FLB home News resources for undergraduates graduates faculty staff graduate assistants flb business office flb graduate student services   staff directory FLB directories UIUC home old browsers April 22, 2005 2004-2005/076 MIT professor at UI to discuss morphology Alec Marantz, department head and linguistics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will give a lecture about morphological decomposition on Friday, April 29, at noon in Room 192, Lincoln Hall, 702 S. Wright Street, U. The lecture, titled “Morphological decomposition: the view from magnetoencephalography (MEG),” is free and open to the public. In his lecture, Marantz will discuss two points of view about his topic. The psycho- and neurolinguistic literature pits "emergent morphology" approaches to word structure against symbolic decompositional approaches. On the emergent view, the apparent morphological structure of a word like "teacher" emerges from generalizations over sound/meaning relations computed from whole words. On this view, pairs like at/float, ritzy/glitzy, and glimmer/glisten form a continuum with teacher/teach, gave/give and walked/walk. Standard evidence from lexical relatedness and from blocking argues against the emergent morphology approach. Marantz will present both behavioral and MEG evidence that distinguishes between semantic and phonological relatedness, on the one hand, and "morphological relatedness" (sharing a root or affixal morpheme) on the other, and argues strongly against placing these on a continuum. Rather, morphological decomposition—which follows directly from the general structure of grammar where syntactic composition always mediates phonological and semantic structure—must be considered fundamental. The lecture is part of the UIUC Department of Linguistics Seminar Series and is co-sponsored by the Department of Linguistics; the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese; and the Beckman Institute.