Borja Herce
Biographic Data
| ID | 1720898 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Borja Herce |
| GIVEN NAMES | Borja |
| FAMILY NAME | Herce |
| SIGNATURE | HERCE B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9493-6656 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 21 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The complexity of syncretism patterns in inflectional class systems
While the morphological phenomena of syncretism and inflection classes have been extensively studied separately, their interaction remains underexplored. Here I present a typology, and a cross-linguistic exploration, of the diversity of morphological syncretism patterns and their complexity in inflectional paradigms. I propose several easy-to-obtain measures of syncretism complexity and I analyze a sample of both related and unrelated inflectiona…
Emergence and evolution of free variation in Central Pame prefixes
Many word forms from different classes in Central Pame (cent2145, Otomanguean) allow two synonymous forms, one containing a prefix with the vowel /a/ and another one with /u/ (e.g. wa-ttsáuʔ ~ wu-ttsáuʔ ‘(s)he feels’). I conduct historical corpus research and elicitation to throw light on the diachronic origin and contemporary profile of this unusual phenomenon. Evidence suggests that it started as a sound change /a/ > /u/ between bilabial conson…
The effects of sound change vs. analogy on paradigm complexity
The effect of sound change and analogy upon inflectional paradigms has been traditionally described through Sturtevant’s Paradox, which states that sound change is regular but generates irregularity, whereas analogy is irregular but generates regularity. While past work has explored trends in sound change and analogy qualitatively, quantitative investigation with large data sets remains underexploited. We tackle this by exploring the effects of s…
Stephen C. Levinson
Central Pame verbal inflection
Central Pame verbal inflection constitutes a system whose organization is strikingly complex, with dozens of inflection classes distributed syntagmatically across multiple positions in a word: prefix, suffix, stem, and tone. This paper presents the first thorough description of this understudied system and investigates every layer and subsystem in detail and how they relate to each other, concluding that, in this distributed-exponence system, syn…
Paradigmatic complexity metrics as signals of phylogenetic relatedness
Morphological complexity metrics like entropy, and notions like the Paradigm Cell-Filling Problem, have recently (re)gained popularity for the synchronic analysis of inflectional systems. The potential of these quantitative approaches for diachronic research, however, remains largely untapped. This paper constitutes a first exploration of whether and, if so, how these methods can be used profitably in this domain. We first use Romance, for which …
System size and system complexity
Inflectional systems vary along multiple dimensions (number of members, size of paradigms, word class, integrative complexity, accidents of history, etc.). This makes it difficult to find significant correlations and causality relations between different properties, as attested systems usually differ in multiple ways at the same time, thus obscuring possible relations between individual variables. Here we analyze the relation between a system’s s…
Short vs Long Stem Alternations in Romance Verbal Inflection
Some verbs in Romance (e.g. the reflexes of faciō ‘do’, dīcō ‘say’, habeō ‘have’, sapiō ‘know’, possum ‘be able’, and volō ‘want’) display alternations between a short (e.g. It. f‐are , f‐a , d‐ire ) and a long (e.g. It. fac‐evo , dic‐e , dic‐evo ) stem. This paper contains an exploration of the lexical and paradigmatic distribution of these stem alternations across Romance varieties to trace when they emerged, how and why. The results suggest a …
The meaning of morphomes
Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged, while their autonomously morphological natu…
VeLePa
This paper reports on the compilation and quantitative analysis of VeLePa, an inflected lexicon containing paradigms of 216 Central Pame verbs and a total of 12528 elicited words, in phonological form, supplied with cell and lexeme frequency information. The language (Otomanguean) is of interest due to both its extraordinary morphological complexity, as well as due to the organization of the inflection into a four-fold concurrent classification s…
Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms
Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same position (e.g., all subject agreement markers as suffixes, all object agreement markers as prefixes). However, little is known about the exceptions to this trend: cases where different values of the same feature are marked in different positions in the word (i.e., positional splits). In this study, we explore the positional properties of subject and object p…
The Typological Diversity of Morphomes
This book constitutes the first typologically oriented monograph on morphomes, which is the term given to systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes like 'plural', 'past', 'third-person singular'. Its first half addresses the theoretical and empirical challenges surrounding the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with relate…
Morphological autonomy and the long-term vitality of morphomes
Morphologists of different backgrounds disagree with respect to the degree of autonomy of the morphological component of language from syntax and semantics. A precise and objective quantification of the diachronic productivity of Romance morphomes is the piece of evidence most crucially missing from this debate. On the basis of 502 morphophonological innovations associated with the loss of stem-final consonants across 63 Romance varieties, this p…
More or Less Unnatural
Morphological systems often reuse the same forms in different functions, creating what is known as syncretism. While syncretism varies greatly, certain cross-linguistic tendencies are apparent. Patterns where all syncretic forms share a morphological feature value (e.g., first person, or plural number) are most common cross-linguistically, and this preference is mirrored in results from learning experiments. While this suggests a general bias tow…
Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations
Stem alternations in Romance have recently been argued to be regulated largely by autonomously morphological (aka morphomic) organizational principles. Here, I assess the relative contribution of morphomic structures vis à vis alternative principles, namely semantic structure, and token frequency. Results confirm the exceptional importance of autonomously morphological domains on Romance verb stem alternations; however, inherent inflectional valu…
Possessive inflection in Chichimec inalienable nouns
Person and number of a possessor are expressed in Chichimec in one of two ways. Most nouns use possessive classifiers. A smaller class (typically inalienables) inflects for the possessor synthetically. This paper constitutes the first in-depth exploration of this latter class. These nouns are characterized by unparalleled levels of irregularity, with more than 100 different inflection classes and most nouns exhibiting completely unique exponence …
Stress and stem allomorphy in the Romance perfectum
Perfective stem allomorphy and stress are morphological traits which interact in complex ways in Romance verbal inflection. This article surveys the whole range of variation of these traits across Romance varieties, typologizes the observed interactions between the two, and examines attested and unattested possibilities. A comparison between the modern-day and the original Latin systems suggests that there is a strong pan-Romance bias against hav…
Stem alternations in Kiranti and their implications for the morphology–phonology interface
Stem alternation is present in the verbal inflection of all documented Kiranti languages, where it ranges from the straightforward phonologically conditioned (e.g. Athpariya and Chintang) to the purely morphological and baroque (e.g. Khaling and Dumi). This paper surveys stem alternation patterns across the whole family. Its main finding is that, unlike the morphological stem alternations of West Kiranti, the phonologically-conditioned stem alter…
Alignment of forms in Spanish verbal inflection
The future and conditional forms ofvenir'come',tener'have' andponer'put' were characterized in Old Spanish by various alternatives (e.g.verné,vendré,verré,venréin the case of come.1SG.FUT) which originated through different sound changes taking place in different varieties. The victory ofvendréin contemporary Spanish could be seen simply as an inconsequential resolution of this competition of forms. Here I argue against such an interpretation. I …
Deconstructing (ir)regularity
Regularity and irregularity are among the most widely invoked notions in linguistics. The terms are backed up by a long and venerable tradition, and yet (or maybe therefore) different disciplines and authors seem to be using them for very different phenomena and in very different ways. The most frequent usage conflates or replaces other notions such as type frequency, productivity, (non-)concatenative morphology, storage vs. computation, predicta…
Morphome interactions
How morphological elements interact with one another is a major concern for both morphological theory and typological research. Morphemes, for example, are usually said to block each other when they are in subset-superset relations to one another. Little is known, by contrast, of how morphomes (i.e. forms with unnatural morphosyntactic distributions) interact with one another. This paper provides an initial typology of morphome interactions, base…
The Typological Diversity of Morphomes
This book constitutes the first typologically oriented monograph on morphomes, which is the term given to systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes like 'plural', 'past', 'third-person singular'. Its first half addresses the theoretical and empirical challenges surrounding the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with relate…
Morphome interactions
How morphological elements interact with one another is a major concern for both morphological theory and typological research. Morphemes, for example, are usually said to block each other when they are in subset-superset relations to one another. Little is known, by contrast, of how morphomes (i.e. forms with unnatural morphosyntactic distributions) interact with one another. This paper provides an initial typology of morphome interactions, base…
Alignment of forms in Spanish verbal inflection
The future and conditional forms ofvenir'come',tener'have' andponer'put' were characterized in Old Spanish by various alternatives (e.g.verné,vendré,verré,venréin the case of come.1SG.FUT) which originated through different sound changes taking place in different varieties. The victory ofvendréin contemporary Spanish could be seen simply as an inconsequential resolution of this competition of forms. Here I argue against such an interpretation. I …
