This formal study of morphologically induced rime-change (bianyun) phenomena in Chinese argues that rime change is effected by affixation of subsegmental morphemes and that the derived forms are subject to prosodically defined templatic constraints. The Affix Manifestation Principle is proposed to account for the tendency of affix preservation. Various processes are motivated to manifest the effect of affixation and to satisfy the templatic constraints. This study not only shows that one unitary process accounts for different cases of rime change and crossdialectal variation but also has broader theoretical implications regarding the notion of maximality under affixation, the nature of output templates, and the light-heavy distinction within moraic theory.

Natural languages are characterized by standards of well-formedness. These internal standards are likely to be, at least in part, a product of a consensus achieved among the users of a language over time. Nevertheless, it is possible that an individual, attempting to invent symbols to communicate de novo, might generate a system of symbols that is similarly characterized by internal standards of well-formedness. In these studies, we explore this possibility by comparing (1) a conventional sign language used by a community of signers and passed down from generation to generation with (2) gestures invented by a deaf child over a period of years and (3) gestures invented by nonsigning hearing individuals on the spot. Thus, we compare communication in the manual modality created over three different timespans—historical, ontogenetic, and microgenetic—focusing on the extent to which the gestures become codified and adhere to internal standards in each of these timespans. Our findings suggest that an individual can introduce standards of well-formedness into a self-generated gesture system, but that gradual development over a period of time is necessary for such standards to be constructed.

This article explores the nature of morphological categories by examining two of the most ubiquitous denominal adjective types, the possessionat (bearded) and similitudinal (friendly) adjectives. Sometimes these adjectives are morphologically distinct, sometimes not; compare icy road and icy hand. This suggests that they are related yet not related. Language provides two means of generating these adjectives: TRANSPOSITION, which alters the lexical category of the base but not its grammatical features, and FUNCTIONAL DERIVATION, which alters the latter but not the former. This article shows how both adjectives may be derived simultaneously by both means. In order to understand fully the semantic effect of transposition on the base, it is necessary to clarify the distinction between the morphological and semantic categories involved and to demonstrate the impossibility of reducing either set of categories to the other.

Since Brown 1973, the study of the acquisition of the items generally referred to as ‘grammatical morphemes’ has tended to focus on inferring the linguistic and cognitive factors governing the ORDER in which these items reach some designated level of acquisition. What is less often addressed is the PROCESS of acquisition of these common inflections and closed-class functors: how it unfolds, why children learning the same language take such different paths, why some morphemes are harder to learn than others, and why the path to adult performance is so uneven. We adopt a microgenetic approach to these questions, using longitudinal data from two children learning English in extremely different ways. One produces protomorphemic filler syllables from which true grammatical morphemes develop smoothly; the other has no filler syllables and displays a more discontinuous developmental pattern, marked by false starts. The production of particular grammatical morphemes as filler syllables or other precursor forms is influenced by phonological salience, position in the utterance, frequency in the input, and morpheme homonymy. Turning to the growing body of crosslinguistic data on protomorphemes, we then propose eight general attributes of morphological systems which, we predict, will promote or inhibit the emergence of filler syllables during development. Finally, we argue that the pattern of smooth development via protomorphemes and their apparent adult-language analogues requires models/theories of morphology that allow for a state of ‘partial knowledge’ of a morpheme within each level of representation.