The morphology-phonology interface: Isolating to polysynthetic languages

The Acquisition of Polysynthetic Languages

One of the major challenges in acquiring a language is being able to use morphology as an adult would, and thus, a considerable amount of acquisition research has focused on morphological production and comprehension. Most of this research, however, has focused on the acquisition of morphology in isolating languages, or languages (such as English) with limited inflectional morphology. The natur...

The Phonology-Morphology Interface from the perspective of infixation

Surviving truncation: informativity at the interface of morphology and phonology

When disyllabic words of Chinese are compounded, truncation often applies to yield a disyllabic output that draws one syllable from each of the contributing words, e.g., xiàdiē + fúdù → xiàdiē + fúdù → diēfú. A substantial portion of new words enter Chinese via this process, and all combinations of four underlying syllables are attested in disyllabic neologisms. Variation in which syllable of t...

Complex Predicates and Agreement In Polysynthetic Languages*

The term “complex predicate” in syntactic theory is still semantically transparent; it can refer to any predicate that a particular researcher finds difficult—whether due to semantic complexity, syntactic complexity, morphological complexity, or whatever. For purposes of this work, I use the term to mean a single “inflectional domain” which contains two or more distinct morphemes, each of which...

A Machine Translation Toolchain for Polysynthetic Languages

We present a set of free tools for building rule-based machine translation systems for polysynthetic languages. As there are no large corpora for most of the “small” languages, it is often impossible to use statistical methods. There are some free MT tools but very little work has been done on polysynthetic languages. The aim of this project is to provide computational tools for morphological a...