Ying Chuang, Elnaz Shafaei-Bajestan, and James P. Blevins (2019), The Discriminative Lexicon: A Unified Computational Model for the Lexicon and Lexical Processing in Comprehension and Production Grounded Not in (De)Composition but in Linear Discriminative Learning. Complexity 2019.
• March 25: No class
• April 1st
  • Discussion of computational induction of morphological relatedness, on the basis of Amit Kirschenbaum, Unsupervised induction of inflectional families, Computer Speech and Language 73 (2022).
• April 8: Morphology reading group
• April 15: Rochelle Lieber and Marios Andreou. 2018. Aspect and modality in the interpretation of deverbal -er nom- inals in English, Morphology 28(2):187–217. 
• April 22: Gabriella Lapesa, Lea Kawaletz, Ingo Plag, Marios Andreou, Max Kisselew, and Sebastian Pado, 2018. Disambiguation of newly derived nominalizations in context: A distributional semantics approach, Word Structure 11(3): 277–312.
• April: 29: no class
• May 20: Virve-Anneli Vihman, Felix Engelmann, Elena V. Lieven, and Anna L. Theakston. 2021. Many ways to decline a noun: elicitation of children’s novel noun inflection in Estonian, Language and Cognition 13(4): 693–733.
• June 3: Helen Sims-Williams. 2021. Token frequency as a determinant of morpgological change. Journal of Linguistics. 
• July 1st (last session): We will talk about two papers by Kaidi Lõo and colleagues on the processing of Estonian inflection (downloadable here):
  • K. Lõo, J. Järvikivi, and R. H. Baayen. Whole-word frequency and inflectional paradigm size facilitate Estonian case-inflected noun processing. Cognition, 175:20–25, 2018.​​​​​​​
  • K. L ̃Lõo, J. Järvikivi, F. Tomaschek, B. V. Tucker, and R. H. Baayen. Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shiws whole-word frequency and paradigm effects. Morphology, 28:71–97, 2018.