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In Mabaan, a Western Nilotic language, there is a binary inflectional voice contrast in the morphology of verbs. In addition to a morphologically unmarked basic voice, there is a fully productive applicative voice, which is morphologically marked. This applicative voice may be called circumstantial in order to distinguish it from another applicative voice, which is derivational, namely benefactive. The circumstantial voice turns an adjunct into an object, making an intransitive verb transitive and a transitive verb ditransitive. In a main clause, however, a transitive verb needs to be detransitivized via antipassive derivation in order for an adjunct to become object through the circumstantial voice. In some types of subordinate clauses, by contrast, any verb can get the circumstantial voice, whatever its transitivity, derivational status and meaning. This voice is obligatory in relative clauses when the relativized constituent is an adjunct and in some types of adverbial clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

In this paper, we investigate the value of derivational information in predicting the inflectional behavior of lexemes. We focus on Latin, for which large-scale data on both inflection and derivation are easily available. We train boosting tree classifiers to predict the inflection class of verbs and nouns with and without different pieces of derivational information. For verbs, we also model inflectional behavior in a word-based fashion, training the same type of classifier to predict wordforms given knowledge of other wordforms of the same lexemes. We find that derivational information is indeed helpful, and document an asymmetry between the beginning and the end of words, in that the final element in a word is highly predictive, while prefixes prove to be uninformative. The results obtained with the word-based methodology also allow for a finer-grained description of the behavior of different pairs of cells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-linguistically, there are different patterns for denominal verb formation and languages show preferences for certain patterns (cf. McIntyre, 2015). In this paper, I focus on denominal verb formation in English and Modern Greek. The analyzed data come from the TenTen corpora (Sketch Engine, Kilgariff et al., 2014). The first aim is to quantify the use of the patterns of denominal verb formations in both languages. The results of the analysis corroborate the findings of previous analyses, such as the strong preference for conversion for denominal verb formation in English and for suffixation in Modern Greek. However, the present paper aims to go a step further. The second aim is to discuss why English and Modern Greek show these preferences. I propose that the preferences can be explained if we correlate the parameters of inflectional marking, word order/configurationality, system of lexical category assignment and boundary permeability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the processing of morphologically complex words focusing on how morphological (in addition to orthographic and semantic) factors affect bilingual word recognition. We report findings from a large experimental study with groups of bilingual (Turkish/German) speakers using the visual masked-priming technique. We found morphologically mediated effects on the response speed and the inter-individual variability within the bilingual participant group. We conclude that the grammar (qua morphological parsing) not only enhances speed of processing in bilingual language processing but also yields more uniform performance and thereby constrains variability within a group of otherwise heterogeneous individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The morphemes such as the French au or the Italien nel are designed by different terms in grammars of Romance languages, which shows that it is difficult to identify the lexical category of this type of fusional morpheme. The aim of this paper is to propose a detailed analysis of these contracted forms. I suggest that the fusion occurs during a secondary grammaticalization. This process involves, on the one hand, the definite article, i.e. a grammatical element, and, on the other hand, some prepositions which, semantically, can be functional or lexical but which function syntactically as grammatical elements. The analysis shows that case inflection of nominals has been transferred to the preposition while the other categories appear in the article which merged with prepositions. Therefore, the fusional forms can be considered as prepositions marked by the grammatical categories of gender, number and definiteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH), which accounts for certain difficulties that learners experience with L2 morphosyntax. We focus on inflection and articles, which have often been accounted for through defective syntactic representations or problems with the interface between morphology and syntax (inflection) and between semantics or discourse/pragmatics and syntax (articles). We argue that some problems in these domains reflect transfer of L1 prosodic constraints: certain forms cannot be prosodically represented as target-like and hence are omitted or mispronounced. We trace how the PTH has developed over time, from its initial instantiation as involving permanent L1 transfer, to currently, where L1 representations are seen as adaptable to the needs of the L2, and new representations can in fact be acquired. We provide an overview of work conducted in this framework and discuss how the theory has been extended beyond production to encompass comprehension and processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 paper investigates morphological awareness for inflected and derived words among high versus low literacy students of English as a foreign language in the 5th, 7th and 9th grades. The study experimented with Arabic L1 students and tested inflectional morphological awareness (IMA) and derivational morphological awareness (DMA) separately using the Word Analogy task. Results demonstrate generally less developed morphological awareness skills in low as against high EFL literacy students. Moreover, significant differences between IMA and DMA in favor on IMA were observed in both groups of students and across all grades. This appears to reflect the distributional and linguistic properties of the two morphological systems. Moreover, though morphological awareness emerged rather early in EFL learning, differences between the two morphological systems decreased, though remained significant, as grade level increased. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings, as well as the potential role of Arabic as L1, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dutch has a construction consisting of a verbal part and something else: ′wɛrksə 'enjoy your work' (< werk 'to work'), ′rujzə 'enjoy your rowing' (< roei 'to row'). According to accepted wisdom, this 'success imperative', as it is known in the literature, consists of an imperative and a pronoun ze 'them'. The paper challenges the standard analysis and investigates two alternatives: an imperative form plus a modal particle, and a verbal stem plus an inflectional ending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An auditory lexical decision task tests morphological decomposition and sensitivity to violations in inflection in late second language learners, early learners (heritage speakers), and native speakers of Russian. Two datasets compared reaction times and error rates to real Russian inflected nouns and nonce nouns. Two parameters of real nouns were manipulated: case (the nominative, or the oblique case), and inflection (overt or zero). Nonce nouns had (a) real stems and inflections combined in an illegal way (lemoning), and (b) inflected nonce stems (lemosing). Results suggest that heritage and late learners process inflectional morphology; however, their processing of inflected words is unreliable: they are willing to accept words with incongruent inflections. While no major differences were found in the processing patterns of early and late learners, a developmental trajectory was observed in both groups of learners: their sensitivity to violations in inflection improved with proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key accounts of morphological variability in L2 acquisition posit either deficits in the representation of abstract morphosyntactic features or the mapping between morpho-phonological forms and syntactic features due to computational limitations. This study extends previous research to L2 Italian, a richly inflected language. The production and grammatical intuitions of suppletive and affixal verb inflection were elicited from a cross-section of instructed adult L2 learners with L1 Spanish and L1 English. Although a clear production-intuition gap was found, supporting computational views, a strong regularity in the degree of variability across test conditions, L1s, and proficiency levels was also attested, supporting representational accounts. The findings suggest morphological development in L2 Italian is consistent with structure-building models that assume no L1 transfer of functional features. Imperative verb forms in L2 Italian are proposed as defaults equivalent to the bare verb forms of L2 English and non-finite defaults of L2 French and German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we discuss methods for investigating grammatical processing in bilinguals. We will present a methodological approach that relies on: (i) linguistic theory (in our case, morphology) for the construction of experimental materials; (ii) a design that allows for direct (within-experiment, within-participant, and within-item) comparisons of the critical conditions; and (iii) data analysis techniques that make both linear and non-linear gradient effects visible. We review recent studies of masked morphological priming in bilinguals in which the application of these methodological principles revealed highly selective interactions of age of acquisition (and the native/non-native contrast) with the linguistic distinction between inflection and derivation. We believe that such considerations are not only relevant for grammatical processing experiments, but also for studying bilingualism, and its potential cognitive advantages, more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In alphabetic writing systems, the most consistent correspondences hold between written and spoken segments. Although English spelling uses the Roman alphabet and is thus largely phonographic, it also encodes non-phonological distinctions such as those among homophonic words (e.g., pair, pare, pear). We review evidence that English spelling is to some extent morphographic at the level of suffixes: some suffixes (e.g. -s and -ed) have a single constant spelling (‹-s› and ‹-ed›), despite the fact that they vary in phonological realization (-s is realized as [z], [s], or [əz], depending on the preceding segment); while other suffixes (e.g. -ic) are spelled differently from homophonous word-final phonological sequences (e.g. ‹relic› vs. ‹relick›). We explore the implications of our research for psycholinguistic findings on morphological processing of written English, with a special focus on 'affix stripping' processes. Psycholinguistic research has largely assumed the straightforward linguistic validity of morphographic spelling, without appreciating either its typologically unusual nature or the subtle and complex relation that it bears to morphology, phonology, and semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In fusional languages, inflectional affixes may encode multiple morphosyntactic features such as case, number, and gender. To determine how these features are accessed during both native (L1) and non-native (L2) word recognition, the present study compares the results from a masked visual priming experiment testing inflected adjectives of German to those of a previous overt (cross-modal) priming experiment on the same phenomenon. While