Perceptual functionality of morphological redundancy in Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara)

Abstract

A recent cross-linguistic survey suggests redundant marking of the same meaning by multiple morphological markers to be more widely attested than commonly believed. While this phenomenon (referred to as multiple (or extended) exponence in the morphological literature) has been examined within the context of morphological theory and diachronic research, little work has investigated the processing of morphological redundancy and synchronic motivations for its use. This paper reports a field speech-in-noise experiment to assess perceptual functionality of redundant markers in an agglutinating, morphologically complex language of Northern Mexico, Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara). This language possesses morphological patterns in which a meaning is redundantly cued by two consecutive suffixes, and where the second (outer) suffix is optional. We show that the effect of adding the optional suffix varies with the overall likelihood of recognising its meaning in context: cue redundancy helps when recognition of the cued meaning is difficult but hurts when recognition of the cued meaning is easy. The results are interpreted as support for the operation of Grice's Maxim of Clarity in spoken word recognition and/or production: the listener expects the speaker to say only as much as is necessary to transmit the message.

Keywords:

• redundancy
• morphology
• multiple exponence
• Gricean inference
• morphological processing

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to our Choguita Rarámuri teachers for their collaboration and patience. This paper benefited from feedback on several versions of this paper from two anonymous reviewers and Florian Jaeger. For valuable discussions, we would like to thank Roger Levy, Scott DeLancey and audience members at the American International Morphology Meeting (UMass), the International Conference on the Mental Lexicon (Université de Montréal/McGill University), the UCSD and U of Oregon Linguistic Fieldwork Working Groups. Any errors and omissions are our sole responsibility.

Funding

This work was supported by the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) Program/National Science Foundation (NSF) [under grant no. 1160672] and a Hellman Fellowship (2011–2012) awarded to Gabriela Caballero.

Notes

1. Where ‘cues’ are understood as the dimensions (phonological, morphological and syntactic) within the formal (expressive) level that allow hearers to infer the functional content of utterances, plus any functional or extralinguistic content that may affect the inference process. For instance, animacy is considered a lexical semantic cue to agentivity (see Bates & MacWhinney, 1989).

2. Data are transcribed using the International Phonetic Alphabet. Tone is left unmarked. Abbreviations used include: appl – applicative; caus – causative; cer – certainty; fut – future; nom – nominative; pass – passive; pst – past; poss – possessive; pot – potential; sg – singular.

3. It is worth pointing out that recognition accuracy is agreed to be a function of predictability of what is being recognised given the available context and acoustic/sensory robustness of the set of cues to what is being recognised (e.g., Broadbent, 1967; Norris & McQueen, 2008).

4. This may obtain more broadly for cue coalition. We expect the results to extend beyond morphological cues. For instance, phonetic cues associated with ‘clear speech’ might hurt recognition of a meaning that is predictable in context (instead being interpreted as a cue that some other message is intended, as in sarcasm (‘He is [s:oʊ:] smart’) or exasperation at the listener: ‘I … do … not … know’ vs. [ə˜ə˜ə˜], Hawkins & Smith, 2001).

5. We assume that the order of recognition usually tracks order of occurrence in the speech signal though some exponents might be harder to recognise than others or might be superimposed (fully or partially) on the other exponents, e.g., tone.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This work was supported by the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) Program/National Science Foundation (NSF) [under grant no. 1160672] and a Hellman Fellowship (2011–2012) awarded to Gabriela Caballero.