Interview with Richard Hudson
Book: Estudos de Morfologia – recortes e abordagens
Organizer: Edson Rosa de Souza
(CV: http://buscatextual.cnpq.br/buscatextual/visualizacv.do?id=P595967)
1) What is the place of morphology in the Cognitive Theory?
Let's start with 'Cognitive Theory'. A more widely used term is 'cognitive linguistics', so I hope
you won't mind if I shift to that term. This isn't really a theory, but a movement, rather like
'structural linguistics' in the early twentieth century - a bunch of ideas centred on one
particular idea, which in this case is the idea that language builds on general cognitive skills
rather than having its own special set of skills. This idea allows us to divide linguists into three
groups:
1. cognitive linguists, who assume that language uses general-purpose cognition
2. modular linguists, who assume that language has its own special mental 'module' (or a
set of them)
3. non-cognitive linguists, who see language as an abstract system rather than as part of
cognition.
Cognitive linguists include such figures as Ronald Langacker, George Lakoff, Adele Goldberg
and Michael Tomasello; this is a relatively recent movement, dating back to the 1980s.
Modular linguistics is really the brain-child of Noam Chomsky, so the term applies to all
Chomsky's followers such as Stephen Pinker and Jerry Fodor; and as a movement it dates from
the 1950s. Both these movements have thousands of followers, but I would guess that most
linguists are non-cognitive, in the sense that they don't think much about cognition, and don't
care how language relates to it.
Having set the context for 'cognitive linguistics', I now want to focus on my own particular
version of cognitive linguistics: Word Grammar. This is one of three well-defined cognitive
theories, alongside Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar. Unlike the other two, this
one is centred in the UK rather than in the USA, and as this geographical difference might
suggest, it has strong links to the European tradition as well as to the USA one - rather like the
intellectual situation in Brazil, I would guess. The European influence shows most obviously in
two ways that are relevant now: Word Grammar uses European dependency grammar rather
than American constituency grammar, and it follows the European tradition of Word-andParadigm morphology rather than the USA tradition of Item-and-Arrangement morphology. To
make these differences concrete, take the sentence Small babies cry. For a typical American
linguist, the syntactic analysis would recognise at least a noun phrase small babies and a
sentence, as well as the morphemes {baby} and {z}; whereas a typical European syntactic
analysis, as represented by Word Grammar, would just recognise three words in the syntax
(with small modifiying babies and babies acting as subject of cry), and would leave {baby} and
{z} to be handled in the morphology.
So: what is the place of morphology in cognitive linguistics? Well, it depends which of these
theories you're talking about. In terms of research, I don't think either Cognitive Grammarians
or Construction Grammarians are very interested in morphology - they're much more
interested in higher levels of language - semantics for the former, syntax for the latter. There is
a book by Geert Booij called 'Construction Morphology', which applies Construction Grammar
to morphology, but it doesn't make a clear distinction between syntax and morphology, and
doesn't strike me as very different from non-cognitive theories. In contrast, Word Grammar
has quite a lot to say about morphology, so this is the version of cognitive linguistics that I'll
talk about in the rest of this interview.
2) To what extent is the Cognitive Theory different from the other
theoretical models with respect to the description of
morphological phenomena?
The cognitive orientation of Word Grammar makes a big difference to its treatment of
morphology. For one thing, it assumes that when you're talking about morphological structure,
you're talking about cognitive structure - what people have in their minds. And since it's very
clear that different speakers of the same language can have different mental structures, we
don't assume that there's a single 'correct' analysis.
For example, what's the morphological structure of slept, the irregular past tense of the verb
SLEEP? One morpheme {slept} or two {slep}+{t}? Well, there's some very nice research evidence
from quantitative sociolinguistics, produced by Greg Guy, that shows that young speakers have
a one-morpheme structure and older ones recognise two morphemes - in other words, our
mental structures become more sophisticated through life, so that (in this case) we only
become aware of the similarity between slept and wept, or between slept and walked, in
middle age. That means that there's no point in arguing about which analysis is correct:
different people need different analyses. Similarly, we know from 'folk etymology' that
ordinary people can impose analyses that are wildly wrong from the expert's point of view - for
example, hamburger was analyzed as {ham}+{burger} instead of the etymologically correct
{hamburg}+{er}, and the cheeseburger was invented.
So, if you're a cognitivist your goal is always mental reality - what's in the mind of a speaker rather than some kind of absolute truth about the word in question. That's healthy because
the pursuit of absolutes leads inevitably to prescription; but it's challenging as well, because
we haven't got an established method for checking mental reality for individual speakers - or,
for that matter, for reporting it when we find it. But at least we can be modest about our
claims: the analysis presented is probably correct for at least some speakers, some of the time.
The cognitive orientation underlies other important differences as well. For instance, it shows
that we have to distinguish processes from structures. We must be able to create new
morphological forms by rule, otherwise small children wouldn't be able to work out that more
than one 'wug' is described as wugs; but there's also good psychological evidence that we
retrieve frequently used inflected forms from memory, even if they follow regular patterns. So
maybe things comes straight from memory, rather than being created by rule; but there's also
good evidence that we still recognise the {z} morpheme in things, so we can't assume that a
'unit of mental storage' such as the word-form things is a single unanalysable item: it must be
a complex structure. But then we have plenty of evidence for the same conclusion in the rest
of language, where even opaque idioms such as kick the bucket and clichés such as Lovely
weather today are known to be stored with links to all their parts - to the ordinary word bucket
and so on. And in the rest of cognition we know that we can remember complex structures
such as faces or the route from one place to another.
Similarly, morphology must be neutral between production and perception, so we mustn't tie
morphology to processes of creation (e.g. 'to make a plural noun, take the base and add {z}')
rather than recognition (e.g. 'a noun is plural if you can remove {z} and leave the base'). And
perhaps most important of all, if morphology is part of general cognition, it has access to all
the cognitive apparatus that's available for general cognition. For example, we know that our
minds can accommodate extremely rich and complex social structures (e.g. Fred is Bob's uncle
and is married to Jill, and his best friend is Bert and he works with Barbara); so we don't need
to look for a parsimonious theory of morphological structure. There's no reason to assume
that the mind is parsimonious, but there's every reason to assume that it looks for general
patterns and similarities (as in the hamburger example), so we may expect a typical mind to
contain a vast collection of exemplars alongside a rich collection of generalisations across
these exemplars - very different from most familiar models of morphology.
3) How does the Cognitive Theory analyze and/or classify the
different morphological types of languages?
Unfortunately, Word Grammar hasn't produced any published work on morphological
typology. But I think it has something to contribute in this area as well. One question is why
languages fall into general morphological types at all? Why don't we have a random
distribution of morphological patterns within a language instead? For instance, a language
might in principle be highly inflectional in its nouns and agglutinating in its verbs - so why are
mixed patterns like this so rare? The answer lies, I think, in the cognitive structures.
The reason for the name Word Grammar is that the word is the central unit of language
structure (alongside the morpheme and the phoneme, or whatever we call the basic units of
these levels). This being so, our minds contain a very rich set of generalisations about words i.e. about the typical word. This is where the most general parts of the grammar are located,
so we know very general facts about the phonology of a typical English word, about its syntax
and semantics, and about its morphology. For instance, we know that the typical English word
is realised by a single base, but that it may have an inflectional suffix - just one, not a string of
them. So English words all conform to this pattern, and the suffix {n't} must be a clitic rather
than an inflectional affix because otherwise isn't and doesn't would have two inflectional
suffixes. In contrast, the typical Latin word (bearing in mind that most words are nouns or
verbs, so they're inflected) is realised by a combination of a base with at least one inflectional
suffix, and possibly a whole string of them (as in am-a-v-er-o, I will have loved). English and
Latin belong to very different morphological types which strongly tend not to mix because our
cognitive bias is towards a single general pattern which reinforces itself over the generations.
So a language's morphological typology is contained in the generalisations that its speakers
create for the morphology of its typical word.
This morphological structure can have predictable consequences. For example, in my work on
clitics I've noticed that all the languages that have special clitics also have complex inflectional
morphology. So French allows strings of clitics such as Donnez-le-moi (Give it me!) as well as
strings of inflectional affixes as in donn-er-i-ez (you would give). Suppose it's true that special
clitics are only found in combination with complex inflectional morphology; why would that be
so? Well, maybe it's because special clitics build in a parasitic way on the general patterns for
word morphology, and can only arise when these provides a precedent.
4) How does the Cognitive Theory explain the
lexical/grammatical distinction?
Word Grammar gives the same answer as the other cognitive theories: the distinction is simply
a matter of degree, so the grammar and the lexicon are actually the opposite ends of a single
continuous structure. The general patterns are what we call the grammar and the specific
patterns are what we call the lexicon, but there's no natural boundary between them. Instead,
we have a single structure which Michael Halliday (my first employer) calls the 'lexicogrammar' - a very useful name.
One immediate consequence is that if the lexical part of lexico-grammar is a network (as most
people agree), then the grammatical part must be too. Here's a simplified example of a Word
Grammar network which illustrates this principle.
word
noun
B
DOG
base
{dog}
C
plural
A
base
fif
DOG:plural
base
fif
{dog}{z}
{z}
D
The grey boxes divide the network into four areas. Area A shows the hierarchy which links the
lexeme DOG to 'noun' and 'word' via links called 'is-a' (as in 'DOG is-a noun'). These links are
marked by a small triangle whose broad base lies next to the larger (and more general) supercategory. The hierarchy also shows that 'plural' shows an alternative (inflectional) way of
dividing 'noun', and that 'DOG:plural' is-a both DOG and 'plural', so it inherits from both. Area B
is part of the network for DOG, showing that its base is {dog}, and Area C is the general
network (the 'rule') for plural nouns, showing that their 'fif' (fully inflected form) consists of
their base followed by {z}. Area D brings these two patterns together in the morphology of
'DOG:plural', which inherits its base from DOG and its suffix from 'plural'.
The 'is-a' links in this diagram are fundamental because they allow generalisations to apply to
specific cases. They are well established in ordinary cognition, where they support the logic
called 'default inheritance', which allows exceptions. For example, by default a bird inherits the
ability to fly; but exceptionally, penguins can't fly. This logic is of course exactly right for
morphology, where exceptionality is so widespread; so we can generalise about plural nouns
having {z} in spite of exceptions like mice.
It is also the is-a hierarchy that provides the open-ended lists of increasingly general categories
like the one from DOG:plural to DOG to noun to word. The area of the network near the top of
the hierarchy is what we call 'grammar', and at the bottom we have 'lexicon', but there is no
natural division between them. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the lexicon is
simply a collection of lexemes, all located at the same level of generality. On the contrary, we
can expect lexemes to have sub-lexemes and sub-sub-lexemes. This is important for
morphology because we often find that morphology is more constant than syntax. For
example, we can recognise a single lexeme TAKE which provides the identical irregular
morphology for a wide range of syntactically and semantically very different sub-lexemes (as in
I took the tablet, I took a photograph, I took to her immediately, The glue took in five minutes) - so there's no need to decide between one lexeme and two. And once again, the cognitive
approach reassures us that this kind of tall hierarchical structure is theoretically sound,
because it is so easy to find similar hierarchies outside language in almost any area of cognition
-- people, places, the animal world, the plant world, vehicles, and so on and on.
5) What are the main challenges of the Cognitive Theory
concerning the analysis of issues of morphology and its relation to
other levels of linguistic analysis?
The question assumes that morphology is a separate level of analysis -- a very European
assumption. The dominant American tradition splits morphology between syntax and
phonology, with syntax handling the morphosyntax -- the distribution of morphemes
within words -- and phonology handling the morphophonology -- the allomorphic
variation in their phonological realisation. As I mentioned above, cognitive linguists
tend to be heavily influenced by the American tradition, so to the extent that they talk
about morphology at all, they tend to assume it's just the meeting point of syntax and
phonology. In contrast, Word Grammar follows the European tradition in recognising a
separate level, so the biggest challenge for cognitive linguistics is to decide between
these two alternatives. But let's assume that you and I are right: morphology is a
separate level of analysis. What then?
Morphology is arguably the most abstract level of language in the sense that it is the one
furthest from non-linguistic structures. Phonetics is close to non-linguistic sounds and
movements, semantics is close to non-linguistic thought, and phonology and syntax are
directly related to phonetics and semantics; but morphology stands between phonology
and syntax, as far away from the 'real' world as it is possible to be. This makes it
particularly interesting for cognitive linguists because iconicity is low - its structure is
driven neither by the structure of sounds nor by the structure of the message being
expressed, but purely by the 'engineering' problem of using available phonology to
realise a potentially open-ended vocabulary of words. Of course, this abstractness of
morphology discourages those who are most interested in meaning, which I think
explains why there's been so little morphological work in cognitive linguistics.
