(Extreme) Polymorphism in Occitan Verb Morphology

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Polymorphism in Occitan Verb Morphology

(Extreme) Polymorphism in Occitan Verb Morphology

A. General remarks

This paper draws attention to a number of cases of polymorphism in central Occitan (lengadocian dialect), relying on unpublished material from the ALLOc (Ravier 1973). Exploring polymorphism facts among this wealth of data is a valuable contribution to Occitan and Romance linguistics. In the first place it is just to praise Ravier and collaborators for often eliciting multiple paradigms (including negative data – that is forms rejected by the informant – in some cases). The submitted paper quite rightly highlights the theoretical interest of those yet unpublished and hence understudied data (see however Casagrande 2011).   

The paper insists on polymorphism not being a marginal and unnecessary element of language, and intends to argue that it represent a central aspect of linguistic systems. This claim is connected with the convincing (and hardly controversial) idea that linguistic changes supposes (in the facts) or implies (in principle) some degree of polymorphism in the production and in the grammar of speakers.

The article doesn’t develop a theory of the paradigms, the richness (or “overabundance”) of which is repeatedly emphasized. Some formulations seem to suggest that the author considers paradigms as primary objects.  No morphemic analysis is proposed, nor any alternative procedure responsible for the regularities which have to be stated somehow, however high the degree of polymorphism in language could be. This procedure can be viewed alternatively (and perhaps equivalently) in terms of generation or in terms of constraints.

The author should explain more precisely what (s)he means in p. 8 when writing :

 “The extreme polymorphism found in the verb morphology of this dialect (up to 4 coexistent (sub-)paradigms in the imperfect subjunctive!) is not easy to explain.” Or yet more explicitly in p. 18 : “It has been argued that if polymorphism is the natural state of linguistic systems, it is 642 also anti-economic from a cognitive point of view: learning and memorizing full coexistent paradigms presupposes a high processing cost.” (reviewer’s emphasis)  This seems to suggest that learning one’s language paradigms, in the natural process of language development in the child, could resemble pupils in the first form of a grammar school chanting “Rosa, rosa, rosam ….”

 One of the most extreme case of polymorphism commented in the paper (in p. 8) involves four parallel paradigms for one and the same “tiroir” (‘drawer’, “paradigm cell”) as the scholars in the “Toulouse school of dialectology” would have dubbed it. If paradigms were irreducible objects this would indeed represent a heavy load for the learner’s memory.  

 Under a morpheme (item and arrangement) analysis (which can be reformulated into other formal mechanisms of paradigm generation or prediction or validation) all the variation boils down to a double choice (complemented with well-known effects of Occitan phonology) :

• Choosing /an-/ or /an-g-/ a preterit stem
• Choosing /e/ or /a/ as the final vowel of the subjunctive imperfect morpheme /ɛse/  o /ɛsa/ (I ignore here further possible elaboration).

In both cases the second form represents an innovation and would probably replace the first one over time (everything being equal and should the dialect survive).

Of this two choices, one is lexical and idiosyncratic (although analogically supported), viz enlargement of /an-/ to /an-g-/ in the preterit. The other choice concerns all forms of imperfect subjunctive in the dialect via the unique morpheme specific to this form (and thus results idiosyncratic too although frequent because it concerns a flexional item combinable with almost all verb stems).  

The cognitive cost then doesn’t seem either enormous or problematic to me. Not more than could be the existence of two synonymous words in a language. Synonymy (lexical or morphemic) is exactly the kind of variation that “transformational” or “generative approaches” do not discard as non-existent or uninteresting, but as trivial and irrelevant (or indirectly relevant) for the computational part of a speaker’s inner grammar. In the case of flectional morphology (as in the various cases presented here) variation doesn’t reduce to pure equivalence, because not only morphemes replace other morphemes, but selection relations (and hence derivations or whatever computational equivalent of derivation) also are modified (e.g. selection of stem /an-/ by the enlargement /–g-/, selection of the imperfect subjunctive morpheme by the theme vowel /–a/…). But selection relations concern the lexicon as they are properties of individual items (morphemes o words). Indeed variation in the idiosyncratic part of language (lexicon) and stability of the processing devices of the grammar represents a plausible model conciliating the universality of the linguistic faculty with both linguistic change and language diversity. The fascinating point is that an addition of idiosyncratic changes (of the type presented in the submitted paper) may lead to major typological variation, because the same grammar finally operates with a different lexical and flexional material.  

