Regular morphology and the lexicon

Abstract

Three models of morphological storage and processing are compared: the dual-processing model of Pinker, Marcus and colleagues, the connectionist model of Marchman, Plunkett, Seidenberg and others, and the network model of Bybee and Langacker. In line with predictions made in the latter two frameworks, type frequency of a morphological pattern is shown to be important in determining productivity. In addition, the paper considers the nature of lexical schemas in the network model, which are of two types: source-oriented and product-oriented. The interaction of phonological properties of lexical patterns with frequency and the interaction of type and token frequency are shown to influence degree of productivity. Data are drawn from English, German, Arabic and Hausa.