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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 important question in understanding language processing is whether there are distinct neural mechanisms for processing specific types of grammatical structure, such as syntax versus morphology, and, if so, what the basis of the specialization might be. However, this question is difficult to study: A given language typically conveys its grammatical information in one way (e.g., English marks "who did what to whom" using word order, and German uses inflectional morphology). American Sign Language permits either device, enabling a direct within-language comparison. During functional (f)MRI, native signers viewed sentences that used only word order and sentences that included inflectional morphology. The two sentence types activated an overlapping network of brain regions, but with differential patterns. Word order sentences activated left-lateralized areas involved in working memory and lexical access, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus, the inferior parietal lobe, and the middle temporal gyrus. In contrast, inflectional morphology sentences activated areas involved in building and analyzing combinatorial structure, including bilateral inferior frontal and anterior temporal regions as well as the basal ganglia and medial temporal/limbic areas. These findings suggestthat for a given linguistic function, neural recruitment may depend upon on the cognitive resources required to process specific types of linguistic cues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of the continuity between inflection and derivation as posed by the Old English suffixes -a, -e, -o and -u. On the structural side, the morphological analysis that has been carried out focuses on the overlapping of inflectional and derivational phenomena. On the functional side, affixation is analysed in the constituent projection and inflection in the operator projection of the Layered Structure of the Word (LSW), where the derivational affix constitutes a morphological pivot and the inflectional affix a morphological controller. The conclusion is reached that, whereas the LSW allows for a unified treatment of derivation and inflection in the synchronic axis, it requires further attention in the area of inflection as a Word/Complex Word operator. In this line, this article demonstrates that the insertion of gender, number and case operators in the top layer stresses the morphological character of the LSW, while it is more consistent with the grammatical nature of gender in Old English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an analysis of the German noun inflection, based on the theory of minimalist morphology developed by Wunderlich and Fabri (1995). Overview of the minimalist morphology; German noun paradigms in minimalist morphology; Inflectional types and their hierarchical relations; Assignment of inflectional types to lexemes.

Copyright of Journal of Linguistic Research / Dilbilim Arastirmalari Dergisi is the property of Bogazici University Press 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.)

Most approaches to inflectional morphology propose a single-default representation. This research on Jordanian Arabic offers an analysis having more than one default inflection. This is accomplished by showing that unlike previous morphological accounts like the single-mechanism model, dual-mechanism model, and the schema model (cf. Pinker, 1990; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; and Bybee, 1985), the current research relies upon the 'openness' mechanism to define defaultness. Openness is thus defined as the ability of the inflectional process to accept new forms into a language. The corpus used in this research contains diminutives, verbal nouns, derivatives, and loan words used in JA. Other defining factors are modified in this research, such as regularity (rule-based mechanism) and productivity (type frequency). The findings of this research indicate that there are two possible defaults in Jordanian Arabic ordered in terms of openness: the sound feminine plural and the iambic broken plural. The findings have the implication that a language's grammar can have a multi-default system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utmost natural language processing systems practices stemmer as a distinct module in their architecture. Specially, it is crucial for developing, machine translator, speech recognizer and search engines. In linguistic morphology, stemming is the process for reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their root, stem or base form. In this article, a stemming system for Afar-af is presented. This system takes as input a word/terms and removes its affixes (suffix, prefix) rendering to a rule based algorithm. This stemmer is not adequate to describe every rule applied in Afar-af word formation. Consequently, N-gram is combined with the rule to handle cases that are not covered by rule in the hybrid approach of this stemmer. The algorithm follows the well-known Porter algorithm for the English language and it is advanced according to the grammatical rules of the Afar, language. Afar-af morphology was studied and defined in order to model the language and develop an automatic procedure for conflation. The inflectional and derivational morphologies of the language are discussed