 

B. Specific points

1. p. 1 “ Polymorphism – or «  overabundance »  in recent theoretical works on variation in morphological systems “ :  Please give at least one reference to document this use of “overabundance” (which can be found again on p. 3)
2. p. 1 The formulation : “ During the “glaciation” era of transformational grammar “ seems uselessly and strangely polemical.  Whatever one’s appraisal of the contribution of transformational grammar(s) to linguistics, the term “glaciation” is at least an undervaluation.  Indeed transformational or generative approaches (as opposed to structuralist frameworks) are much better fitted to cope with variation (be it only for the reasons that they naturally involve multiple levels of representation and hence some form of internal variety if not variation).
3. p. 1 “more precisely from the fieldwork notes 43 written during the realization of the Atlas” the paper doesn’t exactly relies on “fieldwork notes” but on unpublished material (that the author has probably been allowed and enabled to consult by CLLE-ERSS, the CNRS laboratory in the university of Toulouse under which responsabilities the data are kept… This should be acknowledged and made explicit.
4. p. 2 “The idea according to which multiplicity of forms should be viewed as the surface manifestation of an underlying unity was one of the credos of the transformational period of Generative grammar2” : It would be accurate to quote one formulation of this “credo” or at least give one reference to transformational work where this exclusion of “variation” is expressed … and recall the kind of variation which is discarded from analysis,
5. p. 2 What the author thinks of Jakobson’s ‘motto’ (“Naive attempts 80 to deal with variations without attacking the problem of invariants are condemned to 81 failure ».) is not clear to me. Jakobson’s statement doesn’t seem obviously inconsistent or absurd to me and, if rejected, as I suppose it is by the author, rejection would deserve one word of comment or justification.
6. p. 3 Some phonetic symbols are not visible ins the pdf ([atɑ̃dʁ]) (“ɑ̃” doesn’t appear in my copy… and in fact all nasal vowel). It is not too much trouble for the reviewer, but should be emended for publication.
7. p. 3 Gaidoz doesn’t mention “polysynthesis”. He talks about “langues agglutinantes ou encapsulantes”. The use of “polysynthetic” (as opposed to “agglutinative”) tends to be limited to languages in which lexical arguments are incorporated into words (as Athabaskan languages). The lexical of affixal status of clitic pronouns is abundantly discussed in transformational or generativist frameworks (see for instance the chapter about clitics in Spencer 1991 and the references there, or, for the Romance area, chapter 5 in Manzini and Savoia 2008, or for French the analysis presented in Sportiche 1996 and Sportiche 1999 (among a wealth of proposals). Also note that Gaidoz rather seems to suggest that the lack of historical documentation may lead to put forward wrong, or at least superficial, analyses of “exotic” systems, rather than to advocate modelling the analysis of European language on a rough interpretation of unfamiliar systems.
8. p. 4 “What is more, formal variation and proliferation may be said to be the norm ra-152 ther than the exception.” What can conceivably be considered as “the norm” is the existence of some variation in every language, not of “variation and proliferation” in every place of the morphology of a language. This point should be made more precise.
9. p. 4 Form from ALLOC in table 1 one and others, as well as everywhere in the text of the submitted paper, are written in IPA notation. Xavier Ravier and others authors of the ALLOc (as all the author of the Atlases belonging to the NALF project promoted by Albert Dauzat of which ALLOc is part) make use of a “romanist” notation which is substantially the same as the one in the ALF, namely the Rousselot phonetic notation. Transposition into the now more usual and reader friendly IPA is a good choice. It should nevertheless be mentioned to the reader and the principles of the transcription made explicit. For a systematic key of transposition from Rousselot’s notation to IPA see for instance the documents annexed to the website of the Symila project (http://symila.univ-tlse2.fr/alf/notation_phonetique).
