Syntactic Pathways to Morphology: Mike Putnam

Speaker: Michael T Putnam

Title: Distributed Morphology in Diachrony: The trajectory of umlaut in German

Date/time: 24 July, 3pm

Place: Google Meet

Abstract: Although the application of Distributed Morphology (DM), and related neo-constructionist, late-insertion frameworks, to bi/multilingual data has opened the door to collaborations between formal linguists and language scientists (López 2020, to appear; Lohndal & Putnam, 2021, 2024), the extension of these findings into diachronic developments has to date been extremely sparse. Calabrese & Grestenberger (2024) provide an initial detailed sketch of the advantages and challenges of adopting a DM-analysis to the development of historical morphosyntactic phenomena. In this presentation, I explore the development of umlaut in German through the lens of DM-desiderata. German umlaut represents an ideal test case for the application of DM in diachrony given its trajectory from being initially considered a phonological development which then later became one primarily licensed by syntactic/morphological constraints (Wiese 1996a,b; Schwayder 2015; Nübling et al. 2017; Embick & Schwayder 2018). With a primary focus on the development of plurals in connection with umlaut, I highlight the advantages that a DM-analysis provides in explaining how diachronic change takes place, while also pointing out a number of questions and challenges that the framework faces when applied to diachronic data.

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