Stem alternations in Kiranti and their implications for the morphology–phonology interface
Stem alternation is present in the verbal inflection of all documented Kiranti languages, where it ranges from the straightforward phonologically conditioned (e.g. Athpariya and Chintang) to the purely morphological and baroque (e.g. Khaling and Dumi). This paper surveys stem alternation patterns across the whole family. Its main finding is that, unlike the morphological stem alternations of West Kiranti, the phonologically-conditioned stem alter…
VeLePa
This paper reports on the compilation and quantitative analysis of VeLePa, an inflected lexicon containing paradigms of 216 Central Pame verbs and a total of 12528 elicited words, in phonological form, supplied with cell and lexeme frequency information. The language (Otomanguean) is of interest due to both its extraordinary morphological complexity, as well as due to the organization of the inflection into a four-fold concurrent classification s…
Deconstructing (ir)regularity
Regularity and irregularity are among the most widely invoked notions in linguistics. The terms are backed up by a long and venerable tradition, and yet (or maybe therefore) different disciplines and authors seem to be using them for very different phenomena and in very different ways. The most frequent usage conflates or replaces other notions such as type frequency, productivity, (non-)concatenative morphology, storage vs. computation, predicta…
Morphome interactions
How morphological elements interact with one another is a major concern for both morphological theory and typological research. Morphemes, for example, are usually said to block each other when they are in subset-superset relations to one another. Little is known, by contrast, of how morphomes (i.e. forms with unnatural morphosyntactic distributions) interact with one another. This paper provides an initial typology of morphome interactions, base…
Stem alternations in Kiranti and their implications for the morphology–phonology interface
Stem alternation is present in the verbal inflection of all documented Kiranti languages, where it ranges from the straightforward phonologically conditioned (e.g. Athpariya and Chintang) to the purely morphological and baroque (e.g. Khaling and Dumi). This paper surveys stem alternation patterns across the whole family. Its main finding is that, unlike the morphological stem alternations of West Kiranti, the phonologically-conditioned stem alter…
Alignment of forms in Spanish verbal inflection
The future and conditional forms ofvenir'come',tener'have' andponer'put' were characterized in Old Spanish by various alternatives (e.g.verné,vendré,verré,venréin the case of come.1SG.FUT) which originated through different sound changes taking place in different varieties. The victory ofvendréin contemporary Spanish could be seen simply as an inconsequential resolution of this competition of forms. Here I argue against such an interpretation. I …
More or Less Unnatural
Morphological systems often reuse the same forms in different functions, creating what is known as syncretism. While syncretism varies greatly, certain cross-linguistic tendencies are apparent. Patterns where all syncretic forms share a morphological feature value (e.g., first person, or plural number) are most common cross-linguistically, and this preference is mirrored in results from learning experiments. While this suggests a general bias tow…
Quantifying the importance of morphomic structure, semantic values, and frequency of use in Romance stem alternations
Stem alternations in Romance have recently been argued to be regulated largely by autonomously morphological (aka morphomic) organizational principles. Here, I assess the relative contribution of morphomic structures vis à vis alternative principles, namely semantic structure, and token frequency. Results confirm the exceptional importance of autonomously morphological domains on Romance verb stem alternations; however, inherent inflectional valu…
Possessive inflection in Chichimec inalienable nouns
Person and number of a possessor are expressed in Chichimec in one of two ways. Most nouns use possessive classifiers. A smaller class (typically inalienables) inflects for the possessor synthetically. This paper constitutes the first in-depth exploration of this latter class. These nouns are characterized by unparalleled levels of irregularity, with more than 100 different inflection classes and most nouns exhibiting completely unique exponence …
Stress and stem allomorphy in the Romance perfectum
Perfective stem allomorphy and stress are morphological traits which interact in complex ways in Romance verbal inflection. This article surveys the whole range of variation of these traits across Romance varieties, typologizes the observed interactions between the two, and examines attested and unattested possibilities. A comparison between the modern-day and the original Latin systems suggests that there is a strong pan-Romance bias against hav…
Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms
Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same position (e.g., all subject agreement markers as suffixes, all object agreement markers as prefixes). However, little is known about the exceptions to this trend: cases where different values of the same feature are marked in different positions in the word (i.e., positional splits). In this study, we explore the positional properties of subject and object p…
