Martin Maiden and Chiara Cappellaro awarded major AHRC Research Grant. Historical-comparative linguistics meets psycholinguistic experimentation
Professor Martin Maiden (PI) and Dr Chiara Cappellaro (CI) have been awarded a major AHRC Research Grant for their project Morphomes. A Psycholinguistic Investigation.
The concept of ‘morphome’, developed by Aronoff in the 1990s (not to be confused with ‘morpheme’!), refers to abstract patterns of distribution of forms in morphology which cannot be explained, synchronically, either through phonological or functional conditioning.
A classic example is the English ‘perfect participle’ where there is a systematic mismatch between the form of the participle, which may vary unpredictably from one verb to another, and the corresponding and quite different functions which that form expresses, of which there at least two: passive and perfect. Thus, to take the example of verbs such as see, write, seek, read, tear, bring, take, sell, shear (etc.), each with different past participle forms, for each verb the same form always appears equally in the passive (The thing is seen/written/sought/read/torn/brought/taken/sold/shorn) and the perfect (I have seen/written/sought/read/torn/brought/taken/sold/shorn the thing).
The concept of the morphome is the centre of a debate in linguistic morphology which has major theoretical ramifications (cf. Luís & Bermúdez-Otero 2016; Herce 2023). A fundamental question is whether morphomic structures are cognitively real—do they exist in speakers’ grammar rather than being merely detectable by linguists—and, if so, what kind of mental representation is involved?
Until very recently, the evidence for the psychological reality of morphomes had come principally from data derived from the historical morphology of Romance languages (e.g., Maiden, The Romance Verb, 2018) and is therefore the result of indirect comparative-historical inference. However, there cannot be any significant advance in our understanding of morphomic structures and their place in the architecture of grammar until we can complement the diachronic evidence with direct, synchronic, experimental evidence. This is what this project will aim to do.
Having already successfully completed a pilot experiment focusing on one specific morphome in Italian, whose findings have been published in the journal Morphology (Cappellaro et al. 2024), in collaboration with Dr Maria Ktori (RA), Maiden and Cappellaro will carry out the very first comprehensive programme of research into the psychological reality of morphomes. This will look at a wider range of Romance languages and will involve new behavioural, eyetracking, and EEG experiments.
