A Study of Inflection and Derivation in the Mental Lexicon

本研究的目的是考虑Pinker等人提出的屈折词法中规则和非规则之间的明显区别是否也适用于派生词法。根据Pinker等符号学家的观点，规则的屈折形式是由规则获得的，而不规则的形式被认为存储在联想记忆中，有时会发生新的不规则形式是由与实际的形式同源而形成的。这一主张直接反对连接论者的主张，即杂音和不规则词之间没有质的区别，因此心理词汇没有规则的空间。我在本研究中指出，与屈折词法一样，派生词法包括一些可以被限定为缺省的词缀，如英语后缀-ness和日语后缀-sa，这两个词缀都是从形容词派生的抽象名词。这项研究最密切地研究的是英语和日语中表示代理人的派生名词。事实证明，英语中的施事后缀是默认的-er，而日语中的各种施事后缀之间没有默认的施事后缀。我指出，日语中的施事名词，包括那些带有产生性后缀之一的施事名词，包括它们所属的语素类别(大和、中日、外国或拟和)，都受到限制。这四个语素类别被认为是相互区别的，至少部分是由某些音位特征决定的。因此，我们似乎可以认为，日语中新形成的施事名词不是规则的产物，而是与存储在词汇中的实际施事名词在语音上相似的相似之处。这一建议将通过我计划进行的一个使用无稽之谈的实验来进一步证明。

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.