Course Description
There are many cases where a grammar fails to provide any way to realize certain forms of a word. Lexemes which fail to occur in all of the inflectional variants are sometimes said to exhibit paradigm gaps or to be defective. The study of defectivity is a challenge to our current understanding of morphological productivity and of word formation more generally. But, while defectivity has been documented in several dozen languages to date, it remains ill-defined and ill incorporated into our theories of language. There is little understanding of how defectivity is encoded in grammar, how it is actuated in the course of language change, or how it is acquired by children. This course will focus on the study of defectivity. We will first attempt to develop a definition of the phenomenon of defectivity. We will review theories of how defectivity is grammatically encoded, and proposals about the diachrony of defectivity and its acquisition (focusing on recent proposals that it is acquired via the use of indirect negative evidence), and also consider gaps in derivational morphology. Throughout the course, we will draw on a collection of case studies drawn from a diverse sample of languages.
Area Tags: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Acquisition, Computational Linguistics
(Sessions 1 & 2) Monday/Thursday 3:00pm – 4:20pm
Location: ILC S416
Instructor: Kyle Gorman
Kyle Gorman is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and director of the master’s program in computational linguistics. He also works as a software engineer at Google Research. Some topics Gorman has worked on include the morphophonology of Latin, productivity and defectivity, phonotactics, statistical methods for computational model comparison, finite-state techniques, text normalization, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, morphological analysis, and aphasia.
