About

The central question addressed by the Multifunctionality in Morphology project is how to adequately account for (derivational) affixes that can appear in different, seemingly unrelated contexts and that have little meaning of their own. The project focuses primarily on Slovenian, relying on the initial descriptions of multifunctionality, which show that Slovenian is an ideal source of data for researching this phenomenon, since in in Slovenian, multifunctional affixes can be found in all major categories (nouns, verbs and adjectives).

The project is divided into three components, where the empirical component of the project will establish a new set of data that will serve as the basis for the descriptive and theoretical components. 

As part of the empirical component, annotated databases of nouns, adjectives and adverbs will be built, and an existing database of verbs WeSoSlaV (Arsenijević et al., in preparation) will be supplemented with additional material. 

In the descriptive component, we will first address issues specific to Slovenian linguistics, i.e., shortcomings in the traditional descriptions of Slovenian. In doing so we will establish (i) which items treated as morphemes in traditional literature should be further decomposed and (ii) which affixes treated as separate (as cases of accidental homonymy) in the traditional literature can be reanalyzed as multifunctional. More precisely, we will determine which suffixes exhibit (a) multifunctionality within a category, (b) multifunctionality between categories, and (c) maximal multifunctionality (i.e., affixes that can be used in different categories and inflection). 

The central component of the project is theoretical. To formulate a unified account of multifunctional affixes in Slovenian, Distributed Morphology will be adopted as a starting point.

These components lead towards a more general contribution of the project – building a unified, cross-linguistically testable  model that will explain what type of elements multifunctional affixes are (the working hypothesis is that they are transitive roots), where they are merged and how they are categorized. By addressing these questions, the project will contribute towards resolving several open issues in the broader field of syntactocentric approaches to morphology. Along with an account of multifunctionality, the project will also offer insight into the nature of roots - how they are categorized, whether they can project, whether they have selection markers, etc.  At the same time, the project will allow for a comparison of different theoretical approaches based on how well they can explain the central phenomenon.