Linguistic Comprehension and the Typology of Exponence

Speaker: Mae Carroll, University of Melbourne, Australia

Arguably, no part of language displays more salient cross-linguistic variation than that of inflectional morphology. Inflectional morphology is the marking of grammatical information, such as number or tense, within words. Some languages, like Vietnamese, display no inflectional morphology at all instead utilising other means for expressing that information; while on the other end, a single verb in Ngkolmpu, a language spoken in the southern New Guinea region, may have thousands of forms that speakers must be able to produce and understand in an instant. This remarkable variation is not just in the size of these systems, i.e. the number of forms of a word, but also how these systems are organised. We observe systems which display transparent one-to-one mappings of form and meaning and others in which multiple meanings map to multiple forms and vice versa. The mapping of form and meaning in inflection is known as exponence. It is the ultimate goal of inflectional typology to explain all this variation.  

In this talk, I focus on answering the following concrete questions: (1) What are the possible parameters of linguistic variation in the domain of exponence? And (2) how are languages distributed with respected this possibility? To answer these questions, we must also ask (3) how may we analyse languages with respect to these parameters in a meaningful way, that is consistent cross-linguistically, and without presupposing any particular expectation? 

To answer these questions, I introduce advances in the theory of exponence which uses formal models and computational methods to operationalise a comprehension-based approach (Carroll & Beniamine, Forthcoming). This approach defines exponence as possible information and allows us to make coherent statements about how languages are similar or different with respect to exponence. Then, using Canonical Typology (Corbett 2015; Bond 2019), I establish the possibility space of linguistic variation of exponence proposing a four-way typology of mappings. Finally, I present our preliminary results which shows how a diverse sample of languages fully exemplifies all possible points of variation but also show considerable variation in how they are distributed with respect to these parameters.    

References:  

Carroll, Mae & Beniamine, Sacha. Forthcoming. Linguistic comprehension and the typology of exponence.   

Corbett, Greville G. 2015. Morphosyntactic complexity: a typology of lexical splits. Language 91.145-193. DOI: 10.1353/lan.2015.000    

Bond, Oliver. 2019. Canonical Typology. In Jenny Audring & Francesca Masini (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory, 409-431. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Speakers Bio

Mae Carroll is an expert on the languages of New Guinea. Her research seeks to explore the limits and drivers of linguistic complexity. She was awarded her PhD from the Australian National University in 2017, where she worked with speakers of Ngkolmpu, a Yam Language spoken in West Papua.

Mae has held fellowships at the Australian National University and the University of Surrey. She was a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Surrey Morphology Group where she maintains visitor status. She is a member of the Research Unit for Indigenous Language and an affiliate of Evolution of Cultural Diversity Initiative.

She has broad interests in descriptive linguistics, linguistic typology, language evolution and computational modelling.