The Typological Diversity of Morphomes
This book constitutes the first typologically oriented monograph on morphomes, which is the term given to systematic morphological identities, usually within inflectional paradigms, that do not map onto syntactic or semantic natural classes like 'plural', 'past', 'third-person singular'. Its first half addresses the theoretical and empirical challenges surrounding the identification and definition of morphomes, and surveys their links with relate…
Morphological autonomy and the long-term vitality of morphomes
Morphologists of different backgrounds disagree with respect to the degree of autonomy of the morphological component of language from syntax and semantics. A precise and objective quantification of the diachronic productivity of Romance morphomes is the piece of evidence most crucially missing from this debate. On the basis of 502 morphophonological innovations associated with the loss of stem-final consonants across 63 Romance varieties, this p…
Short vs Long Stem Alternations in Romance Verbal Inflection
Some verbs in Romance (e.g. the reflexes of faciō ‘do’, dīcō ‘say’, habeō ‘have’, sapiō ‘know’, possum ‘be able’, and volō ‘want’) display alternations between a short (e.g. It. f‐are , f‐a , d‐ire ) and a long (e.g. It. fac‐evo , dic‐e , dic‐evo ) stem. This paper contains an exploration of the lexical and paradigmatic distribution of these stem alternations across Romance varieties to trace when they emerged, how and why. The results suggest a …
The meaning of morphomes
Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged, while their autonomously morphological natu…
VeLePa
This paper reports on the compilation and quantitative analysis of VeLePa, an inflected lexicon containing paradigms of 216 Central Pame verbs and a total of 12528 elicited words, in phonological form, supplied with cell and lexeme frequency information. The language (Otomanguean) is of interest due to both its extraordinary morphological complexity, as well as due to the organization of the inflection into a four-fold concurrent classification s…
Stephen C. Levinson
Central Pame verbal inflection
Central Pame verbal inflection constitutes a system whose organization is strikingly complex, with dozens of inflection classes distributed syntagmatically across multiple positions in a word: prefix, suffix, stem, and tone. This paper presents the first thorough description of this understudied system and investigates every layer and subsystem in detail and how they relate to each other, concluding that, in this distributed-exponence system, syn…
Paradigmatic complexity metrics as signals of phylogenetic relatedness
Morphological complexity metrics like entropy, and notions like the Paradigm Cell-Filling Problem, have recently (re)gained popularity for the synchronic analysis of inflectional systems. The potential of these quantitative approaches for diachronic research, however, remains largely untapped. This paper constitutes a first exploration of whether and, if so, how these methods can be used profitably in this domain. We first use Romance, for which …
System size and system complexity
Inflectional systems vary along multiple dimensions (number of members, size of paradigms, word class, integrative complexity, accidents of history, etc.). This makes it difficult to find significant correlations and causality relations between different properties, as attested systems usually differ in multiple ways at the same time, thus obscuring possible relations between individual variables. Here we analyze the relation between a system’s s…
The complexity of syncretism patterns in inflectional class systems
While the morphological phenomena of syncretism and inflection classes have been extensively studied separately, their interaction remains underexplored. Here I present a typology, and a cross-linguistic exploration, of the diversity of morphological syncretism patterns and their complexity in inflectional paradigms. I propose several easy-to-obtain measures of syncretism complexity and I analyze a sample of both related and unrelated inflectiona…
Emergence and evolution of free variation in Central Pame prefixes
Many word forms from different classes in Central Pame (cent2145, Otomanguean) allow two synonymous forms, one containing a prefix with the vowel /a/ and another one with /u/ (e.g. wa-ttsáuʔ ~ wu-ttsáuʔ ‘(s)he feels’). I conduct historical corpus research and elicitation to throw light on the diachronic origin and contemporary profile of this unusual phenomenon. Evidence suggests that it started as a sound change /a/ > /u/ between bilabial conson…
The effects of sound change vs. analogy on paradigm complexity
The effect of sound change and analogy upon inflectional paradigms has been traditionally described through Sturtevant’s Paradox, which states that sound change is regular but generates irregularity, whereas analogy is irregular but generates regularity. While past work has explored trends in sound change and analogy qualitatively, quantitative investigation with large data sets remains underexploited. We tackle this by exploring the effects of s…
Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (20 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Language and cultural evolution (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Inflection (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (9 works) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (9 works) · Mathematics (8 works) · Psychology (8 works)