Some background information
Lexical Categories in Linguistic Theory
Spring 2004
How it started: Phonology and lexical categories |
My primary research area is phonology. Several years ago, I began to collect and analyze cases of languages where words belonging to different lexical categories also showed differences in their phonological behavior. I looked at about a dozen languages, from different language areas and families, and interesting patterns seemed to emerge.
In this earlier work, I modeled the privileged phonological behavior of nouns in terms of noun-specific (i.e., positional) faithfulness constraints, and I did some preliminary investigation into psycholinguistic and morphological differences between nouns and verbs that might explain why nouns qualify to have these special protective constraints but verbs do not.
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The current project: Do the patterns hold up, and if so, why? |
The Lexical Categories research group in Spring 2004 will explore many different aspects of lexical category differences, with the ultimate goal of trying to answer these two questions:
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