Download Rules or schemas? Evidence from Polish

LANGUAGE AND COGNITIVE PROCESSES, 2004, 19 (2), 225–271
Rules or schemas? Evidence from Polish
Ewa Da˛browska
Department of English Language and Linguistics, University of Sheffield,
Sheffield, UK
At least three factors—regularity, type frequency, and phonological
heterogeneity—have been claimed to be implicated in determining the
likelihood that a particular inflection will be applied to new stems. The role
of these factors in determining Polish speakers’ productivity with genitive
and dative inflections was investigated using nonce word production tasks
and spontaneous child language data. Both children and adults freely
generalised genitive masculine inflections, which are irregular but apply to
large classes of phonologically heterogeneous nouns. However, speakers
were only weakly productive with genitive neuter and dative neuter
inflections, in spite of the fact that they are almost completely regular. This
is attributed to the fact that the neuter class is relatively small, and that most
nouns are clustered in a few densely populated phonological neighbourhoods. Thus, type frequency and phonological heterogeneity appear to be
much better predictors of productivity than regularity. These findings are
discussed in the context of single and dual mechanism approaches to
morphological productivity.
Perhaps the most fascinating of our linguistic capacities is the ability to
produce forms we have never heard before. The last five decades have seen
Correspondence should be addressed to Ewa Da˛browska, Department of English
Language and Linguistics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK. E-mail:
[email protected].
This study was supported in part by British Academy grant RB 100556; much of the
research was conducted while the author was visiting the Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. I would like to thank Magdalena Smoczyńska for
generously providing me with a coded version of the Kraków corpus; Wojcich Kubiński,
Ola Kubińska, Agata Kochańska, Anna Tymińska and Beata Williamson for their help in
collecting the adult data; and Caroline Rowland, Marcin Szczerbiński, and two
anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper.
Part of the material discussed here was presented at the Second International
Conference on Construction Grammar (Helsinki, September 2002) and the Second
International Conference of the Slavic Cognitive Linguistics Association (Turku,
September 2002); the developmental data is discussed more fully in Da˛browska (2001).
c 2004 Psychology Press Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/pp/01690965.html
DOI: 10.1080/01690960344000170
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a formidable amount of research on the mental mechanisms which make
this possible. In recent years, much of this research has focused on one
particular aspect of linguistic creativity which is relatively easy to study—
namely, morphological productivity, or the ability to produce inflected
forms such as the plural of a noun or the past tense of a verb.
There are two main approaches to explaining morphological productivity. According to one view, the human ability to supply the inflected forms
of new words relies on a single mental mechanism. The best-known variant
of this approach is associated with connectionist models such as those
described by Elman et al. (1996), Plunkett and Marchman (1993),
Rumelhart and McClelland (1986), and many others. Connectionist
models consist of networks of interconnected ‘units’ loosely corresponding
to neurons in the human brain. The strength of the connections between
the units changes as the result of ‘experience’ (e.g., exposure to pairs of
basic and derived forms of a number of lexemes). Such models are very
good at extracting patterns implicit in the input and can generalise them to
novel inputs; and according to proponents of this approach the process by
means of which they accomplish this resembles human generalisation in
some important respects.
Another single-mechanism approach was developed by cognitive
linguists and sometimes goes under the name of ‘schema theory’ (Bybee,
1995; Langacker, 1991, 2000; see also Taylor, 2002). The central premise of
this approach is that people store large numbers of exemplars of complex
units, and that similar exemplars have partially overlapping representations. Generalisations emerge as similarities inherent in exemplars are
reinforced through repeated use. This results in the extraction of schemas
of varying degrees of generality. For example, a schema which might be
represented by the formula PAST/C(C)O:t captures the commonality
between past tense forms such as bought, brought, caught, fought, and
thought (they all refer to past events or states; they all consist of one or
more consonants followed by the vowel [O:] followed by [t]), while PAST/
Verb-D captures the properties shared by all regular past tense forms (they
refer to past events and the corresponding phonological form ends in an
alveolar stop). The original function of schemas is to capture redundancies
in the lexicon; however, once they become well-established, they can be
used to inflect novel words.
Like connectionism, schema theory maintains that generalisations
emerge as a by-product of the way information is stored in long-term
memory. Furthermore, both approaches emphasise the role of local
similarities and of type frequency. The main difference is that schema
theory (especially the version developed by Langacker) postulates more
elaborate representations, and hence can account for a wider range of
phenomena—though at the price of being less explicit about the actual
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227
details of acquisition and processing. However, the two approaches are
broadly compatible, and in fact, connectionism may be regarded as a
method of modelling some aspects of schema theory (Bybee, 1995: 428;
Langacker, 1990). The subsequent discussion, therefore, will be couched in
schema theory terms, although the points that will be made also apply to
most connectionist models.
The alternative position, which has been referred to as the dual
mechanism theory or the hybrid model (Clahsen, 1999; Clahsen,
Rothweiler, Woest, & Marcus, 1992; Marcus et al. 1992, 1995; Pinker,
1998, 1999) maintains that the memory-based system can explain only
some aspects of linguistic productivity—specifically, the generalisation of
irregular patterns such as those shared by strong verbs in English. To
account for the full range of human abilities, however, we must postulate
an additional, qualitatively different mechanism: symbolic rules. Symbolic
rules concatenate a variable standing for a stem with an affix: for example,
the English past tense rule adds the -ed ending to a verb stem to produce
regular past tense forms such as played and kissed, and the plural rule adds
-s to noun stems, resulting in composite forms such as cats and dogs.
Unlike the memory system, symbolic rules are not constrained by
phonological or semantic similarity. Because of this property, the regular
inflection applies as a default whenever memory cannot be accessed. Thus,
when confronted with nonce words in the course of a psycholinguistic
experiment, English speakers usually use the regular inflection: asked to
supply the past tense of snarf or the plural of wug, they almost invariably
respond with snarfed and wugs (Prasada & Pinker, 1993). Outside the
laboratory, they do exactly the same with other words for which they do
not have stored entries, viz. newly coined words, recent borrowings, and
low frequency words. Speakers also fall back on the default system when
the memory trace is too weak or temporarily inaccessible. This situation
arises most often in immature language users, since strong memory
representations take time to build up; the result is regularisation errors
such as comed, bringed, childs. Children also occasionally overgeneralise
irregular patterns, producing past tense forms such as bat for bit (on
analogy with sat) or truck for tricked (on analogy with drunk); such errors,
however, are extremely rare (Xu & Pinker, 1995). Finally, the regular
inflection is used with a variety of noncanonical forms such as
onomatopoeic words, acronyms, and truncations, as well as with headless
words, where information stored with an irregular root cannot be passed
on to the derived form.
The various circumstances in which memory cannot be accessed and
hence the default inflection must apply are summarised in Table 1. It is
worth noting that the circumstances are quite heterogeneous, and some are
rather unusual. The fact that the dual mechanism theory gives a principled
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TABLE 1
Circumstances in which memory is not accessed and the regular inflection is applied
(adapted from Marcus et al., 1995)
Circumstance
Examples
Nonce words
krilged, wugs
Overgeneralisation errors
bringed, catched
Low-frequency words
stinted, eked
Unusual-sounding words
ploamphed, krilged
Words with irregular homophones
lied (cf. lay) hanged (cf. hung)
Words which rhyme with irregular words blinked (cf. thought), glowed (cf. knew)
Onomatopoeic words
dinged, peeped
The word is mentioned rather than used I checked the article for sexist writing and found
three mans on page 1.
Proper names
the Childs (cf. children), the Manns (cf. men)
Borrowings
latkes, cappucinos
Truncations
synched, mans ‘manuals’
Acronyms
PACs, OXes
Derivation from different category:
(a) denominal verbs
(b) deadjectival verbs
(c) nominalisations
spitted ‘put on a spit’
righted ‘returned to an upright position’
ifs, ands, buts
Derivation via different category:
(a) via noun (verb ! noun ! verb)
(b) via verb (noun ! verb ! noun)
costed ‘calculated the costs’
wolfs ‘instances of wolfing’
Derivation via name
Mickey Mouses, Renault Elfs
Bahuvrihi (exocentric) compounds
sabre-tooths, low-lifes
Nominalised phrases
bag-a-leafs, shear-a-sheeps
explanation for why the regular inflection applies in all of them is a strong
argument in its favour.
There is also a fair amount of psycho- and neurolinguistic evidence
suggesting that different mental mechanisms are involved in processing
regular and irregular inflections. First, the two systems are sometimes
differentially affected in language impairment. Individuals suffering from
anomic aphasia and Alzheimer’s disease perform relatively well on regular
verbs, but have problems with irregulars. Conversely, in agrammatics,
Parkinson’s patients, and children with Specific Language Impairment, the
regular system is disrupted, while the retrieval of irregular forms appears
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
229
to be relatively unaffected (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1997, 1998; Ullman et
al., 1997b). Secondly, Jaeger, Lockwood, Kemmerer, Van Valin, and
Murphy (1996) and Ullman, Bergida, and O’Craven (1997a) found that
different areas of the brain were activated during the processing of regular
and irregular past tense inflections, although these findings have been
challenged by Seidenberg & Hoeffner (1998). Last but not least, it has
been argued that performance on irregular verbs is highly sensitive to
frequency and similarity to other irregulars, while regulars do not show
such effects (Pinker & Prince, 1992; Ullman, 1999), although again, other
studies report frequency and phonological neighbourhood effects for both
regulars and irregulars (Alegre & Gordon, 1999; Marchman, 1997; Orsolini
& Marslen-Wilson, 1997; Ramscar, 2002).
As will be clear from the foregoing discussion, most of the evidence for
the dual mechanism theory has come from studies of the English past
tense. This raises a problem, since the regular and irregular past tense
inflections differ in several respects: that is to say, regularity is confounded
with other factors which may contribute to the observed differences.
First, English regular and irregular verbs differ in frequency. Irregular
verbs have very high token frequency: about 85% of past tense forms
occurring in casual conversation are irregular (Marcus et al., 1992: 75).
Regular verbs, in contrast, have a high type frequency: of the thousand
most frequent verbs in English, 86% are regular (Pinker, 1999: 217). It is
not difficult to see that high token frequency favours rote-learning: it is
easy to memorise a frequently occurring form. High type frequency, in
contrast, facilitates schema extraction: it is easier to notice a pattern shared
by a large number of verbs than one which is shared by only a few.
Second, English regular and irregular verbs invoke different morphological mechanisms to mark tense. The past tense of regular verbs is
formed by suffixation (e.g., walk þ -ed), and the resulting form is easily
segmentable into a component that specifies the type of process (walk) and
a component that marks tense (-ed). Most irregular verbs, in contrast,
require vowel changes (ring - rang, catch - caught, bite - bit, etc.)—a process
which is less transparent, and therefore probably more difficult to
generalise.
Third, the various irregular patterns in English apply to clusters of
phonologically similar verbs (e.g., ring-rang, sing-sang, spring-sprang),
while the regular inflection is phonologically unrestricted. Although this is
by no means untypical, it is certainly not invariably the case: some regular
inflections (e.g., the ‘conjugations’ in Romance languages) are restricted to
subsets of stems defined in phonological terms, and, conversely, irregular
inflections may apply to phonologically open-ended classes (e.g., the Polish
genitive masculine inflection, to be discussed below). Thus, English
speakers’ reluctance to generalise irregular patterns to novel verbs may
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be simply a consequence of the fact that they have very narrow domains of
application.
Because of these confounds, the English past tense is clearly not a good
testing ground for theories of morphological productivity. The English
plural inflection and the German past participle, which have also been
extensively studied in connection with the single versus dual mechanism
debate, are unsuitable for similar reasons. More recent studies which claim
to provide support for the dual mechanism theory have focused on
morphological subsystems in which regular and irregular inflections are
better matched on other properties, such as person and tense marking in
Spanish (Clahsen, Aveledo & Roca, 2002) and the Hebrew plural (Berent,
Pinker & Shimron, 1999). In both of these subsystems, regular and
irregular inflections apply to classes of comparable heterogeneity and rely
on the same mechanism (inflectional suffixes). However, the frequency
confound remains. Ninety per cent of masculine nouns in Hebrew (the
class studied by Berent et al.) take the regular inflection; thus, regular
forms outnumber the irregulars 9:1. The odds against irregular Spanish
verbs are even higher. While the total number of irregular verbs is similar
to the number of verbs in the smaller regular classes (in fact, it is slightly
higher), the irregulars do not instantiate a single pattern but rather a
collection of patterns—that is to say, different verbs are irregular in
different ways. This means that any one irregular pattern applies to a
much smaller number of verbs than any of the regular patterns. For
example, the irregular first person singular past marker -e applies to just 30
verbs, while the corresponding regular endings (first conjugation -é and
second/third conjugation -ı́) apply to about 10 000 and 1400 verbs
respectively.1
Another morphological subsystem which has received a great deal of
attention in the context of the single versus dual mechanism debate is the
German plural. German has five plural affixes, -en, -e, -s, -er, and -Ø, three
of which (-er, -e, and -Ø) sometimes require umlauting of the stem vowel.
However, one of these endings, -s, appears to have properties which
distinguish it from the other four. It is used with surnames, borrowings,
headless words, words which are mentioned rather than used, etc.—that is
to say, in many of circumstances associated with the regular past tense and
plural in English. Furthermore, it is frequently overgeneralised by
children, and applied to nonce words in psycholinguistic experiments.
1
Some irregular stem changes apply to slightly larger classes of verbs. However, in this
case, there is yet another confound, namely phonological transparency: Forms with irregular
stems are less transparent than forms with regular stems. Clahsen et al. acknowledge this (p.
617), and regard the children’s failure to generalise the irregular affixes rather than irregular
stems as their strongest argument.
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
231
These properties lead some researchers (Clahsen, 1999; Clahsen et al.,
1992; Marcus et al., 1995) to conclude that -s is the default plural marker in
German.
It is not difficult to see that the German plural is a much better test case
for the dual mechanism theory than the morphological subsystems
considered so far. It is free from the confounds that beset the English
past tense, since two of the irregular affixes (-en and -e) are also used with a
wide variety of stems. What is more, the -s plural is relatively infrequent: in
fact, it applies to only about 4–10% of the noun vocabulary. The fact that
speakers freely generalise an infrequent affix undermines a central claim of
single mechanism theories, namely, that type frequency is the most
important determinant of productivity. Thus, the data presented by
Marcus et al. (1995) and Clahsen et al. (1992) appear to provide
particularly compelling evidence for symbolic rules of the kind postulated
by the dual mechanism theory.
However, the evidence for the claim that the -s affix is the default plural
in German is far from clear-cut. As noted by a number of language
acquisition researchers, German-speaking children overgeneralise all the
plural markers, not just -s (Behrens, 2001, submitted; Bittner & Köpcke,
2000; Köpcke, 1998; Szagun, 2001), and the marker which is generalised
most often is -en, the most frequent affix, not -s. Clahsen et al.
acknowledge this, and propose that some children misidentify -en as the
default.2 They point out that overgeneralisation errors with both -en and
-s are ‘‘an order of magnitude’’ more frequent than errors involving the
other affixes (Clahsen et al., 1992: 247–248). However, this is only true if
one uses their method of calculating overgeneralisation rates, which
involves dividing the number of errors with a particular affix by the
number of all uses of that affix. If the error rates in their data are
recalculated using the conventional method (as the ratio of errors to the
number of opportunities for making error, i.e. the number of correct uses
with other affixes), the differences disappear (see Da˛browska, 2001).
There are also problems with the nonce word data. Although
participants in the Marcus et al. (1995) study indeed preferred the -s
plural, it appears that their stimuli were biased towards this ending. As
pointed out by Behrens (submitted), a high proportion of the nonce words
2
Marcus et al. (1995) claim to have found some independent evidence for this. They
observe that the children they studied sometimes left out the -en ending in compounds. Since
irregular endings can occur inside compounds while regular endings normally do not (cf. micecatcher and *rats-catcher), the fact that children leave out -en in compounds, they argue,
confirms that they have misidentified it as the regular ending. However, there are some
serious problems with this argument (see Da˛browska, 2001).
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used in the study were monosyllabic nouns ending in a plosive, and such
nouns tend to take the -s plural. Other researchers, who used more varied
stimuli, have found that participants had no particular preference for -s,
and that their responses depended on the gender and the phonological
properties of the stem: for example, they tended to choose -en with
feminine nouns ending in -ung and masculine nouns ending in schwa, -e
with masculine nouns ending in -ling, and -s with nouns ending in a full
vowel (Köpcke, 1988; see also Gawlitzek-Maiwald, 1994).
Finally, although it is true that -s is strongly associated with many of the
default circumstances, it is by no means the only plural ending which
occurs in them. Bahuvrihi compounds, for example, take whichever ending
is required by the rightmost element (e.g., Schreihäls-e ‘bawlers’ (literally
‘scream-throats’), Großmäul-er ‘bigmouths’), and most rare words take
endings other than -s (this is a matter of arithmetical necessity, since -s
applies to only a small part of the noun vocabulary). Other exceptions
include borrowings (only about 50% of which take -s), many nouns derived
from other categories (e.g., nominalised verbs such as Modenschau-en
‘fashion shows’, Käuf-e ‘purchases’), some nominalised phrases (e.g.,
Tunichtgut-e ‘ne’er-do-wells’, Vergissmeinicht-e ‘forget-me-nots’), and,
occasionally, abbreviations (e.g., LPG-en alongside LPG-s: Wegener,
1994: 269) and names (thus we have Emil-e, Anton-e, Beate-n alongside
Emil-s, Anton-s, Beate-s).
To summarise: The dual mechanism theory offers a convincing account
of English speakers’ knowledge of past tense and plural inflections. Both of
these have a single ‘default’ ending which applies in all the circumstances
listed in Table 1; and there is strong evidence for various dissociations
between regular and irregular inflections. However, it is not clear whether
conclusions about English past-tense morphology can be generalised to
other morphological systems, and to linguistic productivity in general. This
is because the idiosyncratic properties of the English system of marking
past tense exaggerate the differences between regular and irregular verbs,
and make what could be quantitative differences appear qualitative. The
same is true of most other morphological subsystems which have been used
as testing grounds for the theory. The German data do offer partial support
for the dual mechanism theory, in that it shows that even relatively
infrequent affixes can be freely generalised to new words; but the results
are far from conclusive.
Clearly, what is needed are data from other languages. In this paper, I
present the results of four studies designed to investigate Polish speakers’
productivity with the case inflections of their language—specifically, their
ability to supply the genitive and dative inflections. These two inflections
have been chosen because they make it possible to unconfound regularity
from type frequency and phonological heterogeneity. The genitive
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
233
masculine inflection is highly irregular and, it will be argued, lacks a
‘default’, while the corresponding feminine and neuter inflections are quite
regular. Since the genitive masculine and feminine inflections apply to
relatively large and phonologically heterogeneous classes of nouns, and all
are signalled by affixes, the genitive case will allow us to examine the
effects of regularity per se, and determine whether regular inflections are
indeed more productive in the psychological sense. Study 1 will compare
adult native speakers’ ability to inflect novel words of different genders in
an experimental setting; and study 2 will analyse the use and non-use of the
genitive inflections in a corpus of spontaneous child speech, with a view to
determining whether there is a developmental advantage for regular
inflections. The third study examines adults’ ability to supply the dative
inflection with nonce words. Dative inflections for all three genders can be
regarded as ‘regular’; however, they apply to classes which vary in size and
phonological neighbourhood structure, thus making it possible to
determine the degree to which class size and structure affect generalisability. The last study is a simple elicitation task with real words, conducted
in order to confirm that the descriptions of the dative neuter ending given
in published grammars of Polish are an accurate reflection of native
speaker knowledge. I will also provide, for both the genitive and the
dative, a linguistic analysis of the distribution of case endings in the default
circumstances listed in Table 1, based principally on information provided
in published grammars and dictionaries. This will make it possible to
determine whether they are indeed uniquely associated with regular
inflections.
THE GENITIVE
The genitive inflection
The Polish case marking system is complex and fairly irregular. There are
seven cases, each with two to four different endings (Table 2). The single
TABLE 2
The Polish case marking system (the singular endings)
Case
Feminine
Masculine
Neuter
Nominative
Genitive
Dative
Accusative
Instrumental
Locative
Vocative
-a (-Ø, -i)
-i/-y
-‘e,a -i/-y
-e˛ (-Ø)
-a˛
-‘e,a -i/-y
-o, -u, -i/-y, (-Ø)
-Ø (-a, -o)
-a, -u (-i/-y)
-owi (-u, -‘e, -i/-y)
-Ø, -a (-e˛, -o)
-em (-a˛)
-‘e,a -u (-i/-y)
-‘e,a -u, (-o)
-o, -e, -e˛
-a
-u
-o, -e, -e˛
-em
-‘e,a -u
-o, -e, -e˛
a
The symbol ‘ indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalised.
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most important factor determining the choice of ending is gender (which
for most nouns can be reliably predicted from the phonological form of the
nominative), with additional criteria becoming relevant when there is more
than one marker for a particular gender.
To complicate matters, some nouns, including all deadjectival nouns and
most surnames, decline like adjectives—that is to say, require a completely
different set of endings, which also depend on gender; some nouns,
including many borrowings and foreign proper names, do not decline at all;
and many nouns require stem changes as well as affixes. Most stem changes
are quite regular, but some are restricted to small lexically specified classes
or to individual lexemes.
As can be seen from Table 2, the genitive case is signalled by one of
three endings: -i/-y (considered variants of the same ending),3 -a, and -u.
The -i/-y ending is characteristic for feminine nouns, and -a for neuters
and animate masculine nouns; inanimate masculine nouns take either -a
or -u, depending on the noun. There are no strict rules determining the
distribution of genitive endings with inanimate masculine nouns, although
there are certain tendencies (Bodnarowska, 1962; Kottum, 1981; Westfal,
1956). Some of these are semantic: for example, mass nouns, collective
nouns, abstract nouns, and nouns referring to large objects and locations
usually take -u, while nouns which designate tools, makes of cars, names
of the months, body-part terms, and units of measurement generally take
-a. Others are morphological: some derivational affixes (e.g., -acz, -arz, ek) are associated with -a, and some (e.g., -unek, -ot) ‘‘prefer’’ -u. And
some are phonological: for instance, nouns that end in a palatalised
consonant usually take -a, while nouns that end in -m or certain
consonant clusters prefer -u. However, these criteria are not very reliable.
There are many exceptions, and they are often contradictory: for
example, a noun can be both abstract and end in a palatalised consonant;
in some such cases, the phonological criterion wins, while in others it is
the semantics.
It is clear, then, that there is no single default ending which, unless
blocked, applies freely to all nouns, although one could say that feminine
and neuter nouns do have a default, namely, -i/-y and -a respectively.
However, there remains a problem of the masculine declension with its
3
The endings -i and -y are in complementary distribution (i.e., the substitution of the
wrong ending results in a phonotactically illegal sequence). Because of this, some linguists
(e.g., Nagórko, 1998) consider them allophones of the same phoneme. This conclusion,
however, depends on assumptions about the phonemic status of preceding consonants which
are not shared by all linguists.