Another challenge, therefore, is to explain why morphology exists at all. Why don't we
just link the words of syntax directly to the patterns of phonology? Of course the
immediate answer is that we learn our language from the previous generation, and we
do as they do; but languages change under functional pressures, so why did these
functional pressures on our linguistic ancestors lead them to recognise morphemes as
well as words and phonemes? It isn't hard to think of answers; for example, every time
we recognise a pair of homonyms such as the noun and verb which share bear we are
recognising their shared phonology as more than just a bit of phonology: rather, it is a
recurrent pattern which constitutes a distinct cognitive unit. In short, it is a concept
which hovers between phonology and syntax in the mental space where we recognise
morphology. But even if this explanation works, it needs to be developed properly, and
no doubt there are other explanations for the morphologically complex words (though
of course not necessarily inflectional morphology) which seem to exist in most
languages, and possibly all languages:.
Another challenge is the relation between morphology and semantics. In the European
Word-and-Paradigm approach, morphemes do not have meaning, and are only
indirectly linked to meaning via the words they realise. This has the analytic advantage
of allowing us to recognise morphemes like the {ceive} of receive, deceive, perceive
without worrying about their lack of semantic similarity. But general cognition is good
at recording systematic co-occurrence patterns, so it seems unlikely that our minds
simply ignore semantic similarities when they do exist; for example, the {day}
(pronounced /di/) in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on could easily be linked
directly to the meaning 'day of the week'. Then there are what we might call submorphemic patterns such as the -aison pattern found in French nouns such as maison,
raison, saison) and which is a good clue that the nouns concerned are feminine. How do
such patterns relate to ordinary morphemes? We just don't know, but in cognitive
linguistics we do know that the question is about cognitive structures, and not about
elegance or simplicity; so maybe we do in fact have links that 'jump' levels -- from
morphological structure to meaning, or from phonological structure to syntax -- as well
as those between neighbouring levels.
But this suggestion about rich links that jump across levels raises another challenge:
why is syntax generally so blind both to morphology and to phonology? As Arnold
Zwicky and others have argued, it's hard to find clear examples of syntactic patterns that
are restricted to words that have a particular phonological or morphological structure.
There are possible candidates, such as the strong tendency for the English ditransitive
construction (e.g. I gave Mary a book, I made her a cake) to favour monomorphemic
verbs. But it is striking that the declension classes that play such a major part in
languages such as the Romance languages have absolutely no impact at all on syntax.
This is a strange fact if language is a network where information flows quite freely; one
might expect the dynamics of language learning and use to gradually strengthen chance
correlations between syntax and morphology to the point where, say, -ir verbs tend to be
transitive. But this never happens. Why not?
6) What are the current research proposals of the Cognitive
Theory for the study of lexical and morphological phenomena of
natural languages?
'Research proposals' is a grand name for 'research wishes' when very few people seem to be
interested in doing research on cognitive morphology. However there's no harm in saying
what I would like to do if I had the time.
I think my top priority would be to have a computer system built for handling the networks of
Word Grammar. Since the basic cognitivist claim is that language networks are just like any
other cognitive network, this system would be a general-purpose 'thinking machine', and not
confined to language; so it could contain a social network or a network of known locations as
easily as a linguistic network. The generality of the system would be important for testing the
grammar, because it would guarantee that the computer program wasn't cheating by making
life too easy for the morphologist. Armed with a tool like that, I really could say: here's my
analysis, and it really works because here's what my general-purpose computer system does
with it.
This computer system (which, incidentally, would be equally helpful in syntax or semantics)
would allow me to explore the fine details of morphology, and also those complex lexical
relations that are partially supported by morphology (e.g. duck : duckling :: sheep : lamb),
trying to model what might be in a typical speaker's mind. The point about all these patterns is
that they are rich and complex, and therefore virtually impossible to model without a
computer database.
What would I like to achieve in this research? In an ideal world, with unlimited time and
energy, I'd like to produce a complete morphology for a language. Any language would do, so
English will be fine - even though it has very little inflectional morphology, it has plenty of
derivational morphology. Having done that, it would be fun to return to the language of my
PhD, Beja, which I've hardly touched for fifty years. This is the language that first attracted me
to morphology through its enormously complicated morphology, and the complex interactions
between morphology and syntax. Morphological theory has grown a great deal since 1964, so I
could do a much better analysis now; for instance, in those days I had never heard of clitics,
whereas now I see them everywhere, and I'm sure a lot of Beja morphology is due to
cliticisation. But Beja would feed into clitic theory - for instance, it has inflected clitics (a
cliticised 'be' which inflects for gender, number and person).