   Keeping on the topic of notation, it would often be convenient (and sociolinguistically relevant) to use orthographic notations of Occitan forms alongside phonetic notation (as the author occasionally does for French or Spanish or other languages). In its recent history, Occitan mostly survived in oral practice, but it is and has always also been a written language and a literary language. Acknowledging the affiliation of the oral speech of the informants to the written use of the language is a tribute justly paid to their contribution to the scientific documentation and study of their language.
10. p. 5 “Of course, we are using here the expressions “inchoative infix” or “inchoative inflection” as does Ravier (1971), i.e. as a practical label.” Xavier Ravier correctly phrases “la flexion dite ‘inchoative’” : the so called inchoative flexion. Technically this morpheme is not an “infix”, as it is no located inside another morpheme (as the typical nasal infix in lat. li-n-qu-o vs perf. liqu-i for instance). It is rather a suffix, a “predesinential suffix” as dubbed in Sauzet 2016, p. 12, to avoid the traditional designation “inchoative” (Alibèrt 1976, p. 122) which the author correctly points out as misleading (synchronically). 
11. p. 5 The rationales for the alternation of the verb meaning “to open” in table2 are not correctly explained: “The quality of the pre-tonic vowel may reflect either the outcome of the preposition de of the complex form deoperire, or the initial vowel of the (simple) verb form, which surfaces as [u] when reduced ?”
    The Occitan form “dobrir”, instead of “obrir”, does involve a de- prefix, but this prefix has no bearing on the quality of the stem vowel. In medieval Occitan stressed [ɔ] alternated with unstressed [o], hence “obres” [ˈɔbres] ‘you (sg.) open’ “obrètz” [obrˈɛʦ]. The latest form evolved to [ubrˈɛʦ] according to a general change of unstressed [o] to [u] in the transition from ancient Occitan to modern Occitan. On the other hand tonic [ɔ] sometimes diphthongizes (under complex condition and with notable dialect variations, cf. Ronjat 1930 § 174 ζ). Basically the vowel alternation in Dun is the same as in Ausitz (table 1). Simply Ausitz retains [ɥɛ] (resulting of the diphthongization of [ɔ]) ant shifts stressless [u] to [y], whereas Dun simplifies [ɥɛ] to [ɛ] in the stressed position, and in unstressed position either preserves etymologic [u] or replaces it with the regular unstressed correspondent of stressed (etymological or phonological) [ɛ] namely [e].
12. p. 6 “in some dialects, the success of the inchoative infix -ISC- / -ESC- has been such as to impose “double” inchoative marking in the same verb” : As the author of the article rightly emphasizes, the Occitan outcomes of latin –sc- may be called “inchoative” only from an etymological point of view. In the case of the variant form “creissir” for “créisser” ‘to grow’, it is legitimate to identify a suffix (the predesinential) suffix –iss- / -igu- / -isc-. Already in Latin the inchoative value of –sc- in cresco ‘I grow’ is a pure matter of etymology (in the absence of a non-inchoative counterpart to cresco).
13. p. 9 The form “anguèri” ‘I went’ (I use orthographical spelling for the ease of typing) is necessarily analogical. Whatever the etymology of this verb may be (ADNARE or AMBULARE, this is a reputedly discussed issue), occ. “anar” basically is a thematic verb (or 1^st conjugation). “Anguèri” ‘I went’ is analogical to “tenguèri” ‘I held’ and more certainly, for obvious semantic reasons, to “venguèri” ‘I came’. Contrarily to what Milardet supposes, the development of –w- to –gw- is not limited to the context where a nasal precedes. So habuit yields “ac” < *agw, valuit yields “valc” < *valgw. (“ac” is a regular development of habuit, not the result of the analogy of tenguèri as hypothesized by Koschwitz, see. Note 7 of the paper »).  
14. p. 18 “… it is true as well that in the individual speech acts and discourse events, the speaker generally selects one option among several choices at his disposal.” : I cannot imagine how it could be otherwise, as far as it impossible to utter two forms at the same time …

• Alibèrt, Loís, 1976, Gramatica occitana, segon los parlars lengadocians. - Montpelhièr : CEO, 531p. [reedicion corregida; 1^a edicion 1935-1937 Tolosa : Societat d'estudis occitans ; Barcelona : Impr. Casa de caritat, 1935-1937
• Casagrande, Sylvain, 2011, L'unité et la diversité des systèmes verbaux en langue d'oc et dans les aires limitrophes : Essai de reconstruction . (Doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Jean-Philippe Dalbera), Nice: Université de Nice, 2 vol. 389-63 p.
• Sauzet, Patrick, 2016 Conjugaison occitane: Tolosa : Institut d'Estudis Occitans, 317 p.
• Spencer, Andrew, 1991, Morphological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell
• Sportiche, Dominique, 1996, Clitic Constructions. In Phrase Structure and the Lexicon, sous la dir. de J. Rooryck et L. Zaring, 213-287. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
  Sportiche, Dominique, 1999, Partitions and Atoms of Clause Structure: Subjects, agreement, case and clitics, Routledge

Author Response

Dear colleague,

Many thanks for your comments? The responses have been reported in the revised version. Here is it. Thanks again for the comments!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article defends the idea of a polymorphism in Occitan verbal paradigms system. In the introduction, the author, without making clear his theoretical position and approach to data, starts with many judgments against generative grammars and generative approaches which seem rather ‘contentious’ and not supported by arguments in the introduction. For instance (line 26) “During the glaciation era of transformational grammar…”, etc. (these judgements are recurrent in the introduction and useless for his core argumentation.  It would have been of more scientific solidity to make his theoretical position/approach clearer. Indeed, it is only indirectly clear for the reader (from the analysis and references at the bottom of the article) that the author works within a theoretical model and background, based on lexical morphology (within Aronoff’lines) and after Bonami and Stump (2006) among others, which is, as it is well-known, a different approach to grammar and cognition from the one made by the Generative Grammar, in the way of building knowledge on cognition and acquisition of lexicon in grammar.  The starting point on cognition for the author follows Aronoff or Bybee conception (as the bibliography indicates as well: Bybee 2007, Aronoff 2016, Bonami & Stump 2016, Goldberg 2019), according to whom language is not an autonomous function, but rather the lexicon is the result of a usage-based grammar, a result of chunking and cognitive storage. The major problem that I see with his introduction is that the author builds his argument on polymorphism  through judgements (especially on long-standing issues on the way to interpret variation) against UG grammar without giving clear statements and explication on the usage-based grammar approach used for the analysis. This would have been very useful for the reader to handle his analysis and his view on grammar.

It should also be said that lexical morphology approaches also have methods to rationalize variation with different devices compared to the ones used in syntactic approaches to non-autonomous morphology.

Thus, the introduction seems poorly constructed and  in a way digressive. The author makes the reader believe that dialectologists in the past and today are in an obvious way within ‘proto’-lexical morphological theoretical modeling or within a usage-based approach to grammar, which seems a rather naive consideration (thus Jules Gilliéron or Xavier Ravier, the authors of Gallo-Romance atlases become the paladins of the polymorphic/lexical approach). It is useful to look at the major international linguistic forum today, to see that also generativist (included dialectologists) deal quite well as wall today with variation in grammar. The author bases his criticism on generativists around ‘80s.   

The author seems to make a confusion between variation and polymorphism making the reader to believe that there is an overlap between the two concepts.

He does not give references correctly within the article, he can happen that he has highly cited authors, such as Floricic, however his different theoretical points are not always supported by bibliography. This lack of references weakens his argumentation, since it is not clear where the terminology and analysis model used comes from within the actual linguistic debate. The author quotes thousands of classical references from the nineteenth century or slightly after (Delbrück 1882, Gaidoz 1883, Bréal 1887, Paris 1906, Jespersen 1949, Companys 1964, Alvar 1966 and so on), this is interesting, however contemporary linguistic debates on these concepts are conspicuously absent.

Sometimes we can guess references from the bibliography, but they are not found quoted in the right place. For instance, when he talks about the notion of “overabundance”: recent works on overabundance…in recent morphological research, references are missing but if we look at the bibliography to the bottom of the article we can guess that the reference is Thorton (2011). The terminology is not relativized depending on different approach and we also get the impression that this notion of overabundance is generalized to all morphological recent approaches, which is not the case, it depends on lexical specific models.

He explains polymorphism in grammar through bibliography taken from Italian linguistics (Nencioni, Canello 1978).   

