Multifunctionality in morphology

The central problem that the project Multifunctionality in morphology aims to address is how to adequately account for multifunctional affixes: derivational affixes that have little or no invariant meaning and can appear in different, seemingly unrelated contexts in which their interpretation is enriched. The project focuses primarily on Slovenian, taking advantage of the initial insights into multifunctionality, which show that Slovenian is an ideal dataset to investigate these types of affixes as they are found across all major categories of the language. The project consists of three components. The empirical component of the project is to prepare annotated databases of the derivational structure of nouns, adjectives and adverbs in Slovenian and supplement the existing database of verbs. This will serve as a basis for the descriptive component during which a reassessment of the existing descriptions of Slovenian derivational morphology will be prepared (central questions being which affixes in these descriptions should be further decomposed and which affixes can be reanalyzed as multifunctional). Most importantly, in this component we will identify and describe multifunctional affixes that appear (a) within a single category, (b) in different categories and (c) in both derivation and inflection. The crucial component of the project is the theoretical one. To develop a general account of multifunctionality, the project takes Distributed Morphology as a starting point, and benefits from the identified multifunctional affixes and their prosodic signatures in Slovenian observed in the existing literature. Equipped with these tools and the empirical insight, the project will bring a unified model of multifunctionality that will answer the questions what kind of elements multifunctional affixes are (the working hypothesis being that they are bound roots), where they are merged and how they are categorized. In doing so, the project will make significant contributions to questions that are currently open within the currently dominant syntaxocentric frameworks (in addition to the central analysis of multifunctional morphemes, an insight into the nature of roots, such as their categorization, selectional properties, ability to project, interpretation etc.). The project will also compare different frameworks in how well they account for the considered phenomena, identify the best suited approach and fill in the relevant gaps in it regarding the topic of the project.