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235
two endings, both of which apply to open-ended classes of nouns. Since -a
is the more frequent ending, it is traditionally regarded as the ‘regular’ one.
However, according to the dual mechanism theory, regularity in the
psychological sense (i.e., default status) does not depend on frequency, so
in order to determine which, if any, of the two endings is regular, we must
consider other criteria.
As explained earlier, an important claim of the dual mechanism theory
is that regular inflections must apply in the default circumstances
discussed in the introductory section. Thus, we can use this set of
circumstances as diagnostic contexts for identifying the default. If only
one of the two endings can occur in these circumstances, we can conclude
that that ending is regular in the technical sense of the theory; and if they
allow neither ending, we would have to conclude that both endings are
irregular.
Before we proceed with the test, we must note that three of the
circumstances enumerated in Marcus et al. (1995) are either not applicable
to our data or do not allow us to distinguish regular and irregular forms.
The former includes onomatopoeic words, since renditions of sound are
always neuter, and the latter homophones and rhymes, which designate
symmetrical relations, and hence do not allow us to determine which
member of the pair takes the regular ending (for every -a noun that has a
homophone that takes -u, there is a -u noun that has a homophone that
takes -a; likewise, for every -a noun that rhymes with a -u noun there is a -u
noun that rhymes with an -a noun). Also excluded from Table 3 are the
first two circumstances listed in Table 1 (novel words and overgeneralisation errors), which will be discussed in the following two sections. The
distribution of genitive masculine endings in the remaining 10 circumstances is summarised, with relevant examples, in Table 3. Bahuvrihi
compounds and nominalised phrases are treated jointly because they are
difficult to distinguish in Polish.
As we can see from Table 3, most of the relevant default circumstances
allow both endings; which ending is actually used depends on the lexical
properties of the noun. Furthermore, some circumstances either allow or
require other endings (-Ø or the adjectival -ego). Thus, neither of the two
endings has a privileged status vis-à-vis the other one. Since they cannot
both be regular (by definition, the default cannot depend on lexical
properties of the stem), we must conclude that they are both irregular. This
in turn implies that irregular inflections can be used in default
circumstances, thus undermining one of the central claims of the dual
mechanism theory.
I now turn to a discussion of the psycholinguistic evidence. I begin with a
report on adult performance in a nonce-word production task; this will be
followed by a discussion of the acquisition of the genitive marking.
TABLE 3
Genitive masculine endings in default circumstances
Circumstance
Required ending
Examples (all forms given in the genitive)
Low-frequency words
-a
-u
szańc-a ‘bulwark’, tygl-a ‘crucible’
cze˛stokoł-u ‘palisade’, puchar-u ‘goblet’
Unusual-sounding words
-Ø
swahili, attaché, Delacroix
Words mentioned rather
than used
-a, -u, or form in
Nie moge˛ znaleźć tego drugiego ‘‘autorowi’’/ ‘‘autor-a’’/‘‘rasizm-u’’. ‘I can’t find the
which the word
was originally used second (occurrence of the word) ‘author
(DAT)’/‘author (GEN)’/‘racism (GEN)’.
Proper names
-ego
-a
Tarski-ego, Chomski-ego
Darwin-a, Bach-a
Borrowings
-Ø
-u
sometimes -a
guru, boa, kamikadze, dingo
fonem-u, pub-u, Wehrmacht-u
drink-a, jeep-a, pikador-a
Truncations
-a
sometimes -u
merc-a ‘Mercedes’, spec-a ‘specialist’
sam-u ‘supermarket’ (from sklep
samoobsługowy)
Acronyms
-Ø
PCK (Polski Czerwony Krzyz_ ‘Polish Red
Cross’)
PAN-u (Polska Akademia Nauk ‘Polish
Academy of Sciences’)
-u
Derivation from a different
category:
usually -a
(a) affixation
(b) backforation
usually -u
(c) nominalised adjectives -ego
zszywacz-a ‘stapler’ (from zszywać ‘to
stitch together’), lizak-a ‘lollipop’ (from
lizać ‘to lick’)
zbior-u ‘collection’ (from zbierać ‘to
collect’), wykład-u ‘lecture’ (from wykładać
‘to lecture’)
chor-ego ‘ill person’ (from chory ‘ill’),
uczon-ego ‘scholar’ (from uczony ‘learned’)
Derivation via a different -a
category
-u
utleniacz-a ‘oxidant’ (from tlen ‘oxygen’ via
utleniać ‘oxidize’)
dodruk-u ‘additional print run’ (from
dodrukować ‘print additional copies’ from
drukować ‘to print’ from druk ‘print (n.)’
Derivation via name
-a
-u
(ekranizacja) Hamlet-a/Króla Lir-a
Tajfun-u/Wiśniowego Sad-u ‘(film version
of) Hamlet/King Lear/Typhoon/The Cherry
Orchard’
Bahuvrihi compounds
and nominalised phrases
-a
łamistrajk-a ‘scab’ (lit. ‘break-strike’; cf.
strajk-u ‘strike’), ka˛tomierza ‘protractor’
(lit. ‘angle-measure’)
trójze˛b-u ‘trident’ (‘three-tooth’, cf. ze˛b-a
‘tooth’), długopis-u ‘ball-point pen’ (lit.
‘long-write’)
-u
236
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
237
STUDY 1: ADULT PRODUCTIVITY WITH
GENITIVE ENDINGS
Ever since Berko’s (1958) classic study, the ability to inflect nonce words in
an experimental setting has been regarded as the gold standard of
productivity, and according to Marcus and Pinker, nonce words are one of
the linguistic contexts in which the regular inflection applies. The following
study, therefore, sets out to determine whether adults are productive with
the masculine endings at all, and, if so, whether they are less productive
than with the regular endings.
The second objective is to determine whether Polish speakers are
sensitive to the semantic and phonological factors affecting the choice of
masculine ending. As explained earlier, there is a strong tendency for
nouns designating small easily manipulable objects to take -a and for nouns
designating substances to take -u; and some stem-final consonants or
consonant clusters tend to be associated with one or the other of the two
endings. Since, according to the dual mechanism theory, only irregular
inflections are constrained by semantic and phonological factors, speakers’
sensitivity to such factors would confirm the irregular status of the
masculine inflections.
Method
Participants. The participants were 60 native speakers of Polish (24
males and 36 females), aged from 17 to 70 years (mean 42 years), mostly of
middle class background. All spoke standard Polish.
Materials. Three lists of nonce words were compiled, each comprising
14 forms (see Appendix A). Each list contained eight masculine, four
feminine and two neuter items. (Since the genitive ending for neuter
nouns, -a, is identical to one of the masculine endings, the number of
neuter items was intentionally kept small in order to minimise priming
effects.) All the words had gender-typical offsets: -a for feminines, -o or -e
for neuters, and a consonant for masculines. Of the masculine words, four
ended in a consonant or consonant cluster which is strongly associated with
-a ([˙], [Æ], [ts], [rs]) and four, with a consonant or consonant cluster
strongly associated with -u ([m], [d], [st]; since there are only three
consonant clusters strongly associated with -u, there were two nonce words
ending in [m]). A consonant or consonant cluster was assumed to be
‘strongly associated’ with a particular ending if at least 80% of real Polish
words with that offset took the same ending in the genitive; the relevant
statistical data was extracted from Tokarski and Saloni (2002). The
remaining 16 masculines ended in a variety of consonants distributed more
238
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or less evenly over the entire phonological space. The lists contained words
of one, two, and three syllables, in proportions intended to roughly reflect
the statistical properties of the Polish lexicon. All forms had the
phonotactic structure of real Polish words and were morphologically
simple (that is to say, they did not contain any affixes other than a gender
marker).
Each nonce word was introduced in a context sentence in the nominative
form (printed in bold face). The context sentence was followed by a test
sentence with a blank in a grammatical context requiring the genitive. The
nonce words were presented in three conditions: in a sentential context
suggesting that the referent was an object, as in example (1) below, a
substance, as in (2), or a place name, as in (3):
(1) Jaka wielka anbasa! Nigdy nie widziałem takiej wielkiej _____.
‘What a large anbasa! I have never seen such a large ____.’
(2) Jez_ eli masa jest za ge˛sta, najlepsza jest patala. Po prostu dodaj
troche˛ _____.
‘If the filling is too thick, patala is best. Just add some ____.’
(3) Szmargona lez_ y nad morzem. W przyszym roku pojedziemy do
_____.
‘Szmargona lies near the sea. Next year we will go to ____’
As explained above, if speakers of Polish are sensitive to the semantic
factors governing the choice of masculine inflection, they should prefer the
-a ending in the object condition and the -u ending in the substance
condition. Place names are equally likely to take -a and -u, so the final
condition was introduced as a baseline for the other two.
There were three versions of the test, with each of the three lists
assigned to a different condition in each version. Thus, each participant
encountered one-third of the words in the object condition, one-third in
the place-name condition, and one-third in the substance condition. The
test items were presented in three semi-random orders counterbalanced
across participants.
Procedure. Participants were given a printed copy of the questionnaire and were asked to read the sentences aloud, supplying the missing
form. The test began with a single feminine practice item which, if
necessary, was modelled for the participant. The responses to the test
items were recorded by the experimenter. Participants were encouraged
to answer quickly, ‘without thinking,’ and to give the first form that
occurred to them, but when they did self-correct, only the final response
was recorded. Each of the three versions was administered to one-third
of the participants.
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
239
TABLE 4
Response types by gender (%)
Gender
Expected
responses
(SD)
Gender
errors
No
change
Other
responses
Masculine
Feminine
Neuter
93.5
92.4
65.0
(8.4)
(10.7)
(21.8)
2.6
1.5
16.1
3.9
5.0
18.3
0.0
1.1
0.6
Coding.
Responses were coded as follows:
expected ending (-a or -u for masculines, -i/-y for feminines, and -a
for neuters);
gender errors (e.g., feminine ending with a masculine or neuter
noun);
no change (i.e., nominative);
other (no response; a different case or plural inflection).
Results and discussion
The descriptive statistics summarising performance according to gender
are given in Table 4. The number of expected responses for masculine
nouns was about the same as for feminine nouns—slightly higher, in fact.
Performance on the neuter inflection, on the other hand, was considerably
poorer than on the masculine (Wilcoxon signed ranks: z ¼ 6.3, N ¼ 60,
p 5 .001, two-tailed) or feminine inflection (z ¼ 6.0, N ¼ 60, p 5 .001,
two-tailed).4,5
A closer scrutiny of the responses to the masculine items reveals that
both of the masculine endings were used productively, with -a being used
46.9% and -u 46.6% of the time. Furthermore, all nouns were sometimes
inflected with -a and sometimes with -u, confirming that both endings are
phonologically unrestricted. Graź, the word which got the most -a
responses, was inflected with -u by 9 participants; and 14 participants
used -a with kramost, the least ‘-u-friendly’ word.
4
As explained in the Method section, there were twice as many masculine items as
feminines, and four times as many masculines as neuters, and hence the observed differences
could be partially attributable to the fact that the masculine and feminine scores are more
fine-grained than the neuter score. To check for this possibility, six neuter and six feminine
words were randomly selected from each participants’ responses and a second analysis was
carried out using the scores for these items. The results were almost identical to those
reported in the main text.
5
In all the experiments reported in this paper, assumptions of normality were violated in
at least one condition. Therefore, non-parametric tests have been used in all analyses. All
reported significance levels have been corrected for multiple comparisons.
240
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TABLE 5
Responses (%) to masculine nouns in the
object, place and substance conditions
Condition
Mean
SD
Object
Place
Substance
77.3
43.8
19.8
24.1
32.9
23.7
On the other hand, it is clear that the respondents were sensitive to the
phonological properties of the stem. Since the two endings are in
complementary distribution, one can measure sensitivity to the contrast
by differences in the number of responses with either ending. In the
following discussion, I will use the number of -a responses. Participants
supplied the -a ending with the four words ending in consonants strongly
associated with -a 63.5% of the time (SD ¼ 23.7%); the corresponding
figure for the words ending in consonants strongly associated with -u was
25.0% (SD ¼ 26.0%). The difference is highly significant (Wilcoxon signed
ranks: z ¼ 6.0, N ¼ 60, p 5 .001, two-tailed).
We now turn to participants’ sensitivity to the semantic factors
governing the choice of masculine ending. The means and standard
deviations for the object, place, and substance conditions are given in
Table 5. The Friedman test revealed that the effect of semantics was highly
significant (w2 ¼ 87.0, df ¼ 2, p 5 .001). Further analysis showed that there
were significantly more -a responses in the object condition than in the
place condition (Wilcoxon signed ranks test: z ¼ 6.0, p 5 .001, two-tailed)
and significantly more -a responses in the place condition than in the
substance condition (z ¼ 4.9, p 5 .001, two-tailed).
We can conclude, then, that regularity in the technical sense of the dual
mechanism theory is not a good predictor of productivity. Performance on
the irregular masculine inflection was indistinguishable from performance
on the regular feminine, while there was a very large difference in
performance on the two regular inflections, with the neuter ending being
supplied significantly less often than the feminine ending. (A possible
explanation for this discrepancy will be proposed in the general discussion
at the end of this section.) It is also clear that Polish speakers are sensitive
to both the semantic and the phonological factors affecting the choice of
masculine ending, confirming that the latter are irregular in the technical
sense of the dual mechanism theory.
STUDY 2: ACQUISITION OF THE GENITIVE
We have seen that Polish adults freely generalise both of the masculine
endings to novel nouns. Thus, the adult data are at odds with a central
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
241
claim of the dual mechanism theory: namely, that irregular inflections are
less productive (in the psychological sense) than regular inflections. In this
section, we turn to child language data. The acquisition of the genitive
inflection is potentially an even better testing ground for single and dual
mechanism approaches, since they make different predictions not just
about productivity, but also about the course of development and the type
of errors that children make.
According to schema theory, learners first extract low-level schemas by
noting local similarities between stored exemplars; they may then
generalise over these low-level schemas to form more abstract representations. One of the most important factors affecting generalisation is
frequency, especially type frequency: inflections applying to large classes
are learned earlier than inflections applying to smaller classes. Regularity
as such has relatively little impact on ease or speed of acquisition, since
both regulars and irregulars rely on the same mental mechanism. It may,
however, affect error rates, which are likely to be higher in irregular
systems, where there is more scope for error.
The three genitive endings differ considerably in terms of frequency in
the input (Table 6). The masculine -a and the feminine ending are both
quite frequent (they apply to 36% and 43% respectively of the nouns in
the language addressed to young children), while -u and the neuter -a
apply to fairly small classes of nouns (9% and 12% respectively; note,
however, that these proportions are different in the adult lexicon). Thus, if
schema theory is correct, the two frequent endings (masculine -a and
feminine -i/-y) should emerge at roughly the same time and develop at the
same rate, while the neuter -a and the masculine -u, which apply to smaller
classes of nouns, should be acquired somewhat later. One would also
expect error rates to be highest on inanimate masculine nouns (since this is
the most irregular part of the system), with -a, the more frequent ending,
being overgeneralised more often than -u.
TABLE 6
Frequency of the genitive singular endings
Ending
% nouns
in inputa
% nouns in
adult lexiconb
MASC -a
MASC -u
FEM
NEUT
36
9
43
12
20
21
34
25
a
Inka corpus (Smoczyńska, 1998). b Calculated
from data given in Tokarski and Saloni (2002).
242
DA
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According to the dual mechanism theory, on the other hand, learners
expect to find a default for every category and identify it by noting that a
particular inflection applies in ‘one or two’ of the default circumstances
listed in Table 1 (Marcus et al., 1995: 245); once they have identified the
default inflection, they apply it across the board to all new words. Marcus
et al. do not specify which ‘one or two’ of the default circumstances act as
the triggering context, which makes it difficult to derive specific predictions
regarding acquisition. However, whichever circumstance has this privileged status, Polish children will necessarily encounter some genitive
ending in it, and hence could easily misconstrue it as the default and apply
it to all new nouns. For example, if truncations were the telltale context,
Polish children would conclude that -a is the default ending, since most
truncations take -a; whereas if learners were to consider the endings used
with acronyms, they would conclude that -u is the default, since acronyms,
if they decline at all, take -u (Table 3). If children misconstrued one of the
endings as the default, they should consistently overgeneralise that ending,
and, because the system is quite irregular, we would expect overgeneralisation errors to occur quite frequently.
However, it is also possible that children are able to identify systems
without a default, and rely on associative memory alone when confronted
with such a system. In this case, comparing the acquisition of the part of
the system which lacks a default (the genitive singular of masculine nouns)
with the acquisition of the parts of the system which do have one (the
feminine and neuter inflections) would allow us to establish the degree to
which being able to rely on symbolic rules helps the learner. If the dual
mechanism theory is correct, we would expect to find clear differences
between the acquisition of the masculine inflection on the one hand and
the feminine and neuter inflections on the other—specifically, the
masculine inflections should be acquired later than the feminine and
neuter inflections, and the pattern of acquisition should be different
(gradual increase in marking rates for masculines, sharp rise for feminines
and neuters). We would also expect frequent overgeneralisation of the
regular feminine and neuter endings. Interpreting this prediction is
somewhat complicated by the fact that -a is the regular ending for neuters
as well as an irregular ending for masculines; but it is clear that there
should be more -i/-y errors than -u errors.
Method
The following analysis is based on spontaneous speech data from four of
the ‘Kraków children’, Basia, Inka, Jaś, and Kasia (see Smoczyńska, 1998).
The speech samples were collected in home settings, primarily by the
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
243
mothers, as part of a project headed by Stefan Szuman, and digitised and
tagged by Magdalena Smoczyńska. The data analysed here span the period
from the emergence of the genitive until age 3;10 (Kasia) or 4;11 (the other
three children). This part of the corpus comprises approximately 250 000
child words, including 8200 grammatical contexts which require the
genitive, of which 7918 contain an explicitly marked genitive singular form.
Since the corpus is coded for obligatory contexts, i.e., grammatical
contexts which require a particular form, it is possible to automatically
extract not just child utterances containing genitive forms, but also
utterances in which the child should have used the genitive. This was
accomplished using CLAN software (MacWhinney, 2000); all subsequent
analyses were performed manually. All child forms were classified as either
correct or incorrect; errors were further coded as zero marking (use of the
citation form, i.e., the nominative, in a genitive context), overgeneralisations (use of an incorrect genitive ending), and other (use of the incorrect
form of the stem, use of another case, or, very rarely, a stem without an
ending).
Results
In what follows, I first summarise the error data, which address the
question of whether or not the children can be said to have a default
ending for masculine nouns (that is to say, whether there is a single ending
which they apply consistently to all new nouns) and whether regular
endings are always overgeneralised more frequently than irregular
endings. I will then undertake an analysis of the rate and ‘shape’ of
development of all genitive singular inflections in order to determine
whether there is a developmental advantage for systems with a default.
As we can see from the figures in Table 7, the children overgeneralised
all three endings, although overgeneralisation rates were fairly low
(0–2.2%). The feminine ending was the least likely to be overgeneralised;
and -a was overgeneralised more frequently than -u. However, the
difference in the frequency of -a and -u errors is small when compared with
the vast differences in the frequency of regularisation and irregularisation
errors in English.6 Moreover, it disappears when frequency of overgeneralisations is calculated in relative terms, i.e., as the ratio of the
number of OG errors with a particular affix to the total number of uses of
6
According to Xu and Pinker (1995), English-speaking children irregularise past tense
forms in only about 0.19% of the opportunities, while regularisation rates reported in the
literature range from 4.2% (Marcus et al., 1995) to over 20% (Kuczaj, 1977). Thus, for the
English past tense, regularisations are at least 20 times, and possibly as much as 110 times
more frequent than irregularisations.
244
DA
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TABLE 7
Overgeneralisation errors
Tokens correct
-u
AOG ratea
Overgeneralisations
-y/-i
ROG rateb
Child
-a
-a
-u
-y/-i
-a
-u
-y/-i
-a
-u
-y/-i
Basia
Inka
Jaś
Kasia
Whole
corpus
387 118 422 2
1050 424 1187 9
1137 429 1264 39
465 119 638 17
3039 1090 3511 67
1
2
10
15
28
0
3
1
2
6
0.4
0.6
2.3
2.2
1.4
0.1
0.1
0.4
1.3
0.4
0.0
0.2
0.1
0.3
0.1
0.5
0.9
3.3
3.5
2.2
0.8
0.5
2.3
11.2
2.5
0.0
0.4
0.1
0.3
0.2
Note. Data in rows 1–3 are from: Da˛browska, E. (2001). Learning a morphological system
without a default: The Polish genitive. Journal of Child Language, 28, 566.
a
AOG rate (Absolute Overgeneralisation rate) ¼ OG errors as a percentage of the number
of noun tokens requiring other affixes b ROG rate (Relative Overgeneralisation rate) ¼ OG
errors as a percentage of the total number of tokens with a given affix.
that affix, rather than as the ratio of the number of OG errors to the
number of opportunities for making the errors, i.e., the number of noun
tokens which require other endings. This suggests that the difference in the
frequency of -a and -u errors is attributable to the differences in the
frequency of the two affixes. It is also worth noting that most errors
involved confusion of the two masculine endings; only 23% of overgeneralisations involved the use of gender-inappropriate endings. There is
no evidence, then, that children treated any one ending as the default.
Data on the age of emergence and acquisition of individual affixes is
summarized in Table 8. The children began producing explicitly marked
genitives between the ages of 16 and 18 months, and all four consistently
supplied the genitive in obligatory contexts by 24 months. The earliest
endings to be used productively, if we adopt the traditional criterion of use
with at least three different types, are the feminine -i/-y and the masculine
-a, with the former becoming productive somewhat earlier in two of the
children; the masculine -u and the neuter ending reached this criterion a
TABLE 8
Age of emergence and acquisition (in months) of the genitive endings
First noun type
Third noun type
90% correct
Child FEM MASC-a MASC-u NEUT FEM MASC-a MASC-u NEUT FEM MASC-a MASC-u NEUT
Basia
Inka
Jaś
Kasia
Mean
19
16
20
16
18
17
17
19
16
17
22
16
20
17
19
21
18
18
19
19
20
18
21
17
19
21
18
21
18
20
23
21
21
20
21
22
20
22
20
21
22
21
22
18
21
23
20
21
20
21
22
21
23
20
22
22
24
23
23
23
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
245
month or two later. This developmental sequence reflects the predictions
of schema theory and is incompatible with those of the dual mechanism
theory. However, this result could be a sampling artifact, since the more
frequent endings are likely to have been recorded earlier even if all
inflections appeared at the same time.
If we adopt a more stringent criterion of productivity (marking rates of
90% or above) the picture is somewhat less clear. Three children (Inka,
Jaś, and Kasia) acquired the feminine -i/-y and masculine -a earlier than
the neuter ending; but only one child (Jaś) consistently supplied both of
the frequent endings before -u. The fourth child, Basia, mastered all four
endings virtually simultaneously. Thus, the order of acquisition is
incompatible with the dual mechanism theory, since no child learned both
the feminine and the neuter endings before the masculine, but it is only
partially consistent with schema theory.
Even with a sizeable corpus like the one studied here, there are not
enough data to examine developmental changes in marking rates for
individual affixes; and because the affixes apply to classes of different sizes,
it is difficult to interpret growth rates expressed in terms of numbers of
types. Therefore in the following discussion of the ‘shape’ of development,
I will compare the acquisition of genitive marking in the two large classes,
the masculines and the feminines.
Figure 1 provides information about genitive marking rates according to
gender, beginning with the month in which the child produced at least 10
noun tokens of both genders in genitive contexts (if there were fewer than
10 tokens for one or both genders in a particular month, the relevant
numbers were collapsed with those for the following month). As we can
see, in two of the children (Inka and Jaś) masculine marking rates were
consistently higher than feminine marking rates, while Kasia had higher
marking rates on feminine nouns. In Basia, feminine marking rates were
higher in the beginning but then fell behind masculines. Thus, there is no
evidence for any consistent differences in the rate or pattern of acquisition
of the two inflections.
Note that the marking rates shown in Figure 1 are quite high, even in the
early months. This is because at the point at which these inflections appear,
the children are producing predominantly single-word utterances, where it
is difficult to identify obligatory contexts, and hence some zero marking
errors are likely to have gone unnoticed. Because of this, the figures for the
early months are probably overestimates of the children’s actual marking
rates. Thus, it is more revealing to examine the pattern of growth by
comparing the numbers of masculine and feminine noun types inflected for
the genitive. Since the number of masculine and feminine nouns in the
children’s productive vocabularies is approximately the same (44% and
41%, respectively), comparing the actual number of explicitly marked
246
Figure 1. Marking rates on masculine and feminine nouns.
247
Figure 2. Genitive noun types (cumulative).
248
DA
˛ BROWSKA
types will give us a good measure of the productivity of the relevant
inflections.
Information about the cumulative numbers of masculine and feminine
noun types which have been inflected for the genitive at least once is given
in Figure 2. As we can see from the graphs, the curves for each child have
very similar shapes: growth is fairly slow in the first two or three months
after emergence and then gradually accelerates. What is more, the actual
figures for masculine and feminine noun types are very similar at all stages
of development. Again, we must conclude that the ‘shape’ of development
is the same for both inflections.
Discussion
The data summarised above offer no support for either version of the dual
mechanism theory of acquisition. The children clearly did not treat any one
ending as the default for either masculine nouns or the noun class as a
whole; and there is no evidence of any differences in either the rate or
pattern of development of the regular feminines and irregular masculines:
both inflections were acquired very early (before age 2) and, it would seem,
in the same way.
There is some evidence that endings which apply to larger classes were
learned earlier, although the results are not completely clear-cut. The
neuter inflection was learned last, as predicted by schema theory; but the
masculine -u was sometimes mastered later and sometimes at the same
time as the more frequent endings. It is clear, however, that type frequency
is a much better predictor of the order of acquisition than regularity.
We have also seen that the children overgeneralised all three endings,
with -a and -u errors being considerably more frequent than errors
involving the feminine ending. While the difference in frequency could be
described as involving ‘‘an order of magnitude’’, it is in the opposite
direction to that predicted by the dual mechanism theory: it is the irregular
endings which are overgeneralised more often. This result is easily
explained in terms of schema theory. The feminine ending applies to a
well-defined class of nouns (namely, those which end in -a or -i in the
nominative), and hence it is rarely over-extended to other classes; for the
same reason, feminine nouns are rarely the target of overgeneralisation
errors—that is to say, learners rarely add masculine or neuter endings to
feminine nouns. On the other hand, the distribution of the masculine
endings is largely unpredictable, leaving more scope for error. However,
the errors tend to be confined to the masculine declension, since learners
discover quite early on that feminine nouns take -i/-y and neuter nouns, -a.
It is worth noting that of the two masculine endings, -a was
overgeneralised more frequently than -u. This is readily explained as a
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
249
type frequency effect, since -a is also considerably more frequent in the
children’s correct productions (Table 8). Thus, overgeneralisation errors
offer additional support for the claim that affixes which apply to larger
classes are more likely to be generalised.
GENERAL DISCUSSION OF THE GENITIVE DATA
We have seen that the irregular masculine inflections apply in many of the
‘‘default’’ circumstances enumerated in Marcus et al. (1995), are freely
generalisable to novel nouns, are acquired early, and follow the same
course of development as the regular feminine endings. While this does not
prove that symbolic rules do not exist, it does make them redundant, since
associative memory appears to do the job equally well.
Potentially even more problematic for the dual mechanism theory is the
finding that even adults appear to be only partially productive with the
regular neuter inflection. The respondents in the nonce word production
task supplied the expected ending only 65% of the time with neuter nouns,
and over 90% of the time with masculine and feminine nouns. This is a
surprising finding, since the neuter inflection is not only almost completely
regular, but also has a clearly defined domain of application—namely,
neuter nouns, which nearly always end in -o, -e, or -e˛ in the nominative.
So why are Polish speakers less productive with the neuter ending? The
answer, I suggest, lies in the peculiar structure of the neuter class. The vast
majority of neuter nouns belong to one of a few clusters defined by shared
affixes or other morphological criteria. Many neuter nouns are formed by
adding the suffix -nie or -cie to a verb root, e.g., pisanie ‘writing’, from the
verb pisać ‘to write’, picie ‘drinking’, from pić ‘to drink’. Nominalisations
with the affix -stwo and its variants -dztwo and -ctwo are also quite
common, e.g., zwycie˛stwo ‘victory’ from zwycie˛z_ ać ‘to win’, społeczeństwo
‘society’ from społeczny ‘social’, kierownictwo ‘management’ from
kierownik ‘manager’. Two other sizeable groups are diminutives in -ko
(e.g., kółko ‘little circle’ from koło ‘circle’) and borrowings ending in -um
such as muzeum ‘museum’ and archiwum ‘archives’. (Although -um is not
a true affix, it is a morphologically relevant marker, in that words ending in
-um do not inflect in the singular.)
As we can see from the figures in Table 9, these five large groups
comprise 61% of the most frequent neuter nouns, and 95% of neuter
nouns listed in one large contemporary dictionary.7 There are also several
7
The 95% figure is probably an overestimate, as Janik-Płocińska et al. appear to have
made the decision to list a -nie nominalisation for every verb in the dictionary, including
prefixed verbs. This results in a very high proportion of -nie nouns, many of which are
probably unattested.
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TABLE 9
Proportion of neuter nouns in the five largest clusters
Cluster
High frequencya
Mid frequencyb
Dictionaryc
-nie
-cie
-stwo/-dztwo/-ctwo
-ko
-um
Total in clusters
Rhymes with cluster
Other
36
8
12
1
4
61
11
28
51
8
11
9
5
84
4
12
83
5
6
1
0
95
1
4
a
100 most frequent neuter nouns listed in Kurcz, Lewicki, Sambor, Szafran, and
Worończak (1990) (mean frequency 228, range 50–462/500,000).
b
100 least frequent neuter nouns listed in Kurcz et al. (1990) (frequency 4/500,000).
c
Sample of 159 words selected randomly from Janik-Płocińska, Sas, and Turczyn (2001).
smaller groupings, and some of the remaining words rhyme with words
containing one of the five affixes. The masculine and feminine classes, of
course, also contain many morphologically complex words, but their
proportion is much smaller (25–50% of the words listed in Janik-Płocińska
et al., 2001).
Thus, the composition of the neuter class is very different from that of
the other two classes. A simple metaphor will help to visualise this
difference. Psycholinguists sometimes talk about an abstract space defined
by phonological properties with more or less densely populated
‘neighbourhoods’ (clusters of words sharing phonological features).
Elaborating this metaphor, we can think of the neuter class as consisting
of a few ‘cities’ (very densely populated neighbourhoods) separated by
large stretches of almost empty ‘countryside’—somewhat like Australia.
The masculine and feminine classes, on the other hand, are more like
Europe or Japan: although there are a number of towns and cities, the
surrounding countryside is also fairly densely populated.
Given these differences in the phonological heterogeneity of the gender
classes, schema theory offers a straightforward explanation for the
observed differences in performance. According to the theory, learners’
initial generalisations are low-level patterns extracted by noting local
similarities between specific items. Since words containing the same affix
are similar at both the phonological and semantic level, generalisations
over such words would seem particularly attractive to a mechanism which
looked for local similarities. Thus, learners would initially extract schemas
for action nominalisations ending in -nie, diminutives in -ko, and so on. At
a later point in development, they would normally generalise over these
local patterns, and thus arrive at more abstract schemas. This is probably
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
251
what happens with the schemas for masculine and feminine nouns.
However, in the neuter class, there may not be enough nouns outside the
clusters, or not enough clusters, to force the learner to generalise further.
This would result in an end state in which a speaker is able to inflect
unfamiliar words belonging to one of the clusters, but not words which do
fit any of the low-level schemas. Alternatively, a speaker may note that all
neuter nouns take the same case ending, but fail to routinely apply this
generalisation in production, preferring instead to rely on the more
entrenched low-level schemas; this, of course, would lead to similar
behavioural outcomes.
In the following section, I report on an experiment designed to test
this account by examining adult productivity with the dative inflection,
which, for reasons to be explained below, is a better test case than the
genitive.
THE DATIVE
The dative inflection
The dative case has four distinct markers in the singular: -i/-y, -e, -owi, and
-u. As in the genitive, the choice of ending is determined in the first
instance by gender and, if there is more than one ending associated with a
particular gender, by phonological and semantic properties of the noun.
Feminine nouns take either -i (or its variant -y) or -e, depending on
phonological features of the stem. The so-called ‘soft’ stems (those which
end in [l] or a consonant with the feature [ þ palatal]) take -i; ‘hardened’
stems (ending either in an unpalatalised affricate or a post-alveolar
fricative) take -y; and ‘hard’ stems (ending in any other consonant, i.e., a
stop, an unpalatalised nasal, a labial, dental, or velar fricative, [w] or [r])
take -e. The latter ending triggers obligatory changes in the final consonant
or consonants of the stem (see Tokarski, 2001 for details). The rules for
masculine nouns are much simpler: the vast majority take -owi; about 20
take the irregular ending -u; and a somewhat larger group (all of which end
in -a and refer to human males) take one of the feminine endings, with the
choice again depending on the phonological properties of the final
consonant of the stem. The neuter inflection is the simplest and most
regular part of the system, with nearly all nouns taking the -u ending. The
only exceptions are deadjectival nouns and indeclinable nouns; however,
both of these exceptions are shared with the other genders—that is to say,
all three genders contain nouns which decline like adjectives and nouns
which do not decline at all.
Two properties of the dative case make it a particularly suitable testing
ground for the schema-theory account outlined above. First, it is the only
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case in which the neuter ending is distinct from both the nominative and
from the endings characteristic of other genders (if we disregard the 20 or
so irregular masculines which take -u). This makes it possible to distinguish
correct applications of the dative inflection, overgeneralisations of masculine endings, and zero marking errors. Secondly, using the dative case
allows us to control for a possible confound, namely class size. As indicated
earlier, the neuter class is relatively small, making up about 25% of the
noun vocabulary. Since there is considerable evidence suggesting that type
frequency is a major determinant of productivity, comparing neuters with
one of the larger classes would yield ambiguous results: we would have no
way of knowing whether any observed differences in productivity were due
to class structure or simply class size. However, in the dative case, the
feminine class is split up between two endings, and the number of nouns
which take -e (18%) is roughly the same as the number of nouns which
take the neuter ending.
Before spelling out the predictions of the two theories, we must establish
which of the four inflections are regular in the technical sense of the dual
mechanism theory. The distribution of dative endings in default
circumstances is summarised in Table 10. As we can see from the table,
all four endings occur freely in most of the relevant default contexts, which
suggests that all four are regular. This is not problematic for the theory,
since the domain of application of each ending can be formulated in
general terms (in contrast to the distribution of the genitive ending, which
is lexically specific): -owi is used with masculine nouns, -u with neuters,
-i/-y, with feminines whose stems end in a palatalised consonant, an
affricate, a post-alveolar fricative, or [l], and -e with all other feminines.
Nevertheless, the data in Table 10 considerably weaken three important
claims of the dual mechanism theory. First, they show that the criteria
given by Marcus et al. (1995) do not all pattern together crosslinguistically, since some circumstances require endings other than the
usual regular inflections. Second, since the domain of application of the
two feminine endings is defined partly in phonological terms, it follows that
default rules may be sensitive to phonological properties of the stem.
Third, the fact that unusual-sounding nouns do not inflect at all shows that
none of the inflections can be construed as applying ‘across-the-board’ to a
phonologically arbitrary class of stems. It is important to note that nouns
that do not inflect in the dative do not inflect in other cases either, so no
Polish case inflection is entirely insensitive to phonological properties of
the noun (Orzechowska, 1998).
It should be clear from the foregoing discussion that the dual mechanism
theory and schema theory make rather different predictions with regard to
Polish speakers’ ability to generate the dative form of unfamiliar words.
The dual mechanism theory predicts good performance on all three
253
-owi
-Ø
Low-frequency
words
Unusual-sounding
words
-owi
-emu
-owi
Word is
mentioned rather
than used
Proper names
Onomatopoeia
Ending
Circumstance
Chomski-emu
Darwin-owi (male names)
Mówiełeś, z_ e majstersztyk
to głupie słowo i nie
powinienam go uz_ ywać w
podaniu—ale dzie˛ki temu
majstersztykowi dostałam
prace˛! ‘You said that
majstersztyk
(‘masterpiece’) is a silly
word and I shouldn’t use
it in my application—but
thanks to this majstersztyk
I got the job!’
swahili, attaché, Delacroix
szańc-owi ‘bulwark’
tygl-owi ‘crucible’
Examples
Masculine
-ej
-Ø
-e
-i/-y
-Ø
-e
-i/-y
Ending
Chomski-ej
Darwin (female names)
Mówiłeś, z_ e świta/kadź to
głupie słowo i nie
powinienam go uz_ ywać w
podaniu—ale dzie˛ki tej
świci-e/kadz-i dostałam
prace˛! ‘You said that
świta (‘retinue’)/kadź
(‘vat’) is a silly word and
I shouldn’t use it in my
application—but thanks
to this świta/kadź I got
the job!’
gnu, tse-tse, pepsi,
beri-beri
świci-e ‘retinue’
kadz-i ‘vat’
Examples
Feminine
TABLE 10
Dative endings in the relevant default conditions
etui, hobby, curry,
interview
Przysłuchiwałam sie˛ temu
tik-tak, tik-tak, az_
zasne˛łam. ‘I listened to
the tick-tock, tick-tock
until I fell asleep.’
Mówiłeś, z_ e jarzmo to
głupie słowo i nie
powinienam go uz_ ywać w
podaniu—ale dzie˛ki temu
jarzm-u dostałam prace˛!
‘You said that jarzmo
(‘yoke’) is a silly word
and I shouldn’t use it in
my application—but
thanks to this jarzmo I
got the job!’
-Ø
-u
jarzm-u ‘yoke’
kła˛cz-u ‘rhizome’
Examples
-Ø
-u
Ending
Neuter
254
-owi
-Ø
-owi
-Ø
Borrowings
Truncations
Acronyms
uczon-ej ‘scholar’ (from
uczona ‘learned’)
-e
-ej
zbior-owi ‘collection’
(from zbierać ‘to collect’)
uczon-emu ‘scholar’ (from
uczony ‘learned’)
-owi
-emu
(b) backformation
(c) nominalised
adjectives
-i/-y
walc-e ‘fight’
kamienic-y ‘tenement
house’
harówi-e ‘hard work’
(from harówka ‘hard
work’)
zielen-i ‘(the colour)
green’ (from zielony
‘green’)
-e
-i/-y
zszywacz-owi ‘stapler’
OJA Organizacja
Jedności Afrykańskiej
‘Organisation of African
Unity’
fizi-e (from fizyka
‘physics’)
biol-i (from biologia
‘biology’)
kanaści-e ‘canasta’
pizz-y, fobi-i ‘phobia’
whisky, kakadu
Examples
-owi
-Ø
-i/-y
spec-owi ‘specialist’
PCK (Polski Czerwony
Krzyz_ ‘Polish Red Cross’)
PAN-owi (Polska
Akademia Nauk ‘Polish
Academy of Sciences’)
-e
-e
-i/-y
-Ø
Ending
merc-owi ‘Mercedes’
pub-owi, drink-owi
guru, boa, dingo
Examples
Feminine
Derivation from a
different category:
(a) affixation
-owi
Ending
Circumstance
Masculine
TABLE 10 (continued)
-emu
ciachu ‘biscuit, cookie’
(from ciast-ko)
-u
Wysoki-emu (place name;
from wysokie ‘high’)
pisani-u ‘writing’ (from
pis- ‘write’)
-u
PLO (Polskie Linie
Oceaniczne ‘Polish Ocean
Lines’)
kilo, zoo, euro
-Ø
-Ø
lass-u ‘lasso’,
curry, rodeo
Examples
-u
-Ø
Ending
Neuter
255
Ending
-owi
-owi
-owi
Circumstance
Derivation via
different category
Derivation via
name
Bahuvrihi
compounds and
nominalised
phrases
-e
-i/-y
ka˛tomierz-owi ‘protractor’
(lit. ‘angle-measure’)
-e
-i/-y
-i/-y
-e
Ending
łamistrajk-owi ‘scab’ (lit.
‘break-strike’)
Hamlet-owi
Lir-owi
utleniacz-owi ‘oxidant’
(from tlen ‘oxygen’ via
utleniać ‘oxidize’)
Examples
Masculine
beztrosc-e ‘insouciance’
(from bez troski ‘without
worry’)
zagranic-y ‘foreign
countries’ (from za
granica˛ ‘over the border’)
Karenini-e
Barbarell-i
słomianc-e ‘straw
doormat’ (from słoma
‘straw’ via słomiany
‘straw [adj.]’)
ludzkośc-i ‘humanity’
(from ludź- ‘people’ via
ludzki ‘human’)
Examples
Feminine
TABLE 10 (continued)
poddasz-u ‘garret’ (from
pod dachem ‘under the
roof’)
wodogłowi-u
‘hydrocephalus’ (from
woda ‘water’ and głowa
‘head’)
sznurowadł-u ‘shoe-lace’
(from sznur ‘rope’ via
sznurować ‘to lace up’)
-u
-u
Examples
Ending
Neuter
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genders (since all three have default endings) and no differences between
morphologically simple and derived words (since the same abstract rule
would be applied in both cases). According to schema theory, on the other
hand, we should expect good performance on morphologically simple
masculines and feminines, since both of these classes contain large
numbers of morphologically simple words scattered throughout phonological space, but not on neuters, because the lexical structure of the neuter
class does not encourage generalisation. Speakers should, however,
perform well on neuter nonce words which fall into the privileged
neighbourhoods defined by the affixes discussed above. Furthermore, if
productivity is related to type frequency, they should perform better on
nonce words containing the highly productive -nie affix than on words with
less productive affixes like -stwo or -ko. Finally, schema theory
hypothesises that some generalisations that speakers extract may be too
weak to support production. If so, performance should improve when the
task involves merely recognising the correct form rather than producing it.
STUDY 3: ADULT PRODUCTIVITY WITH
DATIVE ENDINGS
Method
Participants. The participants were 92 undergraduates from two Polish
universities studying for degrees in foreign languages. All spoke standard
Polish as their first language.
Materials. The participants were given a pen-and-paper test containing
48 nonce words, including
8 morphologically simple masculine nouns;
8 morphologically simple feminine nouns (all belonging to the class
that takes -e);
8 morphologically simple neuter nouns;
8 neuter words with the diminutive suffix -ko;
8 neuter words with the nominalising suffix -nie;
8 fillers (4 masculine, 4 feminine).
All the nonce words were phonotactically legal and had gender-typical
endings; hence it was possible to predict gender from the phonological
form of the nominative. A list of all the nonce words used in the
experiment is given in Appendix B.
Each test item consisted of a context sentence which introduced the
nonce word (printed in bold face) in the nominative and gave a simple
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
257
description of the referent, followed by a test sentence containing a blank
in a grammatical context which required the dative—either the preposition
dzie˛ki ‘thanks to’ or the verb przyjrzeć sie˛/przygla˛dać sie˛ ‘to look
(carefully) at’.
(4) Famagon to świetne lekarstwo na przezie˛bienie. Dzie˛ki _________
od razu sie˛ lepiej poczujesz.
‘Famagon is an excellent medicine for colds. Thanks to _________,
you will feel better immediately.’
In addition to the definition and the test sentence, the 16 test items with
morphologically complex nonce words also contained clues about
morphological structure. In the case of diminutives, the relevant
information was conveyed by an additional clause indicating that the
-ko-suffixed word referred to a small exemplar of the type designated by
the previously defined word:
(5) Łuciero to przedmiot słuz_ a˛cy do pomiaru wilgotności, a łucierko to
po prostu małe łuciero. Dzie˛ki _________ wiemy, kiedy trzeba
wła˛czyć urza˛dzenia nawilz_ aja˛ce.
‘A łuciero is a device for measuring humidity, and a łucierko is
simply a small łuciero. Thanks to a _________ we know when to
turn on the humidifier.’
For action nominalisations, the clue about derivational structure was
provided by introducing the base verb in the infinitive:
.
(6) Zrewienie jest trudne i wymaga duz_ ego dos´wiadczenia. Jez_ eli chcesz
sie˛ nauczyć z_ rewić, najlepiej zapisz sie˛ na kurs. Osobiście wole˛
przygla
˛ dać sie˛ _________.
.
‘Zrewing is difficult and requires considerable experience. If you
.
want to learn to zrew, you should sign up for a course. Personally I
prefer watching _________.’
The neuter nouns were interspersed with feminine and masculine nouns
(MNFN etc.). There were three versions of the questionnaire with three
different orders, counterbalanced across participants.
Procedure. The participants were randomly allocated to either a
production or a forced-choice task. Those assigned to the production task
were asked to write the nonce word in the blank in the second sentence. In
the forced-choice task, participants were asked to pick out the correct form
from an array of four: the stem with the masculine ending, the stem with
the feminine ending, the stem with the neuter ending, and the nominative.
258
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All participants were given an example containing a real word. The test
took about 15 minutes to complete.
Coding. Responses were coded as follows:
expected ending (-owi for masculines, -e for feminines, -u for
neuters);
gender errors (e.g., a masculine or feminine ending with a neuter
noun);
no change (i.e., nominative);
other (no response; a different case or plural inflection; -i responses
for feminine nouns).
If a respondent gave two answers, only the first one was recorded.
Results
Although the study investigated the effects of two factors, gender and
morphological structure, the latter was varied only in neuter nouns.
Therefore, for ease of exposition, the results of the manipulation of gender
and morphological structure in the production task are reported
separately. This will be followed by a comparison of performance on the
production task and the forced-choice task.
Production task: Morphologically simple words. Performance on
morphologically simple masculine, feminine, and neuter words is
summarised in Table 11. A Friedman test with number of responses with
the expected ending as the dependent variable showed a significant effect
of gender (w2 ¼ 74.3, df ¼ 2, p 5 .001). Further analysis revealed that, as
predicted, performance on masculine nouns was significantly better than
on neuter nouns (Wilcoxon signed ranks: z ¼ 5.6, N ¼ 46, p 5 .001, twotailed), and performance on feminine nouns was significantly better than
on neuter nouns (z ¼ 5.9, p 5 .001, two-tailed). Surprisingly, performance
TABLE 11
Performance on morphologically simple words in the production task (%)
Gender
Expected
responses
(SD)
Wrong
gender
No
change
Other
MASC
FEM
NEUT
89.1
97.6
46.7
(16.6)
(6.2)
(23.0)
9.5
1.9
41.0
1.1
0.0
9.8
0.3
0.5
2.4
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
259
on feminines was significantly better than on masculine nouns, although
the effect was much smaller (z ¼ 3.3, p ¼ .003, two-tailed).
It is worth noting that nearly all gender-inappropriate responses
involved overgeneralisation of the masculine -owi ending (73 instances)
or the feminine -e (118 instances); there were only two instances of -u
overgeneralisations, accounting for just 1% of the gender errors.
These results suggest that adult native speakers of Polish either have not
formed a generalisation about neuter nouns, or else the generalisation is
too weak to be reliably used in production. This conclusion is confirmed by
a more detailed analysis of individual participants’ responses to neuter
nouns, which turned out to be extremely inconsistent, with the same
respondent sometimes using the neuter ending, sometimes the feminine
ending, and sometimes leaving the noun uninflected. The mean number of
different response types per participant was 3.3 in the neuter condition and
1.5 and 1.2 in the masculine and feminine conditions respectively. The
difference is relatively large (Wilcoxon signed ranks test: z ¼ 5.7 for the
masculine v. neuter condition and 5.9 for the feminine v. neuter conditions,
N ¼ 46) and highly significant (p 5 .001).
Production task: morphologically complex words. Another Friedman
test comparing performance in the three neuter conditions revealed a
significant effect of morphological type (w2 ¼ 67.1, df ¼ 2, p 5 .001). The
Wilcoxon signed ranks test showed that performance in the nominalisation
and the diminutive conditions was significantly better than in the simplex
condition, although the difference was considerably larger in the former
case (z ¼ 5.9, N ¼ 46, p 5 .001) than in the latter (z ¼ 2.4, N ¼ 46, p ¼
.04). The difference between the nominalisation and the diminutive
condition was also highly significant (z ¼ 5.5, N ¼ 46, p 5 .001). The
details of performance on morphologically complex words and the baseline
simplex condition, converted into percentages, are given in Table 12. The
mean number of different responses per participant was 2.2 for diminutives
TABLE 12
Performance on simplex neuters, diminutives and nominalisations (%)
Condition
Expected
(SD)
Gender
errors
No
change
Other
Simplex
Diminutives
Nominalisations
46.7
56.3
98.4
(23.0)
(32.3)
(6.8)
41.0
43.0
0.3
9.8
0.3
0.5
2.4
1.1
0.8
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DA
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and 1.1 for nominalisations, both significantly lower than the corresponding figure in the simplex condition (3.3; p 5 .001).
Forced choice task. Performance on the forced-choice task is summarised in Table 13. The Friedman test indicated that the number of times
that participants used the expected (i.e., gender-appropriate) ending
differed significantly between conditions (w2 ¼ 108.4, df ¼ 4, p 5 .001),
and further analysis (Wilcoxon signed ranks) confirmed that the
differences were in the predicted direction: that is to say, performance
on simplex neuters was significantly worse than in all other conditions, and
performance on diminutives was not as good as on -nie nominalisations
(p 5 .001 for all comparisons). Thus, the forced-choice part of the study
replicated the general results discussed above.
We now turn to a comparison of performance on the forced-choice and
production tasks. Note that it would be inappropriate to compare actual
scores on the two tasks, since we would have no way of knowing whether
any observed differences in performance were due to the fact that
recognising a correctly inflected form is easier than producing it or to the
fact that the forced-choice task is more structured—that is to say, there are
only three ways to be wrong on the forced-choice task, whereas there are
indefinitely many incorrect responses that one could give on the
production task (e.g., one could supply a stem inflected for another case,
or a plural ending, substitute a familiar word, etc.). To control for this, the
scores from the production study were recalculated as a ratio of correct
forms to the sum of correct forms, gender-inappropriate forms, and zero
responses—that is to say, all responses classified as ‘other’ were excluded
from the analysis.
The results of the comparison are presented graphically in Figure 3. As
we can see, changing the elicitation method made no difference in the
simplex feminine and neuter nominalisation conditions (where participants
performed at ceiling on both tasks) or in the simplex masculine condition.
TABLE 13
Performance in the forced-choice task (%)
Condition
Expected
(SD)
Gender
errors
No change
Simplex MASC
Simplex FEM
Simplex NEUT
Diminutives
Nominalisations
89.7
98.4
57.3
73.6
99.4
(15.0)
(4.3)
(27.8)
(29.8)
(2.6)
10.3
1.6
35.4
26.1
0.6
0.0
0.0
7.3
0.3
0.0
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
261
Figure 3. Expected responses (%) in production and forced choice tasks in the simplex
masculine (MASC-Sx), simplex feminine (FEM-Sx), simplex neuter (NEUT-Sx), neuter
diminutive (NEUT-ko), and neuter nominalisation (NEUT-nie) conditions.
Performance on the forced-choice task was somewhat better in the simplex
neuter condition, but the difference is not statistically significant (Mann–
Whitney U ¼ 843.5, p ¼ .091). The only significant improvement occurred
in the diminutive neuter condition (U ¼ 692.0, p ¼ .02).
These results suggest that speakers indeed have more knowledge about
neuter dative diminutives than they are able to demonstrate in the
production task. On the other hand, there is no strong evidence for an
overarching neuter dative schema, since the improvement in the simplex
neuter condition was modest and not statistically significant.
It is worth noting, however, that the findings reported above do not rule
out the possibility that some speakers may have a fully abstract neuter
schema. This is evident when we compare performance of the highest- and
lowest-scoring participants in each group. Table 14 gives the mean scores
for the two tasks by quartile. As we can see, the difference in performance
TABLE 14
Performance on simplex neuters by quartile
Percentile
Production
Forced choice
Forced choice
—production
76–100
51–75
26–50
1–25
77
60
40
17
93
70
46
23
16
10
6
6
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on the production and forced choice task is greatest in the top quartile
(where performance on the forced-choice task approaches ceiling), and
smallest in the lowest quartile. Thus, the difference between the two
conditions is not attributable simply to scores being uniformly higher in the
force-choice task, but also to the fact that the highest-scoring participants
performed particularly well on the latter task, which may be due to the
availability of a general schema for neuters.
STUDY 4: THE DATIVE INFLECTION WITH
FAMILIAR NOUNS
All the results discussed so far involved nonce word stimuli. Given the
poor performance on morphologically simple neuters, the possibility arises
that the -u ending may be a historical artifact of little relevance to
speakers. Before we proceed with the discussion, therefore, it will be useful
to rule out this possibility by showing that speakers do in fact reliably
supply the neuter ending with ordinary words.
Method
Twenty adult native speakers of Polish were given a pen-and-paper test
consisting of 24 sentences with blanks in grammatical contexts which
required the dative case. Next to each blank was a noun in the nominative,
which participants were instructed to use in the appropriate form. The test
contained 12 morphologically simple neuter words and 12 fillers. Half of
the neuter words were relatively frequent (mean lemma frequency 107 per
500,000, mean dative frequency 2 per 500,000) and half were relatively
infrequent (estimated mean lemma frequency 3 per 500,000; estimated
dative frequency less than 1 per 500,000; see Appendix C for further
details).
Results
Respondents supplied the expected ending 99% of the time with highfrequency neuters and 89% with low-frequency neuters. The difference
was statistically significant (Wilcoxon signed ranks: z ¼ 2.2, N ¼ 20, p ¼
.026, two-tailed). Thus, Polish speakers reliably supply the -u ending with
familiar neuters, and perform slightly better on high-frequency nouns.
GENERAL DISCUSSION OF THE DATIVE DATA
We have seen that adult native speakers of Polish reliably supplied the
expected ending with morphologically simple masculine and feminine
nouns and neuter -nie nominalisations, but performed very poorly on
simplex neuters, showing that they are not fully productive with the neuter
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
263
ending.8 These differences in productivity are difficult to accommodate in
the dual mechanism framework, since all three inflections are regular.
They are, however, easily explained in the schema theory account.
According to schema theory, learners initially extract low-level generalisations over clusters of similar words; more abstract generalisations are a
later development. Because of the peculiar structure of the neuter class,
with most words clustered in a few densely populated neighbourhoods,
learners do not progress beyond low-level schemas.
To explain all of the results, however, schema theory must also account
for the fact that speakers were able to supply the expected ending with
morphologically simple nonce words almost 50% of the time. Two distinct
possibilities come to mind here. First, it is possible that speakers have a
general schema as well as the low-level schemas mentioned above, but the
former is too weak to be reliably used in production. Alternatively,
speakers may only have local schemas, and rely on another, less reliable
mechanism (such as analogy) to inflect stems that cannot be subsumed
under local generalisations. The results reported here do not provide
conclusive evidence that would enable us to choose between these
hypotheses; and indeed, as indicated earlier, there may be individual
differences in this regard: it is possible that some speakers do have a
general schema in addition to local schemas, while others do not.
It is also evident that speakers have very specific knowledge about the
inflected forms of individual lexemes. Before learners can generalise, they
need something to generalise over: in other words, they must memorise a
number of exemplars of the relevant pattern. As pointed out by Langacker
(1991), there is no reason to suppose that the memorised words which
served as the basis for the generalisation are deleted from memory when
the generalisation is extracted. In a similar vein, there is no reason to
suppose that people stop memorising further exemplars after they have
abstracted the schema: after all, the necessary memory mechanisms are
still in place. Indeed, since it is easier to learn structured material, the
availability of the schema should facilitate further rote-learning. This view
is corroborated by the results of the real word study. As we have seen,
8
Performance on simplex neuters in the dative was even worse than in the genitive:
respondents supplied the expected ending only 47% of the time, whereas in the genitive
experiment, the corresponding figure was 65%. However, this may be attributable to the fact
that the genitive neuter ending, -a, is identical to one of the masculine endings. Thus, some of
the -a responses in the genitive experiment could have been overgeneralisations of the
masculine ending. It is interesting to note in this connection that in the dative experiment
respondents used the masculine ending with neuter nouns in 18% of the opportunities. If we
assume that speakers are equally likely to overgeneralise the masculine ending in both cases
and subtract 18% from the total number of -a responses to neuter nouns in the genitive
experiment, we get 47% – the same figure as in the dative experiment.
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performance on morphologically simple real words was much better than
performance on nonce words; and performance on high-frequency words
was better than performance on low frequency words. Both of these
findings suggest that the inflected forms of many familiar words are
retrieved from the lexicon as ready-made units.
The picture that emerges, then, is that of a relatively loosely organised
network in which word-specific representations co-exist with low-level
schemas of varying degrees of entrenchment.9 By traditional linguistic
standards, such a system is messy and redundant, which suggests that
speakers’ mental grammars (unlike linguistic theories) are shaped by
principles other than simplicity and elegance. It is worth noting in this
connection that there is also some purely linguistic evidence suggesting
that speakers normally rely on concrete schemas. As observed earlier,
unusual-sounding borrowings like guru, gnu, and etui do not inflect—not
just in the genitive and dative, but in all cases. This shows that none of the
schemas that speakers normally use in production applies to a set of stems
which is completely open phonologically. Other indeclinable borrowings
suggest that the productive schemas are quite specific. For example,
kamikadze and attaché also do not take any case endings, in spite of the
fact that there are many Polish nouns ending in -e in the nominative.
However, all the native words which end in -e are neuter, and kamikadze
9
Preference for low-level schemas may also explain the puzzling finding that respondents
performed better on feminine nouns than on masculines. As explained earlier, the distribution
of feminine endings in the dative case is determined by phonological factors: stems ending in
[l] or a consonant with the feature [ þ palatal] take -i; stems ending in postalveolar fricatives
or unpalatalised affricates take -y; and stems ending in stops, fricatives (except postalveolars),
unpalatalised nasals, [w], or [r] take -e. Although the choice of ending is predictable from the
final consonant of the stem, the sets of consonants associated with each ending do not form
natural classes. Thus, the distribution of each ending must be defined in terms of fairly specific
schemas: if the noun ends in a postalveolar fricative followed by -a, it takes -y in the dative, if
it ends in -la it takes -i, and so on. The schemas for the -e ending may be even more specific,
since it always triggers changes in the final consonant(s) of the stem: for example, nouns
ending in -ka [ka] in the nominative end in -ce [tse] in the dative, nouns ending in -ła [wa] in
the nominative end in -le [le] in the dative, nouns ending in -sna [sna] in the nominative end in
-śnie [ Æe] in the dative, and so on (see Tokarski, 2001, p. 78). Dative marking on masculine
nouns, on the other hand, is much simpler: they nearly always take the -owi ending, and, if
there are stem changes, they are shared with other cases (that is to say, a given stem will have
the same form in all oblique cases). What is more, the masculine ending applies to a large
class, and there are proportionally fewer morphologically complex nouns. All this leads to the
general schema becoming more entrenched, and could, paradoxically, result in more errors, if
speakers are indeed more proficient with low-level schemas.
If the above proposal is correct, then speakers’ knowledge about the dative feminine
inflection would be embodied in a network of low-level schemas similar to that for the neuter
inflection. The only difference would be that, because feminine nouns are distributed much
more evenly throughout phonological space, the low-level schemas would cover more or less
the whole ground.
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
265
and attaché are assigned masculine gender because they prototypically
refer to male beings; hence, none of the existing low-level schemas are
applicable. Similarly, pepsi and beri-beri inherit feminine gender from the
superordinate term, i.e., cola and choroba ‘illness’. In this case, there are a
number of native feminine nouns ending in -i, but they all refer to women,
and nearly all contain the suffix -yni. Consequently, these nouns, too, are
judged to be too dissimilar from the established schema and are left
uninflected. As a final example, consider the nouns nazi, pony, and husky,
which are all masculine. While there are native masculine nouns that end
in -i or -y, e.g., zbójnicki ‘a kind of folk dance’, uczony ‘scholar’, gajowy
‘forest ranger’, they are all transparently deadjectival (-cki, -ny, and -owy
are affixes used to derive adjectives from nouns and verbs, so all three
words involve derivation of a noun via an adjective). Thus again, these
nouns cannot be subsumed under any local schema and are left
uninflected.
The results reported above offer strong support for the schema theory
predictions about the role of local schemas in language processing. With
regard to the role of frequency, the evidence is more mixed. There is
evidence that frequency does play a role: in the real vocabulary, there are
many more nominalisations with -nie than -ko diminutives (Table 9), and,
as we have seen, performance on nonce nouns with -nie was much better
than performance on diminutives. On the other hand, it is clear that
frequency measured simply as the number of words which take a particular
affix cannot be the whole story. First, the neuter -u applies to
approximately the same number of nouns as the feminine -e—slightly
more, in fact—and yet the feminine ending is freely generalised to nonce
words while the neuter one is not. Second, speakers were more likely to
supply the expected ending with feminine nouns than with masculines, in
spite of the fact that the masculine ending -owi applies to more than twice
as many nouns as -e. Finally, the type frequency of neuter nouns with the
-nie suffix is necessarily lower than the type frequency of all neuter nouns,
so frequency alone cannot explain the difference in performance in the
nominalisation condition and the simplex condition.
Our earlier conclusions about the importance of local generalisations
may help to resolve this apparent paradox. If learners’ initial generalisations are local (i.e., if speakers initially generalise over phonologically
similar clusters of words which may also share semantic properties), then
what matters is the number of words in a particular cluster, not the overall
frequency of the ending. Hence, it is legitimate to compare local
generalisations over clusters of various sizes (e.g., -nie and -ko neuters),
since the corresponding schemas are at the same level of abstraction; but it
is probably inappropriate to appeal to type frequency when comparing
local and global generalisations. If the latter are indeed more difficult to
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extract, speakers need more experience before they reach the same level of
proficiency. Furthermore, at the moment it is not clear how to count the
nouns in clusters. If higher-level generalisations are generalisations over
clusters, then what matters may be the number of clusters rather than the
number of words in all the clusters.
Generally speaking, it seems that some work in the single-mechanism
framework (Marchman & Bates, 1994) overemphasises the role of
frequency. Frequency is only one of the determinants of productivity,
and phonological coherence is probably more important.
CONCLUSION
The dual mechanism theory proposed by Pinker, Marcus, and their
colleagues offers a convincing account of the English past tense and plural
inflection, where there are indeed strong dissociations between regular and
irregular patterns. These, however, may be attributable to the adventitious
properties of the English system of marking tense and number, which
exaggerate the differences between regulars and irregulars. In order to
evaluate the theory, therefore, it is necessary to consider data from other
languages. As pointed out in the introductory section, the evidence
provided by research on the German plural inflection and other crosslinguistic studies is far from conclusive. There is even less support for the
theory in the Polish data. Contrary to a central claim of the theory, default
circumstances do not pattern together in Polish, and irregular endings can
occur in most of them. Furthermore, all inflections, both regular and
irregular, appear to be sensitive to the phonological and/or semantic
properties of the noun, since noncanonical nouns do not inflect. In
acquisition, there is no evidence of any differences in either the rate or
pattern of development of the regular genitive feminine inflection and the
irregular masculine inflections (except that, contrary to the predictions of
the dual mechanism theory, there are more overgeneralisation errors
involving the latter). Most fatally, regularity is a poor predictor of
productivity in adults. Polish adults are only weakly productive with the
regular dative neuter inflection, but freely generalise the irregular
masculine endings to novel nouns.
It should be stressed that the results reported here are not necessarily
incompatible with other ‘dual route’ models such as Caramazza,
Laudanna, and Romani’s (1988) Augmented Addressed Morphology or
Schreuder and Baayen’s (1995) race model. Like the theory put forward by
Pinker and Marcus, these models state that there are two ways of
producing a morphologically complex form: it can be either assembled by
combining component morphemes or simply retrieved from memory.
However, neither Caramazza et al. nor Schreuder and Baayen equate the
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
267
two routes with regular and irregular morphology: they specifically allow
the direct access route to be used with regularly inflected forms
(particularly if they are high-frequency); and they do not necessarily rule
out the possibility that the parsing/assembly route is used with irregulars
(provided that they are productive and have a reasonably clear domain of
application).
Both of these theories are concerned with how information is
represented in the mental lexicon, and the two ‘routes’ correspond to
different ways of accessing stored information. This in sharp contrast to the
approach advocated by Pinker, Marcus, and their colleagues, who propose
an additional memory-independent mechanism—symbolic rules. The
question that was the main focus of this study is whether this additional
mechanism is necessary. Even the proponents of the dual mechanism
theory acknowledge that the memory system for irregulars is productive.
They argue, however, that it is productive only to a limited degree, so that
symbolic rules are necessary in order to give a complete account of human
ability to inflect words. The evidence reviewed here suggests that the
memory system is powerful enough to explain all that needs to be
explained. The fact that the genitive masculine inflections (which must be
regarded as irregular, since their choice depends on lexical properties of
the stem) are as productive and as easy to acquire as the feminine ending
makes symbolic rules redundant: it seems that associative memory can do
the job equally adequately. In other words, the same mental mechanism—
schemas of varying degrees of generality—can account for speakers’ ability
to supply the correct inflected form of familiar stems, whether regular or
irregular, as well as their ability to inflect new words.10
Manuscript received November 2002
Revised manuscript received July 2003
10
It is also possible to interpret the similarities between regular and irregular processes
reported here as evidence for the ubiquity of rules rather than memory-based schemas—in
other words, one could maintain that it is ‘rules all the way down’ rather than ‘associative
patterns all the way down’. Whether or not this conclusion is warranted depends on how one
defines rules and schemas—in other words, it is a terminological issue rather than a
substantive one. If a ‘rule’ is simply any generalisation that learners extract from the language
they hear, then we can indeed say that all productive use involves the application of a rule.
However, the term is usually used to refer to something rather more specific than this. Rules
are often thought of as fully general (or, more precisely, formulated at the most general level
compatible with the data), insensitive to frequency and phonological similarity effects, and
independent from the memory system. This view of rules is incompatible with the evidence
presented here, which suggests that (i) speakers extract patterns at different levels of
generality, and appear to prefer low-level patterns; and (ii) the nature the generalisations that
speakers extract is determined by type frequency and phonological heterogeneity of the class
to which it applies.
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APPENDIX A
Nonce words used in Study 1
Words labelled with (a) and (u) end in consonants or consonant clusters strongly associated
with that ending.
Gender
List 1
List 2
List 3
Feminines
szmargona
kruma
filinga
nyra
patala
uka
karada
garbodzia
anbasa
glamisia
śruna
oronica
Masculines
grumb
figoń (a)
malirach
ćwiarg
ekrod (u)
kramost (u)
gamal
piastorgaj
oktom (u)
czapic (a)
purk
flors (a)
ścigor
famagon
grotocz
galiro_z
sor
syragin
supang
progonys
klum (u)
graź (a)
milaj
bukarsz
Neuters
orocino
somie
folgo
orowie
glorko
oposie
RULES OR SCHEMAS? EVIDENCE FROM POLISH
271
APPENDIX B
Nonce words used in Study 3
Masculine
simplex
Feminine
simplex
Neuter
simplex
Neuter
diminutive
Neuter
gerund
ekrod
ścigor
famagon
syragin
flors
supang
czapic
ćwiarg
anbasa
patala
filinga
nyrda
garyta
kruma
oronica
śruna
folgo
orocino
somie
orowie
klimo
żulo
świele
mrosie
murewko
suremko
grułko
łucierko
żurbko
chruńko
krucinko
dziutko
smuntowanie
szawocenie
rakszenie
kloskowanie
śrydzenie
żrewienie
prodoczenie
opotuwianie
APPENDIX C
Words used in Study 4
The frequency information is based on Kurcz, Lewicki, Sambor, Szafran, and Worończak
(1990), who list all words which occurred at least four times in their 500,000-word corpus of
written Polish. Words with the entry ‘ 5 4’ in the lemma column were not listed and hence
their exact frequency is unknown
Frequency
Word
English
translation
Lemma
frequency
Dative
frequency
Low
bydle˛
cygaro
fiasko
futro
koryto
piskle˛
Mean
beast
cigar
fiasco
fur
trough
chick
54
54
54
54
54
55
between
2.8 and 3.8
51
51
51
51
51
51
51
High
prawo
szcze˛ście
zero
słońce
serce
niebo
Mean
right, law
luck
zero
sun
heart
sky, heaven
249
67
76
93
94
65
107
52
52
52
53
52
51
52