A Study of Inflection and Derivation in the Mental Lexicon

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The present research aims to consider whether the clear distinction between regulars and irregulars in inflectional morphology, claimed by Pinker and others, applies to derivational morphology as well. According to symbolists like Pinker, regular inflected forms are obtained by rules, whereas irregular ones are assumed to be stored in associative memory, and it sometimes happens that novel irregulars are formed by anaology with actual ones. This proposal is directly opposed to the connectionists' claim that there are no qualitative differences between ragulars and irregulars, and therefore that the mental lexicon has no room for rules.I showed in this research that, as in the case of inflectional morphology, derivational morphology includes some affixes which can be qualified as default, such as the English suffix -ness and the Japanese suffix -sa, both of which derive abstract nouns from adjectives. What this research investigated most closely is derived nouns representing agents in English and Japanese. It turned out that English has the agent suffix -er as default, while in Japanese there is no default affix among various agent suffixes. I pointed out that agent nouns in Japanese, including those which have one of the productive suffixes -sha (-*), -nin (-*) and -te (-*) attached to them, are restricted with respect to the morpheme class (Yamato, Sino-Japanese, Foreign, or Mimetic) which they belong to. These four morpheme classes are considered to be differentiated from each other at least partially by some phonological properties. It seems, therefore, that we can consider that newly formed agent nouns in Japanese are the produsts not of rules, but of analogy with the actual agent nouns stored in the lexicon to which they are phonologically similar. This proposal shuld further be proved by an experiment in which nonsense words are used which I am planning to make.