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Walenty Szylarski is the author of two Polish grammar books, one in the form of manuscript of 1767 and the other one published in Lviv in 1770. The subject matter of the analysis is five normative resolutions proposed by Szylarski. They concerned: 1) the use of a diacritic over a, 2) the position of ą in the alphabet; 3) the spelling of j before a vowel; 4) the nominative and accusative cases of singular neuter nouns ending with -ę; 5) the instrumental and locative cases of singular and instrumental case of plural masculine and neuter adjectives. Szylarski's suggestions concerning orthography had two basic causes: one was the lack of standardised, generally accepted rules of o rthography (fluctuations in the use of endings), the other was the incompatibility of the spelling convention and the properties of language in use (j, -ę in the final position, position of ą in the alphabet, use of a diacritic over the conjunction a). Some of the orthographic proposals were noticed, while others were not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article presents a synchronic description of the morphology of adjectives in the highly endangered Neo-Aramaic dialects of ʿAqra in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. It discusses the morphology of adjectives in these dialects as used in the sixties of the last century. In particular, the article highlights adjectival patterns, inflectional features, and the adaptation of loanwords from Kurdish, Arabic, and Turkish. The article contributes to the description of the grammar of some 150 North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects in the Kurdistan region that are gradually falling into disuse, due to internal disputes, wars, economic crises, and globalisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to inflecting adjectives for case, number, and gender, the early Germanic languages inflect adjectives as either strong or weak. Scholarly consensus is lacking regarding what triggers this fourth inflectional category, i.e. why an adjective surfaces as either strong or weak. While the traditional school of thought held that weak adjectives surface with definite determiners, some recent scholarship has argued that a semantic force such as definiteness or classification is responsible. To evaluate the two positions, I compared attributive adjectives in the Old High German translation of Tatian's Diatessaron with the corresponding passages in Gothic and Old English. The conclusion supports the traditional school of thought that determiners trigger weak adjectives and refