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The relation between morphology and spelling is an important source of evidence for theories of linguistic processing. In particular, spelling errors can help us assess the role of morphological structure in language users' mental representations of words in authentic texts. Previous research suggests that some morphological units are more prone to spelling errors than others, partly depending on the degree to which they are perceived as separate units. In this paper, we want to test this hypothesis by exploring graphemic variation in a collection of 1,667 German school-exit exams. Specifically, we code the spelling errors for their morphological structure. We can show that inflectional suffixes show a much higher probability of final letter omissions compared to final stems or derivational suffixes. We also find tentative evidence that case markers are more often affected by omissions than number markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article provides a case study of the forms corresponding to the meaning 'small' in Swedish, which exhibit a number-based suppletive alternation: descriptively, liten appears in the singular while små appears in the plural. We demonstrate that this alternation is best treated as contextual allomorphy, and provide six arguments that favor this account over a plausible alternative, according to which the forms realize two distinct roots with different lexical semantics. We situate a Distributed Morphology-based account of the alternation within the broader context of inflection in the language, and address challenges and complications to the allomorphy approach from outside of the root's 'typical' adjectival contexts, including adverbs and compounding. This study supports the existence of root suppletion conditioned by inflectional features, and has implications for our understanding of locality conditions on root suppletion as well as contextual allomorphy more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(N , γ) -hyperelliptic semigroups were introduced by Fernando Torres to encapsulate the most salient properties of Weierstrass semigroups associated with totally ramified points of N-fold covers of curves of genus γ . Torres characterized (2 , γ) -hyperelliptic semigroups of maximal weight whenever their genus is large relative to γ . Here we do the same for (3 , γ) -hyperelliptic semigroups, and we formulate a conjecture about the general case whenever N ≥ 3 is prime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages, grammatical gender is an inherent property of nouns and, as such, forms a basis for agreement relations between nouns and their dependent elements (e.g., adjectives, determiners). Mental gender representation is traditionally assumed to be categorial, with categorial gender nodes corresponding to the given gender specifications in a certain language (e.g., [masculine], [feminine], [neuter] in German). In alternative models, inspired by accounts put forward in theoretical linguistics, it has been argued that mental gender representations consist of sets of binary features which might be fully specified (e.g., masc [+ m, − f], fem [− m, + f], neut [− m, − f]) or underspecified (e.g., masc [+ m], fem [+ f], neut [] or masc [+ m, − f], fem [], neut [− f]). We have conducted two experiments to test these controversial accounts. Native speakers of German were asked to decide on the (un-)grammaticality of gender agreement of visually presented combinations of I) definite determiners and nouns, and II) anaphoric personal pronouns and nouns in an implicit nominative singular setting. Overall, agreement violations with neuter das / es increased processing costs compared to violations with die / sie or der / er for masculine or feminine target nouns, respectively. The observed pattern poses a challenge for models involving categorial gender representation. Rather, it is consistent with feature-based representations of grammatical gender in the mental lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are built up during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents. When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to the irregular, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular inflected words cannot co-determine the phonetic realization of these inflected words. This study shows that the stem vowels of regular English inflected verb forms that are more frequent in their paradigm are produced with more enhanced articulatory gestures in the midsaggital plane, challenging compositional models of lexical processing. The effect of paradigmatic probability dovetails well with the Paradigmatic Enhancement Hypothesis and is consistent with a growing body of research indicating that the whole is more than its parts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this 3-year longitudinal study was to examine the role of three morphological awareness (MA) aspects (inflectional, derivational, and lexical compounding) in the spelling of specific morphemes. Two hundred and fifteen Greek children were followed from kindergarten (K) to grade 2 (G2). In K and grade 1 (G1) they were tested on measures of morphological awareness, letter knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and general cognitive ability. At the end of G1 and G2, they were also tested on spelling of (a) inflectional suffixes in words and pseudowords, (b) familiar stems in simple words, and (c) familiar simple stems in low frequency derived words and in pseudowords with existing derived morphemes. The results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that the derivational aspect of MA in K and the lexical compounding aspect of MA in G1 predicted uniquely the spelling of inflectional suffixes in both words and pseudowords in G1 and G2 respectively. In addition, the lexical compounding aspect of MA in K and G1 predicted the spelling of familiar stems in simple words and the spelling of familiar simple stems in low frequency derived words in G1 and G2 respectively. Inflectional aspect of MA did not predict later performance in any spelling measure. These findings speak to the importance of early MA skills in spelling of specific morphemes and provide supportive evidence to those who suggest that morphological knowledge is part of children's repertoire of strategies employed in spelling, even at the first stages of learning to spell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the Levantine Arabic variety, this paper investigates the paradigmatic asymmetry observed in the inflection of sound verbs whose stems contain three or four consonants and non-sound verbs whose stems contain only two consonantal realizations. It provides a unified account of verb inflection within Optimality Theory and the theory of paradigms. The target of investigation is the allomorphic variation in the non-third person markers which appear in their basic allomorph in inflected sound verbs, but appear in their augmented éeC form in the paradigms of non-sound (weak and geminate) verbs. Previous analyses have viewed this paradigmatic inconsistency as arbitrary exceptions requiring highly specific rules or allomorphic postulates, thus treating the sound and non-sound verb systems as two distinct types. This paper shows that the interaction of independently-motivated markedness constraints with paradigmatic uniformity constraints is capable of producing these allomorphic effects without recourse to ad-hoc rules or arbitrary allomorphic statements. The two verbal types are therefore treated as a unified system. The Optimality-theoretic account of affix allomorphy accords a prime role to the markedness constraint optimizing binarity of prosodic constituents, and rhythmic and prosodic uniformity within and across inflectional subparadigms the interaction of which explains the emergence of the augmented allomorph of the affix. The paper advocates an expanded definition of paradigms allowing grammatical categories such as gender, person, case, etc. to form subparadigms subject to what I refer to as paradigm-to-paradigm faithfulness requiring paradigmatic identity within a grammatical category regardless of verb type. Hollow verbs which present an interesting challenge to the analysis are discussed and accounted for by highlighting the role of Anchor in differentiating between hollow verbs and other non-sound verbs. The paper ends with a comparison with the contrast analysis of Broselow (2008) demonstrating on empirical grounds the superiority of the uniformity against the contrast account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we address the usefulness of the notion of a paradigm in the context of derivational morphology. We first define a notion of paradigmatic system that extends conservatively the notion as it is used in inflection so as to be applicable to collections of structured families of derivationally-related words. We then build on this definition in an empirical quantitative study of derivational families of verbs in French. We apply information-theoretic measures of predictability initially designed by Ackerman et al. (2009) in the context of inflection. We conclude that key quantitative properties are common to inflectional and derivational paradigmatic systems, and hence that (partial) paradigms are an important ingredient of the study of derivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paradigm is a notion closely related to morphology, and more particularly to inflection. However, the paradigmatic approach is gaining in popularity in derivational morphology even if many consider paradigms to be unfit for derivation because of the gaps and mismatches that occur with derivational processes. This results in a lack of consensus on the relevance of derivational paradigms and in a lack of a clear definition of this notion. Therefore, derivational paradigms remain mostly unknown objects that should be studied in greater depth. This is the very goal of the special issue introduced by this paper, namely to define paradigms for derivation, illustrate them with various examples from different languages, and evaluate them in order to assess their psycholinguistic relevance. In this way, the papers in the issue show that paradigms are as operational, valid and useful tools in derivation as they are in inflection. Moreover, a better characterization of this notion will provide new insights into the organization of lexical morphology and new perspectives on the differences and similarities between inflection and derivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for translations is increasing at a rate far beyond the capacity of professional translators. It is too