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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., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Background: German participles are formed by a co-occurrence of prefixation and suffixation. While the acquisition of regular and irregular suffixation has been investigated exhaustively, it is still unclear how German children master the prosodically determined prefixation rule (prefix ge-). Findings reported in the literature are inconsistent on this point. In particular, it is unclear whether participle formation is vulnerable in German children with specific language impairment (SLI)., Aims: To compare children with and without SLI in their abilities to form German participles correctly, and to determine their relative sensitivities to the morphophonological regularities of prefixation., Methods & Procedures: The performance of 14 German-speaking children with SLI (mean age = 7;5) in a participle formation task was compared with that of age-matched and younger typically developing controls. The materials included 60 regular verbs and 20 pseudo-verbs, half of them requiring the prefix ge-., Outcome & Results: Overall, children with SLI performed poorly compared with both groups of typically developing children. Children with SLI tended either to avoid participle markings or choose inappropriate affixes. However, while such children showed marked impairment at the morphological level, they were generally successful in applying the morphoprosodic rules governing prefixation., Conclusions & Implications: In contrast to earlier findings, the present results demonstrate that regular participle formation is problematic for German children with SLI., (© 2016 Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.)

This article approaches defective and overabundant paradigm cells as an opportunity and pitfall for usage-based linguistics. Through reference to two production tasks involving native speakers of Czech, we show how definitions of these two categories are problematized when multiple forms per context are entrenched, or when pre-emption seems to occur in the absence of entrenchment: in other words, pre-emption occurs via entrenchment of uncertainty. We explain the results by adopting a broader, usage-based perspective. We examine the relationship between frequency (as proxy for exposure) and reference-work information (as proxy for a priori structure) to assess their connection with our experimental results. We assign a role to frequency as helping to form perceptions of "suitable" and "unsuitable" forms, but also note places where non-frequency factors predominate. "Structure" as represented by reference-work recommendations appears to have no significant connection to our experimental results; we discuss reasons for this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent evidence indicates that a word's paradigmatic neighbors affect production. However, these findings have mostly been obtained in careful laboratory settings using words in isolation, and thus ignoring potential effects that may arise from the syntagmatic context, which is typically present in spontaneous speech. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech. Following work on English, we focus on the duration of inflected and uninflected word-final /-s/ in content words, while simultaneously investigating whole words. Our analyses reveal three points. First, we find an effect of realized inflectional paradigm size, such that smaller paradigms actively used by the speakers lead to longer durations. Second, higher conditional probability is associated with shorter word forms and shorter segments. Finally, we do not directly replicate previous work on effects of inflectional status as in English word-final /-s/. Instead, we find that inflectional status interacts with conditional probability. We discuss the results in light of models of speech production and how they account for morphologically complex words and their paradigmatic neighbors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Biblos: Revista da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra is the property of Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The category of person has both inflectional and lexical aspects, and the distinction provides a finely graduated grammatical trait, relatively stable in both families and areas, and revealing for both typology and linguistic geography. Inflectional behavior includes reference to speech-Act roles, indexation of arguments, discreteness from other categories such as number or gender, assignment and/or placement in syntax, arrangement in paradigms, and general resemblance to closed-class items. Lexical behavior includes sharing categories and/or forms and/or syntactic behavior with major lexical classes (usually nouns) and generally resembling open-class items. Criteria are given here for typologizing person as more vs. less inflectional, some basic typological correlations are tested, and the worldwide linguistic-geographical distribution is mapped.

The IE languages developed different strategies for the encoding of the passive function. In some language branches, the middle voice extended to the passive function to varying extents. In addition, dedicated derivational formations arose in a number of languages, such as the Greek -ē-/-thē- aorist and the Indo-Aryan -ya-presents. Periphrastic formations involving a verbal adjective or a participle are also widely attested, and played an important role in the building of the passive paradigm in e.g. Romance and Germanic languages. As the periphrastic passive is also attested in Hittite alongside passive use of the middle, both strategies seem to be equally ancient. Some minor strategies include lexical passives and the extensive lability of verbs. A survey of possible strategies provides evidence for the rise of a disparate number of morphemes and constructions, and for their ongoing incorporation into the inflectional paradigms (paradigmaticization) of given languages, thus adding to our knowledge about cross-linguistic sources of passive morphology and grammaticalization processes involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last years a rapid emergence of lexical resources has evolved in the Semantic Web. Whereas most of the linguistic information is already machine-readable, we found that morphological information is mostly absent or only contained in semi-structured strings. An integration of morphemic data has not yet been undertaken due to the lack of existing domain-specific ontologies and explicit morphemic data. In this paper, we present the Multilingual Morpheme Ontology called MMoOn Core which can be regarded as the first comprehensive ontology for the linguistic domain of morphological language data. It will be described how crucial concepts like morphs, morphemes, word forms and meanings are represented and interrelated and how language-specific morpheme inventories can be created as a new possibility of morphological datasets. The aim of the MMoOn Core ontology is to serve as a shared semantic model for linguists and NLP researchers alike to enable the creation, conversion, exchange, reuse and enrichment of morphological language data across different data-dependent language sciences. Therefore, various use cases are illustrated to draw attention to the cross-disciplinary potential which can be realized with the MMoOn Core ontology in the context of the existing Linguistic Linked Data research landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The generation of regular and irregular inflected verb-forms has been taken as a crucial test between models of inflection in the mental lexicon, namely approaches which invoke different mechanisms for regular and irregular forms (rule-based procedures vs. recovery of whole forms stored in an associative network) and accounts which postulate a single procedure for all forms. An alternative hypothesis suggests that inflectional processes are explained by membership of words to clusters, for instance, Italian inflectional classes (conjugations). In a behavioural and a rapid event-related fMRI experiment, participants overtly generated the past participle of verbs from the three Italian conjugations. Results showed that the cognitive operations and the neural substrate underlying inflectional processes rely on specific properties of inflectional classes. Different patterns of cortical activations elicited by verbs from different conjugations were detected for the first time in the left middle frontal gyrus, left pre-supplementary motor area and left anterior cingulate cortex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The currently popular model of decasuative derivation has been criticized on various grounds, both typological and comparative. This paper assesses both the critique and the model. [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.

This paper explores the hypothesis that morphotactically ambiguous segment sequences should be dispreferred and selected against in the evolution of languages. We define morphotactically ambiguous sequences as sequences that can occur both within morphemes and across boundaries, such as final /nd/ or /mz/ in ModE, which occur in simple forms like wind or alms and in complex ones like sinned or seems. We test the hypothesis in two diachronic corpus studies of Middle and Early Modern English word forms ending in clusters of sonorants followed by /d/ or /t/ and /s/ or /z/. These clusters became highly frequent after the loss of unstressed vowels in final syllables and were highly ambiguous when they emerged. Our data show that the ambiguity of these final clusters was indeed reduced so that the distribution of the final clusters became increasingly skewed: clusters ending in voiceless coronals became significantly clearly indicative of simple forms, while clusters ending in voiced ones came to signal inflectional complexity more reliably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on esteemed e-journal Language in India. Topics include word order encompassing the constituent order of a clause namely the relative order of subject, object, and verb, the order of modifiers; and SVO language with rigid word order likely to contribute to the study of linguistic universals as well as evaluation of existing linguistic theories.

Regularity and irregularity are among the most widely invoked notions in linguistics. The terms are backed up by a long and venerable tradition, and yet (or maybe therefore) different disciplines and authors seem to be using them for very different phenomena and in very different ways. The most frequent usage conflates or replaces other notions such as type frequency, productivity, (non-)concatenative morphology, storage vs. computation, predictability, etc. An assessment of these and other variables in Icelandic verbal inflection reveals that most of them are in practice strongly correlated. I conclude, however, that this is largely unsurprising by virtue of the definitional dependencies holding between those notions. It is empirically doubtful whether there exists a single underlying phenomenon or category which the terms designate. In addition, given their multiple and overlapping senses, and the existence of separate, unambiguous labels for the relevant underlying notions, I contend that the terms 'regular' and 'irregular' should be ideally abandoned in scientific literature in order to avoid ambiguity, sloppy reasoning and misunderstandings and to facilitate cross-linguistic comparison and interdisciplinary dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the problem of crosslinguistic rarity by mapping the types of diachronic factors that contribute to the rarity of a particular feature. It is proposed that a number of different diachronic factors may play a role, such as the rarity of source constructions, the rarity of particular types of change, the number of stages necessary for a particular feature to develop, and the number of pathways that can lead to a particular feature. This article looks at a rarissimum of person marking, namely, a zero-marked feminine 2nd singular person index in the Sahidic dialect of Coptic (Afroasiatic; Egypt). It is argued that such markers are rare because they presuppose rare input structures, and most processes of change would lead away from - rather than to - zero-marked 2sg. Furthermore, this study identifies a diachronic process in which a part of a morpheme is reinterpreted as a segmentable morpheme (in this case, a person index), thereby leading to the loss of a zero person marker. This is the converse of the well-known 'Watkins' Law', in which a segmentable person marker is reinterpreted as part of a base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Verb processing is largely described across languages as being impaired in agrammatic aphasia, i.e., non-fluent aphasia with so-called “telegraphic style”. Although both lexical and morphosyntactic errors have been reported in the literature, this paper questions the claim that impaired access to verbs is a hallmark of this clinical syndrome. Aims: The present study aims to assess how agrammatic verb processing is impaired in two languages with distinct grammatical properties: Basque and French, and to test hypotheses that suggested an access deficit to verbs on this new database. Moreover, the nature of agrammatic verb errors is analysed from an interdisciplinary neuropsycholinguistic perspective according to which aphasic symptoms should be interpretable at different levels of organisation of language processing involving neural, cognitive and linguistic aspects. Methods & Procedures: A protocol built on Basque and French grammatical properties was designed in order to assess whether errors are specific to verbs, whether they are lexical or morphosyntactic and whether the verb argument structure complexity increases lexical and morphosyntactic processing difficulties, in both production and comprehension. One Basque-speaking and one French-speaking patient with agrammatism and matched controls were assessed on various oral tasks (object and action naming; sentence production and comprehension; prepositional phrase production), each of them containing 20 pictures displayed on a computer. Data were collected using a digital recorder. Outcomes & Results: Results show that agrammatic speakers produced many lexical verbs of every argument structure type. Errors were specifically morphosyntactic and increased with the verb argument structure complexity. However, verb errors were different in Basque and French due to their distinct morphosyntactic properties. In addition, whereas errors appeared in French in the use of prepositions, case morphology was well preserved in Basque, raising the issue of considering distinct neurocognitive mechanisms underlying different morphological systems. Conclusions: This paper supports the view that Basque and French agrammatic data collected from this study do not result from a lexical-access deficit. However, this interpretation depends on how one considers inflected verbs to be processed (endolexicon or exolexicon), as addressed in the discussion. In conclusion, a “post-lexical access” deficit is rather suggested, that is prior to morphophonological encoding, and affects abstract morphosyntactic operations required to implement the verb argument structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid and automatic processing of grammatical complexity is argued to take place during speech comprehension, engaging a left-lateralized fronto-temporal language network. Here we address how neural activity in these regions is modulated by the grammatical properties of spoken words. We used combined magneto- and electroencephalography to delineate the spatiotemporal patterns of activity that support the recognition of morphologically complex words in English with inflectional (-s) and derivational (-er ) affixes (e.g., bakes, baker ). The mismatch negativity, an index of linguistic memory traces elicited in a passive listening paradigm, was used to examine the neural dynamics elicited by morphologically complex words. Results revealed an initial peak 130-180 ms after the deviation point with a major source in left superior temporal cortex. The localization of this early activation showed a sensitivity to two grammatical properties of the stimuli: (1) the presence of morphological complexity, with affixed words showing increased left-laterality compared to non-affixed words; and (2) the grammatical category, with affixed verbs showing greater left-lateralization in inferior frontal gyrus compared to affixed nouns (bakes vs. beaks). This automatic brain response was additionally sensitive to semantic coherence (the meaning of the stem vs. the meaning of the whole form) in left middle temporal cortex. These results demonstrate that the spatiotemporal pattern of neural activity in spoken word processing is modulated by the presence of morphological structure, predominantly engaging the left hemisphere's fronto-temporal language network, and does not require focused attention on the linguistic input. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies suggest that morphosyntactic difficulties may result from prosodic problems. We therefore address the interface between inflectional morphology and prosody in typically developing children (TD) and children with SLI by testing whether these groups are sensitive to prosodic constraints that guide plural formation in German. A plural elicitation task was designed consisting of 60 words and 20 pseudowords. The performance of 14 German-speaking children with SLI (mean age 7.5) was compared to age-matched controls and to younger children matched for productive vocabulary. TD children performed significantly better than children with SLI. Error analyses revealed that children with SLI produced more forms that did not meet the optimal shape of a noun plural. Beyond the fact that children with SLI have deficits in plural marking, the findings suggest that they also show reduced sensitivity to prosodic requirements. In other words, the prosodic structure of inflected words seems to be vulnerable in children with SLI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Respectus Philologicus is the property of Vilnius University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: Neuroimaging studies of English suggest that speech comprehension engages two interdependent systems: a bilateral fronto-temporal network responsible for general perceptual and cognitive processing, and a specialised left-lateralised network supporting specifically linguistic processing. Using fMRI we test this hypothesis in Polish, a Slavic language with rich and diverse morphology. We manipulated general perceptual complexity (presence or absence of an onset-embedded stem, e.g. kotlet ‘cutlet’ vs. kot ‘cat’) and specifically linguistic complexity (presence of an inflectional affix, e.g. dom ‘house, Nom’ vs. dom-u ‘house, Gen’). Non-linguistic complexity activated a bilateral network, as in English, but we found no differences between inflected and uninflected nouns. Instead, all types of words activated left inferior frontal areas, suggesting that all Polish words can be considered linguistically ‘complex’ in processing terms. The results support a dual network hypothesis, but highlight differences between languages like English and Polish, and underline the importance of cross-linguistic comparisons. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The ASJP project aims at establishing relationships between languages on the basis of the Swadesh word list. For this purpose, lists have been collected and phonologically transcribed for almost 3,500 languages. Using a method based on the algorithm proposed by Levenshtein (Cybernetics and Control Theory 10: 707–710, 1966), a custom-made computer program calculates the distances between all pairs of languages in the database. Standard software is used to express the relationships between languages graphically. The current article compares the results of our lexicon-based approach with the results of a similar exercise that takes the typological variables contained in the WALS database as a point of departure. We establish that the latter approach leads to even better results than the lexicon-based one. The best result in terms of correspondence with some well-established genetic and areal classifications, however, is attained when the lexical and typological methods are combined, especially if we select both the most stable Swadesh items and the most stable WALS variables. [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]

In Modern Greek nominals, the accent is sometimes faithful to the properties of stems, and sometimes to those of affixes. Several facts challenge solutions based on stipulating the ranking of faithfulness constraints in OT, however. These include the fact that accentual dominance of affixes correlates with their semantic markedness (marked Case; marked number); the fact that neighboring cells within a paradigm tend to be accentually uniform; and the fact that control of accent shifts from affix to stem when stems are followed by Class Markers. These facts are argued to motivate an approach in which faithfulness effects and their relative magnitudes are not primitive notions, but are rather derived in certain specific ways that take account of both the internal structure of representations and their overall distance in space. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: By employing visual lexical decision and functional MRI, we studied the neural correlates of morphological decomposition in a highly inflected language (Finnish) where most inflected noun forms elicit a consistent processing cost during word recognition. This behavioral effect could reflect suffix stripping at the visual word form level and/or subsequent meaning integration at the semantic-syntactic level. The first alternative predicts increased activation for inflected vs. monomorphemic words in the left occipitotemporal cortex while the second alternative predicts left inferior frontal gyrus and/or left posterior temporal activation increases. The results show significant activation effects in the latter areas. This provides support for the second alternative, i.e., that the morphological processing cost stems from the semantic-syntactic level. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Proceeding from the assumption that all languages are equally complex, there exists a corollary, widely held but poorly documented, herein referred to as the negative correlation hypothesis. It states: If one component of language is simplified then another must be elaborated. Here, this assumption is reformulated in terms of a scientific hypothesis and subjected to statistical analysis. Thirty-two geographically diverse languages representing thirty language families and two isolates are tested for syllable count and inflectional synthesis on the verb as a means of rating their phonological and morphological complexity, respectively. The correlation between these measures is found to be slightly positive (r=0.0704), but statistically insignificant (p>0.05), indicating that the negative correlation hypothesis, if it is to be retained, still awaits scientific confirmation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

in this paper I detail relationships between verb stems and the conjugation classes to which they belong in Yurok, an Algic language of northwest California. Yurok has four major conjugation classes, with one class, the oo-class, containing three subclasses defined by distinct third-person singular forms. I describe two regularities which have not been noted before. First, within the oo-class, distinct subclasses differing in third singular inflection are associated with distinctions in argument structure. Second, in one intransitive subclass of oo-class verbs, third-person singular inflections have the form and meaning of two Ritwan locative markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have found that priming a target like cerr-o (“hill”) with an unmasked stem-homograph (e.g., cerr-ar, “to close”) or with an unmasked allomorph of a stem-homograph (e.g., cierr-a, “he/she/it closes”) has an inhibitory effect on target recognition. We report evidence from stem-homograph priming studies that implicate both morphological parsing and lexical selection processes at the lemma level. We argue that stem-homograph inhibition is the product of lexical selection mechanisms that are engaged just when a fully ambiguous stimulus (here, an inflectional stem) must be assigned one of its viable interpretations in order to afford conscious perception of lexical identity. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]