Sharon Inkelas (colloquium abstract)

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An Inside-out Approach to Multiple Exponence in Morphology

Sharon Inkelas
University of California, Berkeley

ABSTRACT

Multiple (extended) exponence is the occurrence of more than one morpheme, or morphological construction, in the same word that expones the same morphological category (e.g. Matthews 1974; Stump 1991, 2001, Anderson 2001, 2005; Blevins 2003). The existence of ME stands in direct competition with principles of economy in morphology, which have been cited as motivating the phenomenon of blocking, e.g. of *man-s by men, in which the structurally simpler and/or lexicalized means of expressing the same complex meaning is preferred. This paper addresses the conflict between ME and blocking and proposes a theoretical model which generates both without the need for stipulating either. The solution proposed is a cyclic, 'inside-out' approach to word formation, couched in a very general Optimality Theory framework, in which both ME and its opposite emerge as outcomes of optimizing word structure along scales of meaning strength ('faithfulness') and structural well-formedness ('markedness').