Week 1 is in the books! Your task this weekend is to complete the first step of your final project. For reading, we’ll be preparing to jump straight into nominal morphology. In so doing, I’ve assigned two readings on iconicity, in addition to the AoLI selection. Iconicity is a really awesome and really important concept we’ll be discussing more next week, but I wanted to give you some background reading on it. Having said that, both pieces are fairly long, and, in spots, fairly complex. Basically, I want you to read the beginning of the Haiman paper to get the gist of what he’s saying, then maybe look at the Dingemanse, et al. paper, which is much shorter, and especially take a look at the tables/figures at the end. Some interesting ideas there!
Material From Today’s Class
PDFs
- Class Slides
- Arthur S. Abramson “The Plausibility of Phonetic Explanations of Tonogenesis”
- Graham Thurgood “Vietnamese and Tonogenesis: Revising the Model and the Analysis”
Links
Assignments
Reading
- AoLI Chapter 2, pp. 97-112
- John Haiman “Iconic and Economic Motivation” [PDF] (Optional)
- Mark Dingemanse, Damián E. Blasi, Gary Lupyan, Morten H. Christiansen, Padraic Monaghan “Arbitrariness, Iconicity and Systematicity in Language” [PDF] (Optional)
Practice
- Find a natlang grammar on Wikipedia that has a section related to nominal number morphology. Find one that distinguishes something other than singular vs. plural and post it to our Slack in the #morphology channel.
Mastery
Backburner
- Since your phonology is set, why not start generating some roots? Think about what would make good word forms in your language. It’ll be great to have a cache of these on hand as we move forward!