Wednesday, October 13, 2010

My currently-stewing model of morphology-syntax-discourse (and phonetics and phonology)

This is a very rough sketch, but I thought I'd toss it out as is to see what responses it engenders....

Morphology, syntax, and discourse are all the same thing: structure builders. What qualitative differences exist between them emerge strictly from the scale-derived type of elements they are combining; their fundamental combinatorial principles are the same.

One qualification to this is that morphology is actually two things: a combinatorial component, and a lexical component. These are roughly the morphosyntactic and the morphophonological. The latter in particular covers aspects of morphology that are not directly structure-building, namely, paradigmaticity effects...which are probably attributable to acquisition and retention constraints and strategies.

It's useful in this to see that traditional syntax, as understood through generativist tree diagrams, is quite explicitly the interface between the generic-encyclopedic and the discourses-specific. Functional structure can be of either kind: the former realizes event-argument structure and aspect (both verbal and nominal; nominal aspect is measures, quantification, etc.), and the latter realizes all the features interpretable only relative to the specifics of the discourse, i.e. of the speech act itself. This includes voice, tense, mood and modality, pronominal features, focus, topicality, and clause type.

To understand this clearly: man bite dog is a generic, non-discourse-specific event-argument structure. What we currently call light elements---i.e. stackings of minimal predicates---are enough to constrain the semantics to this realm. Aspectuality doesn't change this: man having bitten dog, man regularly biting dog: all of these are still generic, encyclopedic, non-discourse-specific concepts.

Add in voice, and we begin to have discourse-determined priorities:

man bite dog
dog bitten by man

Add in tense, mood, etc., and we definitely have discourse-determined material, since the semantics added are calculated with respect to NOW, with respect to our REAL WORLD, etc.

man did bite dog
dog would be bitten by man

Definiteness of argments, relativization of arguments, pronominalization of arguments, ellipsis of arguments: all of these refer to pre- or elsewhere-established reference of arguments...which is of course discourse. Same again of course for focus, topicalization, etc.

the man did bite the dog

Clause-type is of course exactly the same thing as the above, even subordination, as subordination indicates NOT being the discourse-Main proposition. Same again for imperatives, which of course are discourse-specific par excellence.

man, bite the dog!
the man that did bite the dog

Phonetics and phonology of course do relate to this: prosody in particular tracks word-level and phrase-level structure quite intensely, and has a rather obviously substantial role at the discourse level. For example, the prosodic weight, and the prosodic specification (clitic, etc.) of morphemes determines their distribution, their position, their availability, their well-formedness in a given configuration. Does the same thing at the phrasal level, acting as the real agent behind the parameterization of word order, among other things. And at the discourse level, it of course manifests quite a bit of discourse morphology, i.e. old/new information and topic/focus and topic/comment contrasts, and very often interrogativity and a thousand other emotional and affective stances.

Phonetics and phonology also share properties with the morphology-syntax-discourse complex in that they too have combinatoriality and configurationality, and often the same modeling tools for the latter work well for the former. Locality, for example. We often think of this as the syntax of phonology, etc., but it's better understood as syntax and phonology both drawing from a common pool of cognitive-computational processes and constraints thereon.

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