Monotonicity as an Effective Theory of Morphosyntactic Variation

Graf, Thomas

Abstract One of the major goals of linguistics is to delineate the possible range of variation across languages. Recent work has identified a surprising number of typological gaps in a variety of domains. In morphology, this includes stem suppletion, person pronoun syncretism, case syncretism, and noun stem allomorphy. In morphosyntax, only a small number of all conceivable Person Case Constraints and Gender Case Constraints are found. While various proposals have been put forward for each individual domain, few attempts have been made to give a unified explanation of the limited typology across all domains. This paper presents a novel account that deliberately abstracts away from the usual details of grammatical description in order to provide a domain-agnostic explanation of the limits of typological variation. This is achieved by combining prominence hierarchies, e.g. for person and case, with mappings from those hierarchies to the relevant output forms. As the mappings are required to be monotonic, only a fraction of all conceivable patterns can be instantiated.

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@article{Graf18JLM,
    author = {Graf, Thomas},
    title = {Monotonicity as an Effective Theory of Morphosyntactic Variation},
    year = {2019},
    journal = {Journal of Language Modelling},
    note = {to appear}
}

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Fri 11 April 2014 | in Papers |
| morphosyntax | PCC | algebra | feature geometry | typology | lattices | person hierarchy |

Graf, Thomas

Abstract The Person Case Constraint blocks certain combinations of clitics and weak pronouns in a variety of languages. Out of the numerous logical possibilities, only four variants of the Person Case Constraint are attested. I show that these four variants form a natural …
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Feature Geometry and the Person Case Constraint: An Algebraic Link

Fri 11 April 2014 | in Presentations |
| morphosyntax | PCC | algebra | feature geometry | typology | lattices | person hierarchy |

Graf, Thomas

Abstract The Person Case Constraint blocks certain combinations of clitics and weak pronouns in a variety of languages. Out of the numerous logical possibilities, only four variants of the Person Case Constraint are attested. I show that these four variants form a natural …
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Sun 01 January 2012 | in Papers |
| PCC | MSO | algebra | substantive universals |

Graf, Thomas

Abstract Graf (2011) and Kobele (2011) proved independently that Minimalist grammars can express all constraints that are definable in weak monadic second-order logic (MSO), i.e. the extension of first-order logic with quantification over finite sets. The proof takes as its vantage point …
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