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Detail of contribution

Auteur: Harald CLAHSEN

Titre:
Derivation versus inflection: Experimental evidence for a controversial distinction


Abstract/Résumé: The question of whether derivation and inflection differ in any substantial way is controversial among morphologists. Distributed Morphology (e.g. Halle & Marantz, 1994) does not explicitly distinguish between derivational and inflectional processes. Realization-based theories of morphology (e.g. Anderson, 1992), by contrast, assume distinct morpholexical representations for derived words that distinguish them from the products of inflectional processes. Experimental psycholinguistic studies have examined surface level and meaning-level properties of morphologically complex words, without paying much attention to the morphological differences between inflectional and derivational processes; see Amenta & Crepaldi (2012) for review. Against this background, I will report results from priming experiments investigating the processing of inflectional and derivational phenomena in native (L1) and non-native speakers (L2) of Turkish in comparison to related phenomena in speakers of Indo-European languages. The experiments demonstrated different priming patterns for inflection and derivation, specifically within the L2 group. This contrast is consistent with realization-based models of morphology that posit precisely the kind of split observed in the data. References Amenta, S. & D. Crepaldi (2012). Morphological processing as we know it: An analytical review of morphological effects in visual word identification. Frontiers in Psychology 3:232. Anderson, S.R. (1992). A-morphous morphology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halle, M. & A. Marantz (1994). Some key features of Distributed Morphology. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 21.