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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2017

What can we learn from Greek verbs on processing morphology?

Résumé

Over the last 40 years, multiple studies have addressed the issue of morphological processing during word recognition, trying to establish how morphologically com-plex words (inflections, derivations, compounds) are analysed and coded in long-term memory. This presentation will focus on the contribution of the Greek verb in the discussion relative to morphological representation, locus and, subsequently, processing: even though Greek has entered relatively late in the discussion, Greek verbs and particularly the Greek aorist have offered some interesting pieces of evidence, starting from the priming study by Tsapkini, Jarema & Kehayia (2002) arguing in favour of the absence, in processing terms, of the grammatical distinction between regularity and irregularity. We will focus on the following topics, aiming to stress that the Greek verbal mor-phology constitutes the place to be in order to directly address essential issues of the domain: 1) First, an important methodological aspect of studying morphological effects with chronometric measures: as Giraudo & Grainger (2001) and Pastizzo & Feld-man (2002) have demonstrated for French and English respectively, it is necessary to include adequate orthographic controls in the experimental design of studies measuring morphological effects, especially in a protocol (masked priming) where orthographic factors do play a role (Forster, Mohan & Hector, 2003). However, the numerous constraints on the constitution of the materials for an experiment, ren-der the use of orthographic controls rather unsystematic in the literature. Our study stresses the importance of this kind of control and puts forward evidence that the decompositional account of morphology, based on mandatory morpheme stripping cannot integrate.2) Second, the way in which certain particularities of the Greek verbal system, such as the existence of different forms for 2nd group verbs, e.g., αγαπώ as well as αγαπάω, having a common aorist αγάπησα, permit us to directly test the different approaches of morphological processing (Voga, Giraudo & Anastassiadis-Symeo-nidis, 2012, using inflectional priming). The data clearly demonstrate that the ‘al-ternating’ form, e.g., πετάω, presenting different characteristics (Ιordanidou, 1992) and being also more frequent in oral speech than the ‘basic’ one, e.g., πετώ, is also the most salient one, i.e., the more pre-activated unit. Consequently, the ‘alter-nating’ 2nd group present form (πετάω) benefits from the prior presentation of the prime, whereas the ‘basic’ one (πετώ) does not. Again, this result constitutes evidence in favour of whole-word processing (Aronoff, 1994) and against the man-datory parsing account.

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Linguistique
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Dates et versions

hal-03070098 , version 1 (15-12-2020)

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Paternité - Pas d'utilisation commerciale - Pas de modification

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  • HAL Id : hal-03070098 , version 1

Citer

Magdalini Voga. What can we learn from Greek verbs on processing morphology?: An overview of priming studies using Greek aorist. Colloque international : "12th International conference on Greek Linguistics (ICGL12)", Université libre de Berlin, Berlin, 16-19 Septembre 2015, 2017, Berlin, Germany. pp.1213-1226. ⟨hal-03070098⟩

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