Afar-af words are very rich in morphology and requires an operative stemming algorithm, which can regulate diverse morphological arrangements that are associated with words. An evaluation of the system indicates that the algorithms accuracy works with better performance than other earlier stemming algorithms for Afar-af giving accuracy of 98.73 percent. Furthermore, Possible extensions of the planned work and advance evaluation approaches are briefly reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heteroclisis is the property of a lexeme whose inflectional paradigm involves two or more distinct inflection classes. Although heteroclisis is widely observable, its implications for grammatical theory remain underexplored, perhaps because its canonical instances have the appearance of sporadic lexical exceptions. But heteroclisis cannot be assumed to lack any role in the definition of a language's morphology, since (i) it is sometimes highly systematic, involving whole classes of lexemes, and (ii) it obeys a universal constraint. These two facts show that heteroclisis is rule- governed. On the assumption that inflectional morphology involves a linkage of content-paradigms with form-paradigms (Stump 2002), heteroclisis can be seen as a kind of mismatch regulated by rules of paradigm linkage. Such rules account for the range of empirical phenomena subsumed by observations (i) and (ii). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research work has been carried out to study the acquisition of Manipuri verb morphology in monolingual children who are in the age range of 2 to 4. The study can thus reveal the actual developmental stages of acquisition of verb morphology across the years of acquisition. The study of the acquisition of verb inflection in Manipuri has also helped in explaining the nature of syntactic development, as the verb in Manipuri carries syntactic load of a sentence since verb inflection, basically, deals with tense and aspect, phi-features and mood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics is the property of Nordic Council for Reindeer Husbandry Research 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.)

I specify a typology for the extreme of inflectional morphology, namely suppletion (as in go ~ went). This is an unusual enterprise within typology, and it requires a 'canonical' approach. That is, I define the canonical or best instance, through a set of converging criteria, and use this point in theoretical space to locate the various occurring types. Thus the criteria establish the dimensions along which specific instances of suppletion are found, allowing me to calibrate examples out from the canonical. The criteria fall into two main areas, those internal to the lexeme and those external to it. Moreover, I find interactions with other morphological phenomena and discuss four of them: syncretism, periphrasis, overdifferentiation, and reduplication. These remarkable instances of suppletion, particularly when in interaction with other phenomena, extend the boundary of the notion 'possible word.' Besides laying out the possibilities for the specific phenomenon of suppletion, I show how a canonical approach allows progress in typology, even in the most challenging areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on "Francophonie," a term used to refer to all languages over the world that have been inflected by the spoken French language. "Francophonie" focuses on many phonic, aural, and oral quotients of textuality which have not been accounted for in translation. It focuses on several French language-speaking communities. It consists of many languages that are based on French colonialism.

The purpose of the study was three fold: one, to investigate the developmental trend of inflectional morphemes, second, to study the relation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension and lastly, to compare the development of inflection between genders. Marathi is an inflected and an agglutinative language; where affixes are attached to the root morpheme altering the person, number gender and tense. Marathi has poly-morphemic words and free word order. Hence knowledge of inflection is highly critical for comprehension of Marathi sentences. Sixty participants, thirty males and thirty females, from Grade III and Grade IV, were assessed on morphological awareness by a judgment task. Reading comprehension was assessed by answering questions on a reading passage. Results indicated significant developmental trend in inflectional morphemes from Grade III to Grade IV. Case marker was significant predictor of reading comprehension in grade III. No significant difference was observed between genders. We conclude that awareness of morphological skills improves reading comprehension and children start to read with meaning. The findings of this study and previous research suggest inclusion of assessment of morphological knowledge in early reading evaluation and intervention. It may also contribute to the assessment and intervention of children with learning disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the syntax, morphology, and semantics associated with the verbal aspect in the Russian language. Topics discussed include the prefix-verb compound (PFV) in the Russian language, the role of inflection in the Russian language, and the use of verbal prefixes in the Russian language.

The paper borrows the concept of (non)concatenation from morphology and applies it to word-formation patterns both within and outside the scope of derivational morphology, arguing at the same time for a broader, lexicological approach to lexeme-formation (as a model of vocabulary expansion) than that identifying word-formation with derivational morphology. It arrives at the conclusion that the binary division of lexeme-formation into either concatenative or nonconcatenative patterns does not reflect the character of many patterns accurately enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work, we investigate a special type of CS below word level, which is observed in mixed compound words. In particular, we discuss mixed Italian–German compounds; this combination is particularly interesting since, in the two languages, the process of compounding follows different rules for what concerns the position of the head, as well as gender and number inflection. An Acceptability Judgment Task was administered to some bilingual speakers, who assessed the acceptability of mixed compounds inserted in both German and Italian clauses. Our conclusion is that it is possible to have mixed compounds, though this option is severely constrained, especially because of the different word order parameters exhibited by the two languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with lexical borrowing and the morphological integration of loan words in Kaliardá, a Greek-based antilanguage, spoken in the urban areas of Greece by socially marginalized communities of cross-dressers, transgender people, and gay men. It is shown that the accommodation of most loans follows the general rules of Modern Greek morphology, namely, the stem-based word formation and compulsory inflection. However, for a considerable part of the borrowed items, there are certain morphological deviances compared to loan formation in Greek. More particularly, there is an overuse of the feminine grammatical gender, assigned to -human nouns, contrary to a neuterization tendency displayed by the Greek language, while the masculine grammatical gender is scarcely employed, and a significant number of feminine loans end in -o and -u in the citation form. Verbal loans do not substantially differ from those in Greek, with the exception of the frequent use of verbal periphrastic formations, consisting of an auxiliary inflected verb type, avélo or vuélo (both loans themselves), and a nominal item. Sometimes, avélo is also employed as a mediator for the integration of English verbs. The data under examination are drawn from a Kaliardá dictionary. Their accuracy is checked with 10 Kaliardá speakers in 2 big Greek cities, Athens and Patras, and they are enriched by a small oral corpus of 32 words collected through interviews. The investigated data comprise items from Italian, French and English, three principal donor languages in Kaliardá, but there are also loans from other languages, mainly from Romani and Turkish, but also from Albanian, German and Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the contrastive use of tense-aspect inflections in early child Romanian. It focuses on the use of the prezent, perfect compus and the periphrastic future morphologies. It finds evidence of the ability to inflect a significant number of the verbs in all the tenses mentioned below the age of 3;0. Additionally, by analysing the context of occurrence of these child predicates, it shows that a basic system of temporal deixis becomes operative before the above-mentioned age. Consequently, the evidence presented by the paper runs against the claims of the Aspect First Hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses morphological markedness as a trigger and target of postsyntactic feature-deletion operations (impoverishment; Bobaljik 2003, Bonet 1991, Halle 1997, Halle and Marantz 1993, Harley 2008, Noyer 1992, 1998) and, taking number as a case study, argues that dual is more marked than plural, in accordance with traditional and more recent approaches to inflectional morphology. In a system that employs abstract binary features, dual may be represented by a combination of the features [-singular,-augmented] (Conklin 1962, Noyer 1992), and the feature [-augmented] is marked in the context of [-singular]. This article draws a formal distinction between markedness-targeted impoverishment and markedness-triggered impoverishment, arguing that the latter is an important diagnostic for morphological markedness. Exemplification comes from syncretisms either directed at or conditioned by the dual in Sámi, Sorbian, Slovenian, Warlpiri, and Zuni, the last of which has been argued by Cowper (2005) to show that dual is less marked than plural. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on the licensing conditions on empty categories in DP which deal with the distribution of the null noun pro in adjectival contexts where N-pro is submitted to requirements of formal licensing and identification. Attribution of contrast between English and other languages with respect to N-pro; Possible argument for the adjectival morphology in languages other than English.

Part III. Deals with the morphology and the syntax of the New Braunfels German (NBG). Description of the plurals of nouns in NBG; Inflection of pronouns in NBG; Analysis of the descriptive and limiting adjectives involved in NBG.

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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.)

The suitability of different parsing methods for different languages is an important topic in syntactic parsing. Especially lesser-studied languages, typologically different from the languages for which methods have originally been developed, pose interesting challenges in this respect. This article presents an investigation of data-driven dependency parsing of Turkish, an agglutinative, free constituent order language that can be seen as the representative of a wider class of languages of similar type. Our investigations show that morphological structure plays an essential role in finding syntactic relations in such a language. In particular, we show that employing sublexical units called inflectional groups, rather than word forms, as the basic parsing units improves parsing accuracy. We test our claim on two different parsing methods, one based on a probabilistic model with beam search and the other based on discriminative classifiers and a deterministic parsing strategy, and show that the usefulness of sublexical units holds regardless of the parsing method. We examine the impact of morphological and lexical information in detail and show that, properly used, this kind of information can improve parsing accuracy substantially. Applying the techniques presented in this article, we achieve the highest reported accuracy for parsing the Turkish Treebank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Oriental Studies / Sarkiyat Mecmuasi is the property of Istanbul Universitesi Edebiyat Fakultesi 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.)

Language learning occurs in distinct phases. Whereas some improvement is evident during training, offline memory consolidation processes that take place after the end of training play an important role in learning of linguistic information. The timing of offline consolidation is thought to depend on the type of task, with generalization of implicit knowledge suggested to take more time and sleep to consolidate. The current study aims to investigate individual differences in the timing of consolidation following learning of morphological inflections in a novel language in typical adults. Participants learned to make plural inflections in an artificial language, where inflection was based on morpho-phonological regularities. Participants were trained in the evening, and consolidation was measured after two intervals: 12 h (one night) and 36 h (two nights) post training. We measured both inflection of trained items, which may rely on item-specific learning, and generalization to new untrained items, which requires extraction of morpho-phonological regularities. The results for both trained and un-trained items showed two patterns of consolidation: early versus late, that is while some participants improved during the first night, others, who deteriorated in performance during the first night, improved in the later consolidation interval. Importantly, phonological awareness in L1 predicted early consolidation for trained items. Furthermore, there was no association between participants' consolidation trajectory in trained and untrained items. Our results suggest that consolidation timing depends on the interaction between task characteristics and individual abilities. Moreover, the results show that prior meta-linguistic knowledge predicts the quality of early consolidation processes. These results are consistent with studies in rodents and humans, showing that prior knowledge accelerates consolidation of newly learnt episodic memory. Finally, the rate of consolidation across exposures to the language might explain some of the variability found in the attained level of second language proficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the syntax of the null pro subject in Early Modern English, Standard Arabic and Modern Standard English and points out how the pro-drop parameter works in these languages. The objective is to show how in languages with rich agreement inflection like Early Modern English and Standard Arabic, the null pro is allowed in the structural subject position of finite clauses, whereas in languages with poor agreement morphology like Modern Standard English it is not permitted. It further illustrates that the rich AGR inflections in Early Modern English and Standard Arabic serve to identify the null pro subject, since the feature-content of the latter (i.e. the pro) can be recovered from the AGR morpheme on the verb morphology. Following Chomsky's (1995) minimalist analysis, I show how the nominative Case and agreement features of the (pro) subject are licensed and how the tense features of the verb are checked in Early Modern English and Standard Arabic. Furthermore, I present an alternative analysis which accounts for the occurrence of the null pro in finite clauses of Standard Arabic. I assume that the D-feature of I(NFL) is strong in the VSO and SVO structures with null pro subjects in Standard Arabic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows the interdependence between semantics and pragmatics by analyzing two morphological phenomena of Spanish, one derivative ?the creation of deverbal nouns meaning ?action of 'x'? and the other inflective ?the use of future subjunctive in conditional si clauses (protasis)?. The results will show that the selection of the forms generated by these morphological processes is not entirely independent of certain pragmatic aspects, such as the use of particular language varieties (i.e., register), certain text types or the general configuration of the speech event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analytical goal of this paper is to provide a treatment of number and aspect as syntactic properties of the Tohono 'O'odham sign. It situates duplication (one of the phonological expressions of syntactic number) and subtraction (one of the phonological expressions of aspect) within this treatment. Morphological analysis might be easier if there were a one-to-one relationship between grammatical notion and phonological expression--if, for example, 'plural' number in Language-L were always and only associated with the presence of the morph Z. Whether the investigation begins with 'plural' or with Z, it would cover the same ground. However, the properties of Tohono 'O'odham morphology, where duplication is only one of the expressions of syntactic number and subtraction only one of the expressions of aspect, are relatively common. This paper argues, therefore, that the grammatical notion, not the phonological expression, provides the appropriate starting point for morphological analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In natural language processing, morphological generation refers to the creation of the appropriate inflected forms of words based on a predetermined set of morphological rules. However, it might be difficult to generate morphology in languages with intricate morphological systems, like the Kurdish Sorani dialect. The concatenative morphology-based unique technique to morphological generation in Kurdish Sorani is proposed in this research. The suggested strategy tries to get over the drawbacks of current approaches and enhance the precision and effectiveness of morphological generation in Kurdish Sorani. The suggested technique generates all conceivable subjective and objective pronouns in both positive and negative forms, together with the various verb tenses for Kurdish morphology. The study presents a detailed examination of Kurdish Sorani's morphology and points out the difficulties in coming up with the right verbforms. The authors suggest a concatenative morphology-based morphological generating system that comprises of a morphological analyzer and a morphological generator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a set of four testimonies from Brazilian researchers who fell in love with Distributed Morphology after the publication of the inaugural article by Morris Halle and Alec Marantz, "Distributed morphology and the pieces of inflection", in 1993. This theory proposes a new architecture of grammar that has a lot in common with syntax and little to do with traditional morphology - for example, the ancient lexicon is broken down into three different lists. Each of the contributors was invited to answer the following questions: (i) What is the feature of Distributed Morphology that leads you to prefer this version of generative grammar to ground your work?, (ii) What was the first subject you explored based on this theory?, (iii) Why does this model seem to you more interesting than the traditional generative one?, (iv) Which subjects did you encourage your students to explore in the past and which ones do you currently encourage? What are the interfaces of the grammar that are highlighted in each case?, (v) Which questions do you plan to explore in the near future? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the state-denoting meaning of its first component gets more and more bleached, nowadays the disyllabic descriptive adjective has transmuted into a gradable adjective. However, the state-denoting meaning of the first component does not totally die out; the disyllabic descriptive adjective, therefore, can only occur with some specific type of degree modifiers. So, the conflict between the assumption made by previous studies like Zhu (1980) that adjectives able to undergo reduplication must be gradable and the observation made by them that disyllabic descriptive adjectives cannot occur with any degree adverb can be solved. For the disyllabic descriptive adjective, the reduplication morphology functions to revive the degree operator function of the first component and make it able to bind and saturate the degree argument of the second component. This distinguishes the disyllabic descriptive adjective from the disyllabic attributive adjective in the reduplication pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research, for example in English, French, German, and Spanish, has investigated the interplay between grammatical gender information and stereotype gender information (e.g., that secretaries are usually female, in many cultures), in the interpretation of both singular noun phrases (the secretary) and plural nouns phrases, particularly so-called generic masculines-nouns that have masculine grammatical gender but that should be able to refer to both groups of men and mixed groups of men and women. Since the studies have been conducted in cultures with broadly similar stereotypes, the effects generally reflect differences in the grammatical systems of the languages. Russian has a more complex grammatical gender system than the languages previously studied, and, unlike those languages frequently presents examples in which grammatical gender is marked on the predicate (in an inflection on the verb). In this study we collected stereotype norms for 160 role names in