difficult, time consuming and expensive to translate everything from scratch in each language. Machine translation offers a solution, as it provides translation automatically. Until recently, statistical machine translation has proved to be one of the most successful approaches. However, a new approach to machine translation based on neural networks has emerged with promising results. The present paper concerns phrase-based statistical machine translation, an area that has been extensively studied in the literature. The translation system consists of many components built on the premise of probabilities. Each component is described separately. Although high quality translation systems have been developed for certain language pairs, there is still a large number of languages that cause many translation errors. Languages with a rich morphology pose an especially difficult challenge for research. We address one group of morphologically rich languages: Slavic languages, which constitute a relatively homogeneous family of languages characterized by rich, inflectional morphology. The present paper offers a comprehensive survey of approaches to coping with Slavic languages in different aspects of statistical machine translation. We observe that the interest of the community in research of more difficult languages is increasing and we believe that the translation quality of those languages will reach the level of practical use in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indefinite and possessive pronouns in German such as ein-es ‘one’ and mein-er ‘mine’ bear strong inflectional endings unlike their determiner counterparts. Following Saab and Lipták (Stud Linguist 70(1):66-108, 2016), I argue that this difference in inflection is due to NP ellipsis, which creates a ‘stranded’ affix that subsequently docks onto the determiner. Assuming that adjectives are reattached by Local Dislocation allows us to account for the descriptive observation that the determiner and pronominal paradigms differ only in the same three exceptional cases where determiners do not bear overt inflection. Furthermore, I discuss how this approach can extend to similar data from Afrikaans, Dutch and English, as well as to split topicalization constructions in German. This analysis provides further support for Saab and Lipták’s proposal that inflection emerges as a direct result of ellipsis, rather than constituting part of the licensing conditions on ellipsis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Mediterranean contact language Lingua Franca (LF), although usually categorized as a pidgin, is known to display a number of non-pidgin-like characteristics. A number of these pertain to its inflection, which shows (for a pidgin) an unusually high degree of retention of lexifier inflectional material. The present paper attempts to situate the inflectional categories of LF, as well as their exponence, between those that are generally found in pidgins and those that characterize LF’s Romance lexifiers. In doing so, the paper contributes both to the descriptive analysis of LF and to the theoretical understanding of its place in the typology of contact languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principles and methods of creating program and declarative tools of a machine grammar of the Russian language are considered. These tools were based on original algorithms developed by the scientific team of the staff of the VINITI (All-Russian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information), the 27th Central Scientific Research Institute, Ministry of Defense (Russia) and the Informatics and Management Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FIC IU RAS). Declarative tools, which are a complex of dictionaries and grammatical tables in machine form, were created on the basis of large-scale studies of large volumes of polythematic textual information (measured in tens of millions of words) using linguistic-statistical methods. The complex of declarative tools consists of grammatical tables and machine dictionaries that include the main types of inflectional and derivational transformations, as well as representative dictionaries of word stems. Unique algorithms of machine grammar of the Russian language were developed through the use of these declarative tools. The described tools are now widely used in a number of industrial information systems for solving complex problems of automatic processing and semantic analysis of textual information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Features are central to all major theories of syntax and morphology. Yet it can be a non-trivial task to determine the inventory of features and their values for a given language, and in particular to determine whether to postulate one feature or two in the same semantico-syntactic domain. We illustrate this from tense-aspect-mood (TAM) in Kayardild, and adduce principles for deciding in general between one-feature and two-feature analyses, thereby contributing to the theory of feature systems and their typology. Kayardild shows striking inflectional complexities, investigated in two major studies (Evans 1995a; Round 2013), and it proves particularly revealing for our topic. Both Evans and Round claimed that clauses in Kayardild have not one but two concurrent TAM features. While it is perfectly possible