Contextual Allosemy in DM

So, Neil Myler and I are supposed to be writing a chapter on the topic of Contextual Allosemy for a DM volume. I thought I could Blog what I think is at stake here, to let the enormous Blogosphere let us know if we’re missing anything. All three of you readers. In our mind, the topic of contextual allosemy divides in two: contextual meanings of roots, and contextual meanings of functional morphemes. Both types of contextual allosemy, whether or not they reduce to a single phenomenon, should be subject to two sorts of locality constraints. Within the first phase in which they meet the interfaces, the trigger of allosemy – the context for contextual allosemy – must be structurally local to the target item whose meaning is being conditioned. In Marantz 2013 (Marantz, A. (2013). Locality domains for contextual allomorphy across the interfaces. Distributed morphology today: Morphemes for morris halle, 95-115), I suggested that the locality constraint here was adjacency, where semantically null items are invisible to the computation of the relevant “next to” relationship. Additionally, since the meaning of an element should be computed when it first hits the semantic interface, anything outside its first phase of interpretation could not serve to trigger a special meaning.

If Embick (perhaps Embick and me) is right, roots need to be categorized in the syntax – they won’t emerge bare at the semantic interface. So in a sense roots are always subject to contextual allosemy; they don’t have a bare semantic value. For functional morphemes, we’re inspired by Neil’s work on possession, where the little v that will be pronounced “have” is given a null interpretation in predicate possessive constructions. What’s suggested in Marantz 2013 is that contextual allosemy for functional morphemes involves a toggle between a specific meaning – say introducing an event variable for little v – and no meaning. The “no meaning” option creates situations in which a phonologically overt (but semantically null) morpheme fails to intervene between a trigger of contextual allosemy and a root subject to allosemy even though the morpheme intervenes phonologically (and thus would block contextual allomorphy between the trigger and the root).

I’ve been thinking more about this topic in light of phonological work by my colleague Juliet Stanton with Donca Steriade (Stanton, J. & Steriade, D. (2014). Stress windows and Base Faithfulness in English suffixal derivatives. (Handout)). S&S argue that, in English derivational morphology, the determination of the pronunciation of a derived form may depend on the pronunciation of a form of the root morpheme not included in the (cyclic) derivation of the form. For example, the first vowel of “atomicity” finds its quality, as a secondarily stressed vowel, in the form “atom” – the first vowel of its stem, “atomic,” is a reduced shwa from which the necessary value for stressed “a” in “atomicity” cannot be determined. If we’re thinking in DM terms, the adjective “atomic” should constitute a phase for phonological and semantic interpretation, after which the underlying vowel of “atom” in “atomic” would no longer be accessible, e.g., in the phase where noun “atomicity” is processed.

This argument assumes, reasonably, that “atomicity” has “atomic” as its base. The -ity ending is potentiated by -ic, and the derivation of a noun in -ity from an adjective in -ic is perhaps even productive. But is “atomicity” derived from “atomic” semantically?

Here’s the online definition of “atomic” in the sense most relevant to “atomicity”:

adjective
1. relating to an atom or atoms.
“the atomic nucleus”
o CHEMISTRY
(of a substance) consisting of uncombined atoms rather than molecules.
“atomic hydrogen”
o of or forming a single irreducible unit or component in a larger system.
“a society made up of atomic individuals pursuing private interests”

Here’s “atomicity”:

noun
1.
CHEMISTRY
the number of atoms in the molecules of an element.
2.
the state or fact of being composed of indivisible units.

Note that it’s “atomic individuals” and the “atomicity of society,” not the “atomicity of individuals” or “atomic society” (“atomic society” is post-apocalyptic). I think one can make the case that both “atomic” and “atomicity” (here in their non-nuclear, non-chemistry meanings) are semantically derived directly from “atom.”

Perhaps, then, the non-cyclicity of “atomicity” phonologically is paralleled by its non-cyclicity semantically, as would need to be the case in a strict interpretation of derivation by phase within DM. We would need -ic NOT to trigger a phase, meaning it could not be the realization of a little a node. I believe we’d need to commit to a theory in which the phonological form of most derivational affixes are the realizations of roots, not of category determining heads. So -ic in “atomicity” could then be a root attached to a category neutral head that does not trigger a phase. This conclusion that derivational affixes include phonologically contentful but a-categorical roots has already been argued for by Lowenstamm (on phonological grounds) and by De Belder (on syntactic and semantic grounds). De Belder specifically claims that -ic does not have an inherent category; we can point to words like “music,” “attic,” “traffic,” “mimic,” etc., alongside of words that are N/Adj ambiguous like “agnostic,” “stoic,” mystic,” etc.

In conclusion, although the within-phase domains of contextual allosemy and contextual allomorphy might diverge because null morphemes don’t intervene for the trigger/target relation of context/undergoer and what’s null in the phonology may differ from what’s null in the semantics, the phases that define the biggest domains from contextual allosemy/allomorphy might be the same. Standard DM assumes they are: one phase to rule them all.