Russian, providing a useful resource for further work in this language. We also conducted a reading time study examining the interaction of grammatical and stereotype gender information in the interpretation of both Russian singular noun phrases, and plurals that were (potentially) generic masculines. Our results show that, although both types of gender information are used, when available, the effects of grammatical marking on the predicate are not as strong as those of such marking on subject noun phrases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arabic is a highly inflected language and a morpho-syntactically complex language with many differences compared to several languages that are heavily studied. It may thus require good pre-processing as it presents significant challenges for Natural Language Processing (NLP), specifically for Machine Translation (MT). This paper aims to examine how Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) can be improved using rule-based pre-processing and language analysis. We describe a hybrid translation approach coupling an Arabic–French statistical machine translation system using the Moses decoder with additional morphological rules that reduce the morphology of the source language (Arabic) to a level that makes it closer to that of the target language (French). Moreover, we introduce additional swapping rules for a structural matching between the source language and the target language. Two structural changes involving the positions of the pronouns and verbs in both the source and target languages have been attempted. The results show an improvement in the quality of translation and a gain in terms of BLEU score after introducing a pre-processing scheme for Arabic and applying these rules based on morphological variations and verb re-ordering (VS into SV constructions) in the source language (Arabic) according to their positions in the target language (French). Furthermore, a learning curve shows the improvement in terms on BLEU score under scarce- and large-resources conditions. The proposed approach is completed without increasing the amount of training data or radically changing the algorithms that can affect the translation or training engines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioural evidence suggests that English regular past tense forms are automatically decomposed into their stem and affix (played = play+ed) based on an implicit linguistic rule, which does not apply to the idiosyncratically formed irregular forms (kept). Additionally, regular, but not irregular inflections, are thought to be processed through the procedural memory system (left inferior frontal gyrus, basal ganglia, cerebellum). It has been suggested that this distinction does not to apply to second language (L2) learners of English; however, this has not been tested at the brain level. This fMRI study used a masked-priming task with regular and irregular prime-target pairs (played-play/kept-keep) to investigate morphological processing in native and highly proficient late L2 English speakers. No between-groups differences were revealed. Compared to irregular pairs, regular pairs activated the pars opercularis, bilateral caudate nucleus and the right cerebellum, which are part of the procedural memory network and have been connected with the processing of morphologically complex forms. Our study is the first to provide evidence for native-like involvement of the procedural memory system in processing of regular past tense by late L2 learners of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hungarian nouns take some seventeen or so suffixal case inflections, e.g. ház ‘house (nominative)’ ∼ ház-ban ‘in a house (inessive)’. Personal pronouns have corresponding case-marked forms but these are not formed by means of suffixal case inflections. Instead, postposition-like stems expressing the individual cases are inflected for each pronoun’s person and number in exactly the same way that nouns inflect for possessor agreement or true postpositions inflect for a pronominal complement (inessive benn-e ‘in him’, benn-ük ‘in them; cf. könyv-e ‘his book’, könyv-ük ‘their book’ from the noun könyv; mögött-e ‘behind him’, mögött-ük ‘behind them’ from the postposition mögött). This manner of case marking embodies a highly unusual pattern of ‘functor-argument reversal’, which is problematic for many models of morphosyntax. In our account of this phenomenon, we adopt the modification of Stump’s ( 2001 ) Paradigm Function Morphology proposed by Stump ( 2002 ); this modification (‘PFM2’) distinguishes form paradigms (expressing morphological properties) from content paradigms (expressing syntactic properties). We also distinguish absolute forms from (bound) conjunct forms of the case postpositions. Pronominal case forms are built on the case postpositions’ absolute forms and a rule of paradigm linkage that effects functor-argument reversal guarantees that their person-number inflection realizes the content of each pronoun. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Ancient Greek grammar, specifically noting aspects of paradigm and morphology, using the work "On Prosody in General," by Herodian. It comments on the "word-and-paradigm" approach in Ancient Greek grammatical theory and considers its impact on the nominative singular, cases, and numerals. Other topics explored include Pseudo-Arcadius' Epitome, inflection, and grammatical numbers.

