Analogical Modeling and morphological change: the case of the adjectival negative prefix in English

Abstract

This article examines the usefulness of Skousen's Analogical Modeling (AM) for explaining morphological change. In contrast to previous accounts of analogy, AM constitutes a general unified model of language that accounts for both sporadic and systematic changes. AM also provides explicit constraints on analogy that allow explanation of how morphological changes begin, which forms most likely serve as patterns for analogy, and which forms are most likely to change. AM is then tested on the case of the adjectival negative prefix in English ( in -, un -, dis -, etc.), using the Middle and Early Modern English portions of the Helsinki corpus as a basis for prediction. AM was given the task of using forms containing negative prefixes for one time period to predict the prefixes that adjectives would take in the subsequent time period. For each of the roughly seventy-year periods in the corpus, AM was able to predict valid prefixes about 90 percent of the time.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 112 citations exist upstream.