for the L1 group both experiments produced converging results, a group of highly-proficient Russian L2 learners of German showed native-like modulations of repetition priming effects under overt, but not under masked priming conditions. These results indicate that not only affixes but also their morphosyntactic features are accessible during initial form-based lexical access, albeit only for L1 and not for L2 processing. We argue that this contrast is in line with other findings suggesting that non-native language processing is less influenced by structural information than the L1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The morphosyntactic property set associated with the syntactic node occupied by a word form is not invariably identical to the property set determining that word form's inflection, as evidence from Bhojpuri, Turkish, Sanskrit and Hua shows. The difference between syntactic property sets and their corresponding morphological property sets may be represented as a property mapping relating two different kinds of paradigm: a lexeme L's content paradigm specifies the range of property sets with which L may be associated in syntax ; its form paradigm specifies the (sometimes distinct) property sets that determine L's inflectional realization. Thus, a language's inflectional morphology doesn't merely specify the realization of paradigm cells: it also specifies the sometimes nontrivial linkage of content with form at the interface of syntax and semantics with morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two masked priming experiments with Greek advanced ESL speakers were run in order to reproduce the experiments reported by Silva & Clahsen (2008): our data yielded similar derivational priming but divergent results for inflectional priming. After comparing the two sets of results and examining some discrepancies between the two studies, we provide an interpretation outside the decompositional framework: morphological priming effects are not viewed as low level perceptual saliency effects but rather as the result of the form-meaning systematic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses the morphological status and the function of Spanish nominal endings -o and -a ( ciel+ o 'sky' vs. caj+ a 'box'); it is shown that both endings, plus the endings -e and -Ø, are inflectional suffixes that mark, however, not the values of an inflectional category (like nominal number or verbal tense), but the values of a feature of the syntactics of the noun - the nominal gender. The 'nominal gender' is defined as a cluster concept based on eight properties; it is a particular case of 'agreement class' opposed to 'noun class.' Some particularities of Spanish nominal gender are examined: its interaction with diminutive suffixes, gender conversion, and its 'non-prototypical' character (a parallel is drawn between Spanish nominal genders and noun classes in Fula). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Diachronica is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. 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.)

Compound formation has been a major focus of research and debate in mental lexicon research. In particular, it has been widely observed that compounds with a regular plural non-head are dispreferred, and a long line of research has examined the nature of this constraint, including which morphological, semantic or phonological properties of the non-head underlie this dispreference. While it is typically assumed that this constraint in fact leads to the barring of a compound analysis to a noun-noun string which would otherwise violate the constraint, its implementation during sentence comprehension has not been thoroughly examined. Using self-paced reading, we demonstrate that knowledge of pluralization and compound formation is immediately utilized in the assignment of structure to noun-noun strings, and that the dispreference for regular plural non-heads in fact leads the parser away from the compound analysis in favor of a more complex grammatical alternative. These results provide new evidence for the online deployment of knowledge regarding pluralization and its interaction with compound formation, and inform our understanding of how morphological information is deployed during, and impacts real-time sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the introduction of the Creole Prototype hypothesis in 1998, much of the controversy it has occasioned has centered on a question as to whether it is scientifically appropriate to reconstruct creoles as born as pidgins, rather than as results of only moderately transformational second-language acquisition or as simply mixtures of ‘features’ from assorted languages coming together. This paper first outlines traits in creoles that reveal their origin in pidgins. Then, the paper refines the characterization of the Creole Prototype’s three features, regarding inflectional morphology, tone, and compositionality of derivation-root combinations. The inflectional component is refined to incorporate Booij’s (1993) distinction between contextual and inherent inflection and Kihm’s (2003) proposal that inflectional morphology can be either bound or free. The tonal stipulation is refined in view of traits of Mon-Khmer phonology that distinguish these languages from creoles despite their analyticity, and the grammatical uses of tone in some creoles such as Papiamentu and Principense. Finally, for the derivational component, an account is proposed for the noncompositionality of reduplicated forms that have been observed in many creoles. The conclusion is that there remains a synchronic characterization possible only in languages recently born from pidgins, and impossible of older (i.e. most) languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the typology of morphological borrowing, one type has received little attention: cases where words are borrowed in several paradigmatic forms. An example of this is found in English alumnus – alumni, where Latin nouns are borrowed both in their singular and plural forms. Such