"The Stuff Words are Made of"

Call for Papers

The Stuff Words are Made of

The proposed conference will provide the platform for leading international junior and senior linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neurolinguistic researchers to discuss the most recent findings on word processing in Indo-Germanic and Semitic languages. Most importantly, its central objective is to go beyond the accumulation of empirical evidence but rather to create an integrative model of cross-language typologies. This effort is meant to lead to a sustainable cooperation between the researchers of the conference. We plan for the outcome of this project to be published in a special journal issue. 

Words are the basic building blocks of language, conveying lexical information about objects, people, places, ideas, processes, states, properties, events and actions – actually, the stuff of life in its contexts. The question for languages like German and Hebrew is whether words represent the basic units that are stored in lexical memory. Indeed, words are not necessarily the lexical primes because they can be analyzed into smaller meaningful units called morphemes. For example, a Hebrew word such as maxshevon (‘pocket calculator’) is made up of the stem maxshev (‘computer’) and the diminutive/ instrument suffix -on; while the stem maxshev itself is constructed of the Semitic root x-sh-b (‘think, calculate’) and the instrument pattern maCCeC. Similarly, in German, the noun Verständnis (‘understanding’) is derived by means of the suffix -nis from the prefixed verb verstehen (‘understand’), which by itself comprises the stem stehen (‘stand’) and the prefix ver-. The question we ask in this endeavor is whether these morphological constructs have ‘a life of their own’ – that is, whether they have separate representations in our minds in addition to the holistic representation of the word itself. 

In contrast to previous cross-language comparisons, we are interested in contrasting languages like German, Yiddish, and Dutch on the one hand and Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic on the other hand, belonging to typologically different language families – the Germanic branch of Indo-European languages and the north-western branch of Semitic languages, respectively (Hetzron, 1997; König & van der Auwera, 1994). These languages are morphologically rich, with many grammatical and lexical notions receiving morphological expression and with rich and varied morpho-phonology (for German: Fleischer & Barz, 1992; for Hebrew: Ravid, 2012; Schwarzwald, 2002). 

Both language families have been the target of a wide range of psycholinguistic morphological studies on inflection and derivation (for German see: Baayen & Moscoso del Prado Martin, 2005; Clahsen, 1999; Smolka, Khader, Wiese, Zwitserlood, & Rösler, 2013; for Hebrew see: Ravid, 2012; Ravid & Schiff, 2012; Velan & Frost, 2011). 

For example, several studies in Hebrew (e.g., Bentin & Feldman, 1990; Schiff & Raveh, in press; Velan & Frost, 2011) demonstrated that complex words in Hebrew, such as migdal (tower), gadol (big), and gidul (tumor), are all lexically represented via their root gdl. Also recent studies in German found that German words like verstehen (understand) are represented via their stem like stehen (stand), regardless of meaning relatedness (Smolka, Komlósi, & Rösler, 2009; Smolka, Preller, & Eulitz, 2013). In contrast to previous assumptions, these findings indicate that the lexical representation of words is not determined by the language family per se, but rather by other factors. 

Furthermore, a recent study has shown some similarity between languages in spite of their typological differences: the family size of Dutch words (i.e. how many complex words comprise the word apple as in apple cake, apple tree, etc.) was able to predict the family size of corresponding word families in Hebrew (Moscoso del Prado Martín, Bertram, Häikiö, Schreuder, & Baayen, 2004). 

The aim of this conference is to shed light on the specific factors and mechanisms that determine the lexical representation of words in a particular language and cause similarities across language families. The conference will not only gather the most up-to-date knowledge in the field, but aims to reach an integrative view on “the stuff words are made of”. In particular, the objective of the conference is to create a model of cross-language typologies by exploiting the Germanic/Semitic contrast.

References

Baayen, R. H. & Moscoso del Prado Martin, F. (2005). Semantic density and past-tense formation in three Germanic languages. Language 81, 666-698.

Bentin, S., & Feldman, L. B. (1990). The contribution of morphological and semantic relatedness to repetition priming at short and long lags: Evidence from Hebrew. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 42, 693-711.

Berman, R. A. (1987). Productivity in the lexicon: New-word formation in Modern Hebrew. Folia Linguistica, 21, 425-461.

Clahsen, H. (1999). Lexical entries and rules of language: a multi-disciplinary study of German inflection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 991-1013.

Fleischer, W., & Barz, I. (1992). Wortbildung der deutschen Gegenwartssprache. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Hetzron, R. (ed.). 1997. The Semitic Languages. London: Routledge.

König, E. & van der Auwera, J. (1994). The Germanic languages. London: Routledge.

Moscoso del Prado Martin, F., Bertram, R., Häikiö, T., Schreuder, R. & Baayen, R.H. (2004). Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: The case of Finnish compared to Dutch and Hebrew. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 30, 1271-1278.

Ravid, D. (1995). Language change in child and adult Hebrew: A psycholinguistic perspective. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Ravid, D. (2012). Spelling morphology: the psycholinguistics of Hebrew spelling. New York: Springer.

Ravid, D. & R. Schiff. (2012). From dichotomy to divergence: Number/gender marking on Hebrew nouns and adjectives across schoolage. Language Learning, 62, 133-169.

Schiff, R. & Raveh, M. (in press). The development of the mental lexicon: When morphological representations become devoid of their meaning. Scientific Studies of Reading.

Schwarzwald, O. (2002). Hebrew morphology. Tel Aviv: The Open University [in Hebrew].

Smolka, E., Preller, K., & Eulitz, C. (2013). ‘Understand’ primes ‘stand’: Morphological structure overrides semantic compositionality in the lexical representation of German complex verbs. Manuscript submitted for publication.

Smolka, E., Khader, P., Wiese, R., Zwitserlood, P., & Rösler, F. (2013). Electrophysiological Evidence for the Continuous Processing of Linguistic Categories of Regular and Irregular Verb Inflection in German. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 25 (8), 1284-1304.

Smolka, E., Komlósi, S., & Rösler, F. (2009). When semantics means less than morphology: Processing German prefixed verbs. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24 (3), 337-375.

Velan, H., & Frost, R. (2011). Words with and without internal structure: what determines the nature of orthographic and morphological processing? Cognition, 118, 141-156.