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    (HET 227) Level-Ordering

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    Yamunaa Sivalingam
    1. Level-ordering proposes that the lexicon is innately structured into levels that constrain word formation rules. 2. An experiment showed that children almost never used regular plurals inside compounds but did use irregular plurals inside compounds. 3. This supports the idea that level-ordering is an innate property as children were applying these constraints without direct evidence in their input.

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    (HET 227) Level-Ordering

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    Yamunaa Sivalingam
    55 views19 pages
    1. Level-ordering proposes that the lexicon is innately structured into levels that constrain word formation rules. 2. An experiment showed that children almost never used regular plurals inside compounds but did use irregular plurals inside compounds. 3. This supports the idea that level-ordering is an innate property as children were applying these constraints without direct evidence in their input.

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    1. Level-ordering proposes that the lexicon is innately structured into levels that constrain word formation rules. 2. An experiment showed that children almost never used regular plurals inside compounds but did use irregular plurals inside compounds. 3. This supports the idea that level-ordering is an innate property as children were applying these constraints without direct evidence in their input.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    55 views19 pages

    (HET 227) Level-Ordering

    Uploaded by

    Yamunaa Sivalingam
    1. Level-ordering proposes that the lexicon is innately structured into levels that constrain word formation rules. 2. An experiment showed that children almost never used regular plurals inside compounds but did use irregular plurals inside compounds. 3. This supports the idea that level-ordering is an innate property as children were applying these constraints without direct evidence in their input.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    of 19

    Level-ordering in

    Lexical Development
    Ashley Chen Kai Yun
    Nurhazimah binti Mahmod
    Ooi Hui Joy
    Pohgawathi Davina a/p Deven
    Level-ordering and its basic notion associated with
    lexicon
    • Level-ordering is suggested to be an innate structural property of the lexicon.
    • Level-ordering constrains the child’s word-formation rules, independent of the
    input received.

    • An experiment is conducted with 33 children, results showed that:


    (1) Children almost never produced regular plurals inside compounds
    (e.g. rats-eater)
    (2) As soon as children used irregular plurals, they used them inside compounds (e.g. mice-
    eater)
    (3) Pluralia tantum nouns were also used inside compounds (e.g. clothes-eater)
    Introduction to levels

    I • Primary affixes (Class I)


    Level 1 N • Irregular inflection
    C
    L • Secondary affixes (Class II)
    Level 2
    U • Compounding
    D
    Level 3 E • Regular inflection e.g. eye → eyes
    Introduction to levels

    Nationalism
    Nation : Stem
    -al : Class I affix
    -ism : Class II affix

    *Class I affixes are always placed closer to the stem, followed by Class II. Hence, nationalism is a
    word, nationismal is not.
    Why teethmarks is acceptable but not
    clawsmarks?

    Why generate irregular plurals within


    compounds instead of regular ones?

    *Based on Victoria A. Murphy’s article in 2000


    Plurals inside compounds

    Teethmarks Clawsmarks
    Tooth undergoes Level 1 Irregular Claw does not undergo Level 1 as it has
    Inflection and becomes teeth regular plural form

    Teeth undergoes Level 2 Compounding Claw jumps to Level 3 Regular Inflection


    and becomes teethmarks and becomes claws

    Claws goes back to Level 2 and becomes


    clawsmarks, which is an unacceptable plural
    Tooth proceeds to next level “smoothly”. form within compound

    Claw does not proceed to next level


    “smoothly”.
    Plurals inside compounds (Gordon’s test)

    Mice-eater Rat-eater
    Mouse undergoes Level 1 Irregular Rat has regular plural form, so it remains as
    Inflection and becomes mice rat in Level 1

    Mice undergoes Level 2 Compounding and Rat undergoes Level 2 Compounding and
    becomes mice-eater becomes rat-eater

    Rat does not need to undergo Level 3


    Regular Inflection
    If the noun is irregular, the inflection form
    should be included. If the noun is regular, the inflection form
    should not be included.
    Plurals inside compounds (Continued)

    Clawsmarks is an unacceptable form. Based on Gordon’s test, claw


    is a regular noun, hence it should remain as “claw” and move on to
    next level.