for a language to have two features of the same type, it is unusual. Accordingly, we establish general arguments which would justify postulating two features rather than one; we then apply these specifically to Kayardild TAM. Our finding is at variance with both Evans and Round; on all counts, the evidence which would motivate an analysis in terms of one TAM feature or two is either approximately balanced, or clearly favours an analysis with just one. Thus even when faced with highly complex language facts, we can apply a principled approach to the question of whether we are dealing with one feature or two, and this is encouraging for the many of us seeking a rigorous science of typology. We also find that Kayardild, which in many ways is excitingly exotic, is in this one corner of its grammar quite ordinary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morphological analyses usually prefer 'deriving' form-identities as systematic syncretism over just stating them in terms of accidental homophony. While such anti-homophony is mostly assumed implicitly, Müller (2004) spells it out more explicitly as violable Syncretism Principle guiding both language acquisition and linguistic analysis ('same form → same meaning'). However, as soon as the child or linguist decomposes word forms into smaller formatives (morpheme segmentation, subanalysis), it is unclear what instances of form-identity exactly are to be avoided (e.g. substring-identities?). This paper frames the logical space of possible Syncretism Principle interpretations, which relate to their functional motivation (ambiguity avoidance) demonstrating their concrete consequences for analysis with a paradigm learning algorithm offering segmentation and meaning assignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines consonant doubling in English? This question is pursued by using a large lexical database to establish systematic correlations between spelling, phonology and morphology. The main insights are: Consonant doubling is most regular at morpheme boundaries. It can be described in graphemic terms alone, i.e. without reference to phonology. In monomorphemic words, consonant doubling depends mostly on the word ending. Certain endings correlate with double consonants (e.g. as in ), while others correlate with single consonants (e.g. as in ). What is more, it is the graphemic form of the word ending that determines the presence or absence of double consonants: The word endings <-ic> and <-ick>, for example, are homophonous, but the former almost always occurs with single consonants (e.g. ), the latter with double consonants (e.g. ). That makes graphemic word endings peculiar entities: Like suffixes, they are recurring and they have distributional properties-but unlike suffixes, they have no morphosyntactic or semantic function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I want to argue for two main and related points. First, I want to defend Richard Wollheim's well-known thesis that the twofold mental state of seeing-in is the distinctive pictorial experience that marks figurativity. Figurativity is what makes a representation pictorial, a depiction of its subject. Moreover, I want to show that insofar as it is a mark of figurativity, all seeing-in is inflected. That is to say, every mental state of seeing-in is such that the characterisation of the properties by which a certain subject is seen in a given picture as having refers to the design properties of the picture's vehicle, i.e., to the visible surface properties of that vehicle that are responsible for the fact that one such subject is seen in it, precisely taken in such a design role. Finally, I will try to show that seeing-in is qualified by inflection independently of whether it is conscious or unconscious (in the sense of subpersonal) seeing-in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a formal theory of inflectional periphrasis, the phenomenon where a multi-word expression plays the grammatical role normally played by a single word filling a cell in an inflectional paradigm. Expanding on the literature, I first identify and illustrate six key properties that a satisfactory theory of periphrasis should account for: (i) the phenomenon of periphrasis is found in the inflection of all major parts of speech; (ii) the logic of the opposition between periphrasis and synthesis is the logic of inflection; (iii) auxiliaries as used in periphrases are morphosyntactic hybrids; (iv) some periphrases are morphosyntactically non-compositional; (v) periphrasis is independent of phrase structure, but (vi) the parts of a periphrase are linked by a grammatical function. The rest of the paper presents a lexicalist theory of periphrasis, relying on a version of HPSG (Pollard and Sag ) for syntax combined with a version of Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump ) for inflection. The leading idea is that periphrases are similar to syntactically flexible idioms; the theory of periphrasis is thus embedded within a more general theory of collocation. Periphrasis is accounted for in a strictly lexicalist fashion by recognizing that exponence may take the form of the addition of collocational requirements. I show how the theory accounts for all key properties identified in the first section, deploying partial analyses for periphrastic constructions in English, French, Czech, and Persian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the spelling of derivational and inflectional suffixes by 10-13-year-old Greek children. Twenty children with dyslexia (DYS), 20 spelling-level-matched (SA) and 20 age-matched (CA) children spelled adjectives, nouns, and verbs in dictated word pairs and sentences. Children spelled nouns and verbs more accurately than adjectives and inflections more accurately than derivational suffixes. DYS children performed worse than CA in all cases and worse than SA in verb inflections, but similar to SA in all the remaining cases, consistent with a delayed rather than deviant performance pattern. Qualitative analysis showed that uncommon vowel graphemes were often replaced by more common patterns. Children with dyslexia may have weaknesses in grasping morphological information and/or in applying this knowledge to spell word suffixes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a few linguistic and bio-futuristic musings in honor of Alan Turing and his legacy. We follow some of the connections Turing used or made between humanness, language, intelligence, deception, gender, sexual orientation, and computational modeling in his exploration of the world. We also take inspiration and continue further along some of these lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important problem of comparative Niger-Congo morphology is understanding the processes that relate word structures in languages of the isolating 'Kwa' type to those of the agglutinating 'Bantu' type. A salient sub-problem of this larger morphological puzzle is charting the connection between the noun class systems of the Kwa-type languages which, at one extreme, can lack such classes entirely, against those of the Bantu type which, at the other extreme, are famously elaborated. This issue is examined by looking at a range of ways that Niger-Congo noun class systems have been observed to diverge from the canonical Bantu type. The main conclusion of this study is that Niger-Congo noun class systems are quite robust, in the sense that loss of one part of the system need not be correlated with loss of the other parts. This suggests that the level of noun class attrition found in Kwa languages was not a historically 'natural' event and also has implications for models of agreement and inflectional morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interplay of the main factors affecting affix order in inflection (semantic scope, phonology, and morphological templates) can be accounted for in an inferential-realizational Optimality-Theoretic model of morphology, which we present here. Within this model, phonological form is spelled out by means of individual-language-particular realization constraints that associate abstract morphosyntactic feature values with phonological forms and that are ordered among more general constraints governing factors like scope and feature splitting. The data used to exemplify the application of our theory to affix order are drawn from Haspelmath's ( A grammar of Lezgian, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 1993) grammar of Lezgian, a language of the Northeast Caucasian family spoken largely in Dagestan (Russia) and Azerbaijan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying the depth-diameter relationship of impact craters around the Oceanus Procellarum area together with values for simple crater, complex crater and basin confirms two inflections in the depth/diameter ( d/D) curve. We classify impact craters to three types, which are simple crater, complex crater and basin. Using the most ‘pristine’ or deepest craters in the data, three kinds of depth-diameter relationships are determined: the linear fit for simple crater is d=0.126 D+0.490 2; the best empirical power fit for complex crater is d=0.327 3 D0.625 2; the best empirical power fit for basin is d=0.300 4 D0.463 3, where d is the depth of the crater and D is the diameter of the crater, both in kilometers. The depth-diameter relationship for basin is characterized by a lower slope than that for complex craters, demonstrating that this morphologic transition corresponds to a further decrease in the depth of an impact structure relative to its diameter with increasing size. These relationships can then be used to estimate the theoretical depth of any impact radius, and therefore can be used to estimate the pristine shape of the crater around the Oceanus Procellarum area. The study of Oceanus Procellarum will help humankind to learn more about the origin and evolution of the moon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends the empirical scope of the most recent approach to affix ordering, the Parsability Hypothesis (Hay 2001, 2002, 2003) or Complexity-Based Ordering (CBO) (Plag 2002; Hay and Plag 2004; Plag and Baayen 2009), to the inflecting-fusional morphological type, as represented by the South Slavic language Bulgarian. In order to account properly for the structure of the Bulgarian word, I distinguish between suffixes that are in the derivational word slot and suffixes that are in the inflectional word slot and show that inflectional suffix combinations are more easily parsable than derivational suffix combinations. Derivational suffixes participate in mirror-image combinations of AB–BA type and can be also attached recursively. The order of 12 out of the 22 derivational suffixes under scrutiny in this article is thus incompatible with CBO. With respect to recursiveness and productivity, the Bulgarian word exhibits three domains of suffixation (in order of increasing productivity): (1) a non-diminutive derivational domain, where a suffix may attach recursively on non-adjacent cycles; (2) a diminutive domain, where a suffix may attach recursively on adjacent cycles; and (3) an inflectional domain, where a suffix never attaches recursively. Overall, the results of this study conform to the last revision of the Parsability Hypothesis (Baayen et al. 2009); and if we see the derivational suffix slot and the inflectional suffix slot of the Bulgarian word as parallel to the non-native stratum and the Germanic stratum respectively in English word-formation, we can conclude that suffixes that are closer to the root tend to exhibit idiosyncrasies and appear less parsable in both languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study I present a comparative and historical analysis of “frequentative” Bantu verb-stem reduplication, many of whose variants have been described for a number of Eastern and Southern Bantu languages. While some languages have full-stem compounding, where the stem consists of the verb root plus any and all suffixes, others restrict the reduplicant to two syllables. Two questions are addressed: (i) What was the original nature of reduplication in Proto-Bantu? (ii) What diachronic processes have led to the observed variation? I first consider evidence that the frequentative began as full-stem reduplication, which then became restricted either morphologically (by excluding inflectional and ultimately derivational suffixes) and/or phonologically (by imposing a bisyllabic maximum size constraint). I then turn to the opposite hypothesis and consider evidence and motivations for a conflicting tendency to rebuild full-stem reduplication from the partial reduplicant. I end by attempting to explain why the partial reduplicant is almost always preposed to the fuller base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses varieties of German with respect to noun pluralisation, with a focus on the status of final plural schwa as in Fisch-e ‘fish, pl.’. By analysing the much-discussed plural morphology of Standard German by means of both prosodic as well as morphological principles, it is argued that final schwa in plural nouns of Standard German is not, as generally assumed, an inflectional suffix. As an alternative, an optimality-theoretic constraint-based analysis of final schwa in plurals leads to the proposal that this segment in noun plurals of Standard German arises as an inserted vowel, which is in turn the result of a specific constraint interaction. In the second part of this paper, related noun plurals are studied in a sample of diverse non-standard dialects of German. Morphological and prosodic constraints, through the well-known mechanism of differences in constraint-ranking in Optimality Theory, derive the (non-)appearance of word-final plural schwas in these dialects which are minimally different from Standard German and from each other. The constraints will include those which refer to properties of whole paradigms of word forms, not just to phonological properties of individual words. As an overall descriptive result, a micro-typology of plural formation in varieties of German emerges, and the prosodic phonology of German is demonstrated to play a crucial role in the formation of word forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines some cases of heteroclisis in the history of Romanian dialects, and concludes that the data call for a reconsideration of Stump’s distinction (Language 82:279–322, 2006) between ‘cloven’ heteroclisis, where the intraparadigmatic ‘split’ is aligned with some morphosyntactic feature distinction, and ‘fractured’ heteroclisis, where this is not the case and the pattern of heteroclisis is purely morphological. Stump’s account creates the impression that the ‘cloven’ variety is universally predominant, and that the ‘fractured’ variety tends to follow very closely the available ‘cloven’ patterns of the language. I shall suggest, instead, that the ‘fractured-only’ situation may in fact underlie heteroclisis cross-linguistically, the phenomenon being in general sensitive not directly to morphosyntactic content, but rather to characteristic, and often purely ‘morphomic’, patterns of stem-allomorphy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the patterns of declension exhibited by German nouns and adjectives, there are some that are traditionally labelled ‘weak’. It is argued here that the behaviour of ‘weak’ noun and adjective forms can be best understood if their inflectional suffixes are regarded not as expressing morphosyntactic properties such as gender and case but rather as the outcome of conflicting ranked constraints governing what an optimal noun or adjective should look like in different contexts. For example, an attributive adjective should carry a suffix; a nominative singular form should carry no suffix; and the default inflectional affix is -en. These language-particular constraints reflect some of the ‘system-defining structural properties’ attributed to German by the late Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stability of a rotating