Speaker: Jon Rawski (MIT)
Title: A Computational Puzzle from Signed Reduplication
Time: Thursday, October 12th, 12:30pm – 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: Reduplication is a cross-linguistically common yet computationally complex morphological copying process. Reduplication is far more ubiquitous and expressive in sign than in speech, regularly exhibiting partial and total copying, as well as triplication and other variants which are either very rare, unattested, or just impossible in spoken languages. Computationally, reduplication possesses linear growth (i.e. at most n copies, independent of the base form’s size), restricting it to the class of Regular functions in both weak and strong generative capacity (Rawski et al 2023, Dolatian et al 2021). This talk examines a unique signed phenomenon of “embedded” aspectual reduplication (Klima & Bellugi 1979, Wilbur 2009), where multiple copying processes compose within one another. This process is puzzling because it potentially allows polynomial growth, violating linearity. At issue is 1) whether regular functions are a necessary and sufficient condition for morphological computation, and 2) how representations and computations differ across speech and sign. I will argue that this embedded reduplication is still regular, since those functions are closed under composition. However, this depends on thorny issues like cyclicity, bounds on the number of copies, and how speakers vs signers represent the semantically-based input to reduplication. I will compare to spoken cases of repeated reduplication in Guébie, Tigre, and Runyankore, and discuss these issues.