Once he comes to the core of the article, it is not clear why in Table 1a, b, c we should expect only semantic criteria of classification instead of morphosyntactic or phonological criteria. He pointed out that there is an inchoative infix in a number of paradigms (infix -is-). Strikingly, this question and paradigms are already published by Floricic (2018), with the same examples from the same regional atlases and discussion about the inchoative infix ISC. We get the impression this author rewrites a part of the paper already published by Floricic 2018 on inchoative infix, without quoting this article in the right place (he does not say that the examples he is discussing are already present in this publication). In any case, the argument, as well as the examples do not sound very new in comparison with this article: Floricic, F. (2018) “Polymorphisme et hypercaractérisation dans la morphologie verbale occitane”, already published in Memorie dell’accademia di archeologia, Lettere e belle arti in Napoli XX, Proceedings of the international congress DIA III, Naples 24-27 November 2014, pages 303-329.  Also, the examples, dyrbi, durmi, parti…taken from the same sources from the ALLOC project have been already published in this article (2018). What is even more amazing is that Floricic 2018 is quoted later in the article. This article seems a remake of the one published in in 2018, especially this part on inchoative and the general idea brought by the article. The same article (2018) is quoted only below, however, the author does not make any explicit statement on the fact that he took examples and argumentation from Floricic 2018.

Going to the content of this article, according to the author there is not anymore, an aspectual value in the -ISC infix. One could wonder how and where he gets this information from, since there is no evidence in the article from the data presented (all his data come from the atlas), so the reader does not know on what kind of sources his affirmation is based on, since no synchronic database or field work are mentioned to check the evolution.

What he calls an extreme polymorphism for instance in Table 6 and similar Tables, regarding for instance the imperf. subjunctive is not very convincing since it seems that there is a gradient in the Occitan features, where the Occitan flexional endings have undergone a variation, also because of the Occitan contact with French language. Whereas this is a polymorphism or a diasystemic variation dependent of a bilingual status of the speakers is not investigated.

Instead of going deeper in the different types of Occitan paradigms, the article switches directly to the Italian domain, looking for analogical arguments of this behavior within Italian paradigms. However, the Italian forms analyzed do not seem strictly comparable, and readers miss the detailed morphological argument to go abruptly from Occitan to Italian (different flexional endings within different paradigms). It is also unbalanced data to compare: a non-standard language as Occitan compared to a Standard/normative Italian. This extensive part on Italian looks digressive from the core subject of Gallo-Romance verbal paradigms.

 

Typos

Pages 3: even if the author is talking about the ‘reduced’ form (with reduced segmental material) of the imperative (from attendre), it looks like that the phonetic transcriptions have some missing characters.

Tables have not legends

 

Author Response

Dear colleague,

Many thanks for your comments? The responses have been reported in the revised version. Here is it. Thanks again for the comments!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

 

Line 8: a single question mark is enough

26: please justify/explain the term “glaciation”? What do(es) the Author(s) refer to with the term ‘transformational grammar’? Is they referring to the earlies stages of the chomskyan theory (60s) or to the so-called Principles and Parameters framework? In the latter, variation was neither ignored, nor assigned the status of a performance deviancy.

58: please define stability and (in)stability.

71: please provide references to justify the claim that “the surface manifestation of an underlying unity was one of the credos of the transformational period of Generative grammar”

95-96: phonetic symbols are missing.

105: equating “fait de langue” with competence is not entirely correct.

159ff: words such as demarche, raison d’être, ‘tiroirs”, foisonnement  can be easily translated into English

162ff: phonetic transcriptions should always occur between square brackets.

164: what is not clear is whether the variants are found in the same register.

Table 6: what are the colors meant to show? Phonetic symbols are missing in the orange rows.

280: The (apparent) polymorphism found in the verb morphology of this dialect is quite easy to explain by assuming two variables: 1) g/ø in the root; 2) e/o in the inflectional ending. The supposed four-ways system is an optical illusion due to the paradigmatic array that the linguist – not the speaker – has reconstructed.

572: I don’t understand why these long quotes in French are needed to stress the per se straightforward claim that polymorphism is a natural phenomenon. By the way, long quotes should not be placed within the text.

592: idem. 14 lines in French are awkward and unnecessary.

642: “It has been argued…” By whom?

Author Response

Dear colleague,

Many thanks for your comments! The responses have been reported in the revised version. Here is it. Thanks again for the comments!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

I thank the author for having addressed the concerns raised in the review. I still have some reserves about the overall organization of the work and its effectiveness, but this is my subjective judgement and it cannot obstacle the publication of this article. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf