Formalising Expressive Morphology

表现力--说话人对话语的看法的信号--长期以来被认为是语言的次要功能，但最近的研究表明，它比之前认为的更有条理。一个突出的主张认为，表达意义是通过标记词法来传达的，即出现在偏离(标记)结构位置的功能语素。然而，缺乏系统的研究是我们理解人类语言中表现力的确切编码的一个严重障碍。Femor项目的目标有两个，一是对表现力策略进行深入的对比研究，二是将这一新的经验知识的理论分析放在最近被高度看好的理论方向上，以期在形态句法中实现表达意义的形式化。南非荷兰语和荷兰语构成了本研究的理想经验域，因为a)他们有两个明显的MM表达形式，b)只有南非荷兰语也表现出共同的(语言内部无标记的)形态过程，即重叠(RE)。通过系统收集MM和RE的形态句法数据，并在进行详细的形式分析之前对数据进行探索性的统计分析，Femor项目将在形态句法表达意义的形式化方面取得重大进展，并加深我们对表达成分的语用化和语法化的理解。

Expressivity - the signalling of the speaker's perspective on the utterance - has long been considered a secondary function oflanguage, but recent work shows that it is far more structured than previously thought. A prominent proposal argues that expressivemeaning is conveyed by 'marked morphology' (MM), i.e. functional morphemes which appear in a deviant (marked) structuralposition. However, the scarcity of systematic investigations is a serious obstacle for our understanding of the exact encoding ofexpressivity in human language. The goal of the FEMOR-project is two-fold, namely i) conduct an in-depth comparative study onexpressivity strategies, and b) couch the theoretical analysis of this new empirical knowledge in the recently taken highly promisingtheoretical direction towards the formalization of expressive meaning in morphosyntax. Afrikaans and Dutch form an ideal empiricaldomain for this research as a) they share two clear manifestations of MM with expressive meaning, and b) only Afrikaans also displaysexpressivity in a common (language-internally unmarked) morphological process, i.e reduplication (RE). By i) systematically collectingdata on the morphosyntax of MM and RE, and ii) analysing the data with exploratory statistical techniques prior to developing adetailed formal analysis, the FEMOR-project will make significant progress in the formalization of expressive meaning inmorphosyntax, and deepen our understanding of the pragmaticalization and grammaticalization of expressive elements.