borrowings lead to a coexistence of borrowed and native paradigms in one and the same language. This type of borrowing is called Parallel System Borrowing (PSB). Such patterns are wide-spread, and concern virtually all parts of morphology, including verbal inflection and pronouns. The emergence of PSB is not governed by a single sociolinguistic factor, such as the existence of learned registers (as with alumnus – alumni). In fact, it appears that some of the most spectacular cases of PSB have no relation to learned registers at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Dutch, Frisian and German dialects, bewildering morphological variation is found in the person-marking system (e.g., the Syntactic Atlas of Dutch Dialects for Dutch and Frisian, and Goossens 1994, Weiss 2005 and Fuss 2005 for German). One type of variation concerns the formation of subject clitics in clauses with inverted word order, i.e. with the subject following the verb. These elements are subsequently extended to other syntactic positions through analogy, via a pathway described by Kathol (2001): originally enclitic elements spread first to the position enclitic to the complementiser, then to verbs in sentences with regular word order, and finally, in a rare number of cases, to verbs in the sentence-final position in subclauses. This paper shows that Kathol’s proposed pathway actually comprises two similar but not identical pathways, i.e. one for specifically enclitic elements, and one for elements occurring both pro- and enclitically. This implies that developments must be modelled as an ‘analogical map’ rather than a pathway, which will be illustrated extensively with data from Dutch, Frisian and German dialects. The map will be shown to apply to more data than Kathol’s original pathway: it not only captures the extension of clitics, but also the spread of many innovative agreement markers and pronouns, and, hence, a range of person marking phenomena, including complementiser agreement (e.g., Carstens 2003, Weiss 2005), clitic doubling (e.g., Fuss 2005) and double agreement (e.g., Zwart 1997). Finally, following Hill (2007), some of the motivations underlying the change and the factors determining their direction are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English speakers disfavor compounds containing regular plurals compared to irregular ones. Haskell, MacDonald and Seidenberg (2003) attribute this phenomenon to the rarity of compounds containing words with the phonological properties of regular plurals. Five experiments test this proposal. Experiment 1 demonstrated that novel regular plurals (e.g., loonks-eater) are disliked in compounds compared to irregular plurals with illicit (hence less frequent) phonological patterns (e.g., leevk-eater, plural of loovk). Experiments 2–3 found that people show no dispreference for compounds containing nouns that merely sound like regular plurals (e.g., hose-installer vs. pipe-installer). Experiments 4–5 showed a robust effect of morphological regularity when phonological familiarity was controlled: Compounds containing regular plural nonwords (e.g., gleeks-hunter, plural of gleek) were disfavored relative to irregular, phonologically-identical, plurals (e.g., breex-container, plural of broox). The dispreference for regular plurals inside compounds thus hinges on the morphological distinction between irregular and regular forms and it is irreducible to phonological familiarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally three independent types of analogical change in inflectional paradigms are distinguished: proportional analogy, paradigmatic leveling and analogical extension. However, the investigation of the data reveals that out of these types only that of proportional analogy can be empirically verified, being supported by clear evidence from languages with well documented history. Moreover, as shown by data from Russian, Old High German dialects, Old Saxon, Old English, and Latin, even in the most secure cases of paradigmatic leveling or analogical extension found in the literature the assumption of proportional analogy is either probable or cannot be excluded. Consequently the three traditional types of analogical change seem to differ with respect to their ontological status. On the one hand, paradigmatic leveling, i.e. the elimination of allomorphy in inflectional paradigms, is to be viewed merely as a motivation for change whose operating principle really is proportional analogy. On the other hand, analogical extension, i.e., the extension of already existing inflection forms through affixes with comparable function, seems to be just a possible way to describe the results of changes which, again, may in fact be instances of proportional analogy. These findings have the following implications for linguistic theory and practice.  In practical work on inflectional morphology paradigmatic leveling and analogical extension without the use of proportional analogy can no longer be used in explanations on reconstructed stages of language development. All proposed explanations of this kind are to be supported by establishing an underlying proportional analogy or reconsidered if this is impossible.  The proposed distinction between the motivational factors of change, to which paradigmatic leveling may belong, and its operational principle, which always seems to be proportional analogy, leads to a new three-level model of analogical change in inflectional paradigms: On the first level there are the motivational factors, on the second the proportional relations, and on the third level we find the factors governing the choice of a particular proportional relation.  Furthermore, it can be shown that a number of morphological processes that have been described recently, such as the spread of the so called ‘superstable inflectional markers’ in nominal paradigms, the ‘externalization of inflection’ in pronouns and ‘product-oriented modifications’ in verbal conjugation, actually operate on the basis of proportional analogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]