Linguistics Seminar Talk - Clara Cuonzo

Title:  Priming morphosyntax in Hebrew and Italian

Abstract 

The notion of morpheme as the smallest unit of meaning and form has been widely abandoned by  theoretical morphologists because empirically inadequate (Matthews 1972, Anderson 1992, Aronoff 1993, Halle and Marantz 1993, Aronoff and Sims 2023). Instead, contemporary approaches to morphology argue for the distinction between morphosyntactic features (plural) and their phonological realisation (/-z/ in regular plurals, /-ən/ as in oxen, /-ə/ as in bacteria or ∅ in fish). However, theories of morphological processing still widely adopt the notion of morpheme. In this talk, I review initial results from lexical decision priming experiments that aim to disentangle priming of morphosyntactic features from their morphophonological realisations.