But we're not in an ideal world, and my time is limited, so a better use of time would be to
work through the standard list of morphological phenomena, making sure that I can offer a
respectable treatment for at least one example of each: syncretism, suppletion, deponence,
declension class, mutation, defective paradigms, clitics, interdigitation, and so on. I've already
worked on several of these phenomena, but if I had a computer tool I could do the job much
more satisfactorily. For example, in 2000 I published an article explaining why we can't say *I
amn't (or *I aren't) -- an example of a defective paradigm with a curious gap -- and I still think
my explanation may have been right; but the complexity made it very hard for anyone else to
check whether my analysis actually did what I said it did. That's where my computer system
would prove me right -- or wrong.
7) As an important researcher in Linguistics, how do you assess
the recent researches on morphology developed from the
theoretical perspective of Cognitive Linguistics? Are the results
positive and is still there a lot for doing in this research area?
As I said earlier, there's been very little research on morphology within other branches of
cognitive linguistics,. The book by Booij that I mentioned earlier is more concerned with the
idea that morphological patterns are 'constructions', just like syntactic patterns, than with any
ideas about cognition. That's not to say that we're short of research on morphology in
cognition -- far from it, but it's all done by psycholinguists. For instance, Steven Pinker wrote a
big book (called Words and Rules) about the mental status of irregular verbs in English, in
which he argued that irregular morphology is recorded in a lexical network whereas regular
morphology is handled by 'rules'; but that perpetuates the distinction between grammar and
lexicon which cognitivists deny. Moreover, his network is different from the 'symbolic'
networks that cognitive linguists generally assume, where each concept is represented by a
single node. Instead, it is a neural network, where a concept is represented simply by a pattern
of activation distributed across a collection of links.
Although I'm obviously biased, I do think that my own work on morphology may be the best in
cognitive linguistics -- a fairly reasonable claim, perhaps, when there's so little competition! In
my opinion, the most important result of my work has been to show that it is possible to
model at least some parts of morphology in a general-purpose network designed for general
cognition rather than just for morphology. (Incidentally, this conclusion is reinforced by the
success of 'network morphology', developed by Grev Corbett and colleagues who could
reasonably be classified as 'non-cognitive'.) My analyses may turn out to be wrong, but at least
they're plausible. And if we really can analyse the relation between (say) WALK and walked
using the same mental apparatus as we use for relating me to my wife's brother (as I claim),
then morphology starts to look very different from its traditional non-cognitive appearance.
8) What kind of advice would you give to those readers who wish
to start their studies in morphology from the theoretical
perspective of Cognitive Linguistics? And what publications or
papers on this subject do you recommend for these readers?
The best way to learn about Word-Grammar morphology is to start with my 2010
textbook for undergraduates, An Introduction to Word Grammar, where they'll find a
combination of theory and practice. The theory takes them through some basic ideas
about 'How the mind works', then through 'How language works' and finally 'How
English works'. The second and third parts both include a chapter on morphology -- first
general morphology and then English morphology -- with quite a lot of worked
examples, but there are a few practice exercises on English morphology on the website
that accompanies the book, which is at
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/i2wg/routes.htm .
Having read these chapters and worked through the exercises, any reader should have a
fairly clear idea of the basic principles for analysis, and should be ready for the longer
and more detailed discussion of morphology in my 2007 book Language Networks: The
New Word Grammar, with fifty pages on morphology and quite a lot of examples from
other languages and network diagrams showing quite complex analyses. If a reader is
interested in working on the morphology of a particular language, this should provide
models for approaching at least some of the patterns in any language.
Like any research-based structure, Word Grammar is constantly responding to new
ideas and evidence and has changed a lot since it started in 1984 with my Word
Grammar, which has a chapter on morphology, as does the next update of the theory,
my 1990 English Word Grammar. So the Word Grammar theory of morphology is very
much 'work in progress', and is still changing. For instance, I recently wrote a chapter
on clitics called 'Default inheritance, Word Grammar and French clitics' in which I
propose a slight modification of the earlier theory of clitics as well as a new analysis of
French pronoun clitics. I'm particularly proud of this analysis because it shows that by
default, French clitics aren't 'special' at all. In this analysis, the apparently special case
of affirmative imperatives such as Donnez-le-moi! 'Give it to me!' provides the default
order, which is overridden in all the cases where either a subject clitic or an imperative
clitic drags the whole clitic cluster before the verb, as in Il me le donne, 'He gives it to
me'. I think this analysis shows that morphology can be analysed in terms of ordinary
cognitive structures, and that this kind of analysis can be illuminating.