Morphology and the Mental Lexicon
Morphology and the Mental Lexicon
Wolfgang DRESSLER(Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna)
Morphology, despite of its Ancient Greek make-up, is a term invented by Goethe for biology and soon afterwards transferred into historical linguistics, which in the mid-19th century was much influenced by biology. Morphology deals with how complex words and word forms are decomposed into meaningful elements and how they are related, how meaningful elements are composed into complex words or word forms. Basic questions of morphology within the mental lexicon are: „How are morphological patterns stored? How are they accessed and then processed? in production vs. reception, oral vs. written, in translation, in language acquisition by children or foreigners, in pathological language impairments?“ The presentation will also deal with the differentiation between actual existing words, non-existing potential (= grammatically legal), and grammatically illegal words and their relation to degrees of language awareness, how we can investigate the structure of the mental lexicon via off-line and on-line tests. Examples will come from such tests, from first language acquisition and from aphasic impairments, data from German, English, Italian and Hungarian Various models of the mental lexicon will be compared.
MEi:CogSci Consortium:
