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As the papers in this volume make clear, categorial shift is often not categorical. Category-altering processes do not necessarily shift all morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of their input simultaneously or completely (Noonan, 1985/2007; Mackenzie, 1987; Lehmann, 1988; Givón 1990, 2001, 2011; Croft, 1991; Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 1993, 2003; Cristofaro, 2003; Malchukov, 2004, 2006; Nikolaeva, 2007; Mithun, 2016a). A number of factors can affect the output of such processes, their course of development, and their consequences for the shapes of grammars. Here each of these issues is examined in turn. First is the identification of the lexical categories involved in the shifts: the structural level at which they take place (roots, bases, stems, words) and the criteria by which they are defined (morphological, syntactic, semantic). Also pertinent here is the nature of the shift processes, in particular, conversion. Second are some recurring trajectories of development of shift processes involving their extension to larger domains of structure. Third are some effects categorial shift processes can have on other aspects of grammar. • Shifting categories may be roots, bases, stems, words, or phrases. • Criteria for categorization may be morphological and/or syntactic. • Conversion (or zero derivation) may take place at any level. • Shifts may be extended over time from lower to higher levels of structure. • Shifts may trigger other grammatical developments, i.e. new categories and paradigms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to study possible differences between the processing of inflectional vs. derivational morphology in Spanish word recognition using electrophysiological measures. A lexical decision task to target words preceded by morphological-related (or unrelated) primes was used. The orthographic and phonological overlap and the grammatical class for the two experimental conditions were exactly the same. Examples of the related conditions were, for inflection, NIÑO-NIÑA (“girl”-“boy”), and for derivation, RAMO-RAMA (“bunch”-“branch”). These conditions were compared with unrelated pairs without orthographic, phonological or semantic relationships. An attenuation of the N-400 component was found for both related conditions from 300ms until 450ms (until 500ms for inflections only). In addition, different locations were suggested by the source analysis. These findings are consistent with accounts that argue for differences between the processing of inflections and derivations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Event-related potentials (ERP) were used to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of inflectional and derivational morphology. The participants were presented with visual sentences containing critical words in which either inflectional, derivational or both rules (combined violation) of Finnish were violated. Inflectional anomalies violated a number agreement of a noun with a previous auxiliary word. Derivational violations included a word-internal selectional restriction violation, i.e., a root and suffix category violation. Combined violations contained both a number and a category violation. The phonemic length of the critical words was controlled. Inflectional violations elicited a bilateral negative effect in the 450–550 ms time window, which was interpreted as an anterior negativity (AN) effect. Inflectional violations also elicited a late positivity (P600) effect. Derivational violations elicited an N400-like negativity effect, followed by the P600 effect. The P600 effects in the derivational and inflectional violation conditions summated linearly in the combined violation condition. The results are discussed with respect to the hypothesis that inflectional and derivational processes are independent and elicited in parallel in the online language comprehension. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this study we introduce an information-theoretical formulation of the emergence of type- and token-based effects in morphological processing. We describe a probabilistic measure of the informational complexity of a word, its information residual, which encompasses the combined influences of the amount of information contained by the target word and the amount of information carried by its nested morphological paradigms. By means of re-analyses of previously published data on Dutch words we show that the information residual outperforms the combination of traditional token- and type-based counts in predicting response latencies in visual lexical decision, and at the same time provides a parsimonious account of inflectional, derivational, and compounding processes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]