    Teethmarks Clawmarks
    Tooth undergoes Level 1 Irregular Claw has regular plural form, so it remains
    Inflection and becomes teeth as claw in Level 1

    Teeth undergoes Level 2 Compounding Claw undergoes Level 2 Compounding and


    and becomes teethmarks becomes clawmarks

    Claw does not need to undergo Level 3


    Regular Inflection
    Tooth proceeds to next level “smoothly”.
    Claw proceeds to next level “smoothly”.
    Irregular plurals may appear inside compounds
     a. teeth marks
     b. mice eater

    Regular plurals may not appear inside compounds


     a. claws marks
     b. rats eater
    Problems for level-ordering
    • As Kiparsky (1982) and subsequent researchers (Selkirk 1982;
    Gordon 1985; AG 1996; Senghas, et al., ms) have noted, the
    restriction on regular plural non-heads predicted by the level-
    ordering hypothesis is not absolute.
    • Regular plurals do in fact appear as non-heads of compound.
    • The existence of regular plural compounds would thus seem to
    present a counter-argument to the level-ordering hypothesis.
    • However, proponents of level-ordering have an explanation:
    recursivity.
    Problems for level-ordering (cont’d)
    • The rules of level ordering indicate that the pluralized noun cannot go
    backward to Level 2 for compounding, but there is an alternative
    explanation called recursivity.
    • Recursivity is the pluralization of the internal noun happens as one
    would expect it to based on level-ordering: it is subjected to regular
    inflection at Level 3 (represented by the double arrows in Table 3, below)

    Examples
    Level 1 Mice, basket, clothes,
    mouse, rat
    Level 2 compounding
    Level 3 -s
    OUTPUT
    • Even if we could limit which constituents were allowed to return to the
    mechanism, how would we limit what processes happen to them on their
    second pass through?
    • If, as the claim goes, the pluralized constituent is truly returned to the top
    of the mechanism then it should be subject to processes at all levels of
    the mechanism – not just to compounding alone.
    • In particular, it should be subject to affixation at levels one and two but
    this does not appear to be the case. Consider the example of the
    derivation of productiveness:

    a) próduct +ive productive #ness productiveness


    • The suffix -ive, which changes certain nouns to adjectives, has been
    affixed noun product, yielding productive at Level 1.
    • Then, at Level 2, the suffix -ness, which changes adjectives to nouns has
    been affixed to productive yielding productiveness.
    • Let’s imagine that things proceeded a little differently and that product
    passed through the mechanism, not undergoing any affixation until it was
    pluralized at Level 3.
    • If this pluralized constituent, now products, could return to the top of the
    level-ordering mechanism, it should then be subject to derivational
    morphology at Levels 1 and 2.

    b) próducts +ive *prodúctsive


    • We saw before that a Level 1 suffix like -ive is affixed to a word at Level
    1, however, example b) above reveals that a pluralized constituent is no
    longer available to such affixation.
    (Cont’d)
    • We might assume that, since compounding occurs at Level 2, that Level 2
    affixation can apply to pluralized constituents, but this does not seem to be
    the case.
    • Note the following example where a Level 2 suffix is affixed to a pluralized
    constituent. Though, the fact that at least one Level 2 process can apply to
    regular plurals after they have passed through the mechanism, any
    affixation is intolerable.

    c) sister #hood sisterhood


    d) sisters #hood *sistershood
    N-N compounds
    This difference in acceptability of irregular and regular plural
    nouns in the nonhead position of noun but this restriction is not
    absolute.
    Some regular plurals, both semantic and morphological, are
    licensed as non-heads in N-N compounds.
     parks commissioner
     assists king
     admissions department
    Support for level ordering
    A good deal of support is given to the level-ordering argument
    by the results of Gordon (1985), which showed that despite very
    little evidence that irregular plurals are possible in compounds.
    But there are also evidences and examples showing they are
    not. The following are a list of irregular nouns which children’s
    might be familiar with.
     toothbrush
     toothpaste
     mousetrap
     man-eater
    • As soon as children are able to correctly use the irregular plural
    form of a noun they prefer it as the internal noun of compounds
    with irregular nouns.
    • They do not, however, allow regular nouns to appear in their
    plural form within compounds.
    • Gordon’s research results seem to indicate that children are
    organizing language based on certain structural constraints,
    such as the morphological differences between regular and
    irregular plurals.
    • Gordon’s results are also in line with the general intuitions of
    most adults that mice eater is better than rats eater.
    Lexicalised Plural Compound
    Level-ordering
    • Gordon suggests that the constraint on morphological
    processing is innate implies that language learners do not have
    to rely solely on the input to be able to develop the appropriate
    grammatical system

    • Humans are preprogrammed to analyze the linguistic context in


    a particular way
    • There should be no necessary synchrony between the
    appearance of irregular plurals in the child’s lexicon and their
    allowability inside compounds.

    • The force of the present data suggests that the young child’s
    lexicon is richly structured in terms of the way in which rules are
    applied.

    • The apparent lack of appropriate input to the child, and failure to


    find evidence of learning taking place, suggests that such
    structuring might be an innate property of the lexicon.

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