gas-dust gravitating disk in the zone of a possible inflection in the angular velocity is examined theoretically. The stability limits are found for a rather wide range of curves in a special model of a dusty, pressure-free medium with the general gravitational field of the galaxy taken into account. Applications to real galaxies are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plural marking is not universally inflectional. This paper examines the formal properties of non-inflectional plural marking on the basis of a detailed case study of Halkomelem Salish. The plural marker in this language displays neither inflectional nor derivational properties. I argue that its distributional properties derive from its syntax: it is a modifier adjoined to category-neutral $\sqrt{}$ roots. The analysis implies that plural marking is not universally merged as a syntactic (functional) head and that it does not universally merge with nouns. This leads to the postulation of a new typology of plural marking which goes beyond the distinction between inflectional and non-inflectional plural marking. Several diagnostics to distinguish among distinct types of plural markers are established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inflection is generally considered to be more productive than derivation. To justify such an assumption, the syntactic function of inflectional morphology is contrasted with the mainly lexical function of derivational morphology. In this paper, the whole question will be carefully discussed with the help of recently developed quantitative approaches to productivity. On the basis of data taken from Italian, it will be shown that a quantitative approach to productivity can shed light on this intricate question by revealing the double nature of inflectional morphology, which on the one hand sides with derivational morphology because of its lexically conditioned inflectional classes. On the other, it scores very high productivity rates for the single inflectional categories in accordance with its syntactic function. Furthermore, the productivity rates of the inflectional categories considered are shown to be not uniform: several factors may influence their productivity, as for instance the substitutive usage of periphrases with modals, even in a language like Italian in which the latter are far less grammaticalized than in others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like the numbers in a sudoku puzzle, a lexeme’s principal parts provide enough information–but only enough–to deduce all of the remaining forms in its paradigm. Because principal parts are a distillation of the implicative relations that exist among the members of a lexeme’s paradigm, they afford an important (but heretofore neglected) basis for typological classification. We recognize three logically distinct sorts of principal-part systems that might be postulated for a given language: static, adaptive, and dynamic. Focussing for present purposes on dynamic systems, we propose five crosscutting criteria for the typological classification of principal-part systems. These criteria relate to (i) how many principal parts are needed to determine a lexeme’s paradigm; (ii) whether distinct lexemes possess parallel sets of principal parts; (iii) how many principal parts are needed to determine a given word in a lexeme’s paradigm; (iv) what sort of morphological relation exists between a principal part and the forms that it is used to deduce; and (v) whether lexemes’ nonprincipal parts are inferred from their principal parts in the same way from one inflection class to another. Drawing on these criteria, we propose a novel classification of a range of typologically diverse languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammaticality judgement tasks show that second language learners who started during childhood are significantly more accurate on judging inflection than learners who started after puberty [Johnson, J., & Newport, E. (1989). Cognitive Psychology, 21, 60–99; Johnson, J., & Newport, E. (1991). Cognition, 39, 215–258; McDonald, J. (2000). Applied Psycholinguistics, 21, 395–423. Production data confirmthat inflection is a bottleneck in adult language acquisition, and that they differ from child learners in this respect [Lardiere, D. (1998). Second Language Research, 14, 359–375; Prévost, P. (2003). Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 65–97; Pre vost, P., & White, L. (2000). Second Language Research, 16(2), 103–133]. Although the observations suggest that the acquisition of inflection is influenced by age, there is no study that focuses on this particular issue nor is there an articulated explanation available for the observed age-related difference. In this contribution, we compare child L2 learners of Dutch to child L1 and adult L2 learners of Dutch in order to investigate effects of age on the acquisition of verbal and adjectival inflection. We hypothesize that adult agreement paradigms differ from child agreement paradigms, the reason being that adult learners cannot rely on syntactic cues, whereas children make reliable use of syntax in building paradigms. By effect, adult learners end up with non-targetlike small paradigms that contain underspecified suffixes. We focus on the types of errors in the three learner groups (child L1, child L2 and adult L2). Our empirical basis consists of results obtained in a series of production experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a type theoretic analysis of Latin grammar, which pays as much attention to inflectional morphology as to syntax. We assign different types to the finite forms of Latin verbs as well as to their infinitives. The rich repertory of agreement information exhibited by Latin is accounted for by a system of numerical indexes (superscripts and subscripts) attached to the types. Agreement coherence and control of sentencehood for strings of words is to be guaranteed by calculations performed on the corresponding strings of types, in accordance with the “pregroup” grammar developed as a refinement of classical bilinear logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A MATLAB based backpropagation neural network (BPNN) model has been developed. Two major geo-engineering applications, namely, earth slope movement and ground movement around tunnels, are identified. Data obtained from case studies are used to train and test the developed model and the ground movement is predicted with the help of input variables that have direct physical significance. A new approach is adopted by introducing an infiltration coefficient in the network architecture apart from antecedent rainfall, slope profile, groundwater level and strength parameters to predict the slope movement. The input variables for settlement around underground excavations are taken from literature. The neural network models demonstrate a promising result predicting fairly successfully the ground behavior in both cases. If input variables influencing output goals are clearly identified and if a decent number of quality data are available, backpropagation neural network can be successfully applied as mapping and prediction tools in geotechnical investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base's phonology (e.g., rat-rats ), whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it (e.g., mouse-mice ). The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that do not resemble existing nouns and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names (e.g., the Barak-Barakim ), they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns (e.g., barak-brakim “lightning”), replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as “regular” or “irregular”; different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the regression of sigmoid-shaped responses with time t of colonization C of roots by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, C= Cp/1+[e −k(t−ti)] is the most useful form of the logistic equation. At the time of inflection ti the slope is maximal and directly proportional to the product of the colonization plateau Cp and the abruptness k of the curve. Coefficient k has a high value when the curve rises abruptly following and preceding long shallow phases. The logistic equation has a curve that is symmetrical about ti such that C= Cp/2 at inflection. Although the logistic equation can generate a good fit to many data sets for changes in colonization with time, there are cases that are not sigmoid and the logistic equation does not apply. For sigmoid curves, the lag in the development of colonization is directly related to both ti and k but not to the plateau and not to the value of the maximum slope. Higher values of k or ti reflect longer lag. When considered alone, ti and k do not fully summarize the lag in colonization, and so a numerical method to combine them is presented here which allows lag to be compared between curves. In this method, the lag is evaluated by calculating the time during early colonization when the slope equals half of the value of the maximum slope. In summary, use of the logistic equation for regression of sigmoid curves of colonization with time allows numerical comparison between curves of the lag, the period of steep ascent, and the plateau. The logistic equation does not model directly the fundamental processes at work in the development of the mycorrhizae. Instead, it can be used as described here to gain insight into the colonization process by comparing the dynamics of that colonization for different species under various conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Syntactic trees, or phrase markers, have originally been suggested as a representation of syntax in the mind based on purely linguistic grounds. In this paper, the psychological reality of syntactic trees and hierarchical ordering is explored from another perspective—that of the neuropsychology of language breakdown. The study reported here examined several syntactic domains that rely on different nodes in the tree—tense and agreement verb inflection, subordinations, interrogatives, and verb movement, through a study of 14 Hebrew- and Palestinian Arabic-speaking agrammatic aphasics and perusal of the cross-linguistic literature. The results show that the impairment in agrammatic production is highly selective and lends itself to characterization in terms of a deficit in the syntactic tree. The complex pattern of dissociations follows from one underlying deficit—the inaccessibility of high nodes of the syntactic tree to agrammatic speakers. Structures that relate to high nodes of the tree are impaired, while “lower” structures are spared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]