This article examines morphological causatives of intransitive verbs in Mapudungun (also Mapuche, Araucanian; Chile, Argentina). The patterning of intransitives in causativization reveals a split system, where the choice of causative suffix is governed by factors of animacy and control. One class, "inactive" intransitive verbs, is characterized as having members that are specialized, nonproductive, and "uncontrolled." The second and larger class, "active" intransitives, consists of animate verbs that take arguments with differing degrees of control and agentivity. Thus, in Mapudungun, the contrast between "inactive" and "active" intransitive verbs is overtly marked by the causative suffixes rather than by pronominal inflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) who are acquiring English often show a more serious deficit in grammatical morphology than in other areas of language. Because most grammatical morphemes appear to be associated with functional categories such as Determiner (De), Complementizer (Comp), and Inflection (Infl), these extraordinary deficits in grammatical morphology might be attributable to a pronounced delay in the acquisition of these, categories or to an underlying grammar that lacks them. In this article, we examined the status of the functional categories Det, Comp, and Infl in the grammar of one child with SLI seen at four ages: 3;9, 4;3, 4;5, and 5;2. The results were consistent with an interpretation of a slowly developing grammar with elements from functional categories especially late in emergence and protracted in development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkish allows finite verb forms that carry tense marking but no overt aspect marking. Unlike those that contain both tense and aspect marking, aspectless forms also lack an auxiliary copula. This is a key difference that Kelepir takes as evidence that aspectless forms derive from clausal structures that lack an aspect projection. However, syntax-morphology mapping is not always isomorphic. Therefore, we also evaluate this proposal from a semantic point of view, raising both empirical and theoretical questions: (1) Is there any aspectual inference associated with morphologically aspectless verbs? (2) Are structures where tense directly combines with a VP compositionally interpretable? While Kelepir's proposal seems to face challenges in both directions, we argue that the semantic considerations are, in fact, consistent with the clausal structure Kelepir argues for, with broader implications for clause structure and compositional interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a sketch grammar of a new bilingual mixed language based on data gathered through interaction with its last native speakers. The language, which we call Posha of Çankırı, is spoken in central Turkey. The source languages are Turkish and Lomavren, another bilingual mixed language for which the source languages are Armenian and some Central Indo-Aryan varieties. In Posha of Çankırı, the mixing happens in the nominal morphology and in the lexicon while the verbal roots and verbal morphology are entirely from the ancestral language, Lomavren, albeit with certain minor changes. The Indo-Aryan layer of vocabulary is rather thin and the Indo-Aryan retentions in grammar can only be speculated. We show that the emergence of Posha of Çankırı has been initiated by language shift, but that its ultimate defining characteristic is L2 insertions into (some distorted version of) the L1. The study contributes to the documentation of lesser known new varieties and touches upon topics such as the mechanism involved in the emergence of bilingual mixed languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses facts about case allomorphy and possessive morphology in Balkar, a Turkic language spoken in southern Russia, to contribute to the examination of the internal structure of case. A number of recent findings in morpho-syntactic research indicate that case markers have a richer internal structure than their surface appearance typically suggests. Specifically, many works in this vein argue based on cross-linguistic facts about phenomena such as suppletion and syncretism that case features are organized into an implicational containment hierarchy. In this hierarchy, accusative case contains the features of the nominative, and the accusative is itself a sub-part of oblique cases. Many arguments for case containment have relied on diagnostics that are less direct than surface-level morpho-syntactic analysis. In this paper, I argue that there is a part of Balkar grammar that shows the containment of accusative case by obliques in a surface-evident way. While such containment is not normally evident in Balkar, I argue that in certain possessed oblique NPs we see an overt expression of the accusative, except when phonological factors interfere. I go on to discuss other related topics about Balkar and the case containment hypothesis more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young children learning Malayalam use morphological categories and inflections quite productively and accurately in general. However, their utterances sometimes show the use of extra morphological material (or commission errors), revealing mismatches between adult and child grammars. In this paper, we present a survey of such errors that are observed in longitudinally collected, spontaneous speech production data of monolingual Malayalam and bilingual Malayalam–English acquiring children in order to identify both the range of commission errors and the underlying grammatical features that may have triggered them. A close analysis of the data shows us that such errors are restricted to a few grammatical loci and shed light on the specific challenges that some grammatical constraints pose for developing grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polymorphism has long been recognized as a crucial dimension of the nature of language. One of the merits of dialectology and dialectologists is emphasis on the inherently variable and polymorphic nature of linguistic systems, which are always in a state of