Affixation in Agwuagune

Syntactic Affixation and Performance Structures

Functional elements (determiners, complementizers, modals, degree words) are in many ways the syntactic analogues of affixes in morphology. Typically, functional elements are bound elements. Phonologically, they are clitics: syntactically, they are unable to appear without an associated thematic element (noun, verb, adjective). I would like to extend the analogy by showing that functional eleme...

L-tone affixation: Evidence from German dialects

In a comparison of the tonal grammars of two German dialects, Swabian and Upper Saxon German, we observe a particular type of intonation contour that is similar in surface form, yet differs phonologically. Phonetically, the contour’s shape is risingfalling; phonologically, the Swabian contour reads as L*H +L 0%, and the one of Upper Saxon as L+ H*L 0%. Both contours are marked ones, and arise t...

Morphological Consonant Mutation as Gestural Affixation

Levels of Affixation in the Acquisition of English Morphology

The theory of level-ordering proposes that word formation processes are assigned to one of three levels within the lexicon. Level 1 processes are applied before Level 2, which are applied before Level 3. Such ordering constraints predict differences in acceptability between pairs such as teeth marks versus *claws marks, and Darwinianism versus *Darwinismian. An acquisition model is examined in ...

A Naive Theory of Affixation and an Algorithm for Extraction

We present a novel approach to the unsupervised detection of affixes, that is, to extract a set of salient prefixes and suffixes from an unlabeled corpus of a language. The underlying theory makes no assumptions on whether the language uses a lot of morphology or not, whether it is prefixing or suffixing, or whether affixes are long or short. It does however make the assumption that 1. salient ...