relative equilibrium and stability. The most striking features of the Occitan data that will be discussed lies in the possibility of finding various forms in a given cell in certain paradigms; more strikingly, it will be shown that two or three (even four) paradigms for one and the same (tense) verb may coexist in the same variety. It will be argued that if polymorphism is the natural state of linguistic systems, it is also anti-economic from a cognitive and processing point of view. It follows that the diachronic evolution of languages tends to develop adaptive solutions to circumvent the potential drawbacks of extreme polymorphism: "natural selection" leads to the reduction or elimination of morphological proliferation. Of course, before reduction or elimination take place, a more or less extended period of time may elapse during which a preference for some paradigmatic options may arise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate zero-derived nouns based on irregular verbs in Greek. This is an under-explored area in Greek morpho-syntax, and in this paper, we will make three main contributions. First, we will discuss the fact that the overwhelming majority of these nouns are feminine, while neuter nouns are considerably less represented and masculine nouns are almost nonexistent. As feminine is taken to be the semantically marked gender in the case of animate nouns, asserting female sex, and neuter is argued to be the default gender in Greek for inanimates, the fact that zero abstract nouns are feminine is surprising. We will argue that feminine is the default in the case of zero derivation by exploiting an analysis of flavors of n. Second, we will show that, contrary to the findings in earlier literature, certain zero-derived nouns do have argument structure, similarly to their affixed counterparts. As not all zero-derived nouns have argument structure, we will appeal to complex head formation to explain the properties of those zero-derived nouns that have an eventive interpretation but do not surface with arguments. Finally, we will turn to an examination of the size of the domain that is nominalized. Since, in our cases, we observe root allomorphy conditioned by a nominal affix in the presence of a zero verbal head, we will suggest that Pruning is the mechanism that allows this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many so-called 'zero tense'-marked (which we define as morphologically reduced and underspecified inflections) or untensed verb forms found in tenseless languages, have been characterized as context dependent for their temporal and aspectual interpretation, with the verb's aspectual content (either as event structure or viewpoint properties) being given more or less prominent roles in their temporal anchoring. In this paper, we focus on a morpho-phonologically reduced inflectional verbal paradigm in Anindilyakwa (Groote Eylandt archipelago, NT, Australia), which is both temporally and aspectually underspecified, and constitutes an instance of zero tense as defined above. On the basis of a quantitative study of an annotated corpus of zero-inflected utterances, we establish that in the absence of independent overt or covert temporal information, the temporal anchoring of this 'zero tense' exhibits complex patterns of sensitivity to event structural parameters. Notably we establish that while dynamicity/stativity and telicity/atelicity are to some extent valuable predictors for the temporal interpretation of zero tense in Anindilyakwa, only atomicity (i.e., event punctuality) and boundedness categorically impose a past temporal anchoring—this confirms insights found in previous works, both on Anindilyakwa and on other languages, while also differing from other generalisations contained in these works. Our analysis also shows that unlike several zero tenses identified in various languages (especially in Pidgins and Creoles), Anindilyakwa zero tense-marked dynamic utterances do not correlate with a past temporal reading. Rather, we show that Anindilyakwa seems to come closest to languages possessing zero tensed-verbs (or tenseless verbs) where boundedness monotonically enforces a past temporal anchoring, such as Navajo and Mandarin Chinese. We also show that aspect-independent temporal information appears to determine the temporal anchoring of all zero tense-marked unbounded atelic utterances (both stative and dynamic) in Anindilyakwa—a fact at once conflicting with some claims made in previous works on zero tenses, while confirming results from past studies of Indigenous languages of the Americas (especially Yucatec Maya), concerning the role of temporal anaphora in the temporal interpretation of 'tenseless' verb forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A considerable body of experimental data currently exists on the representation and processing of derived words. However, no theoretical account has led to a consensus so far, due in part to inconsistencies in empirical results which show either the presence or the absence of signs of early morphological decomposition during lexical access. In this paper, we present the results of a meta-analysis that sought to examine the robustness of the masked morphological priming effect (MMP) in native and non-native speakers. This effect is indexed by faster responses to targets preceded by morphologically related primes vs. unrelated primes (e.g., fighter-FIGHT < needle-FIGHT), and is perhaps the most widespread effect used to test whether speakers of a given language are sensitive to the morphological components of words at early stages of lexical access. To this end, we selected 10 masked priming lexical decision studies (16 experiments) conducted with native and non-native speakers. Variables such as prime duration and level of L2 proficiency were considered in the analyses to assess their impact on the MMP effect. Results showed significant MMP effects, which were restricted to native speakers. No modulations were found for the prime duration. Results are interpreted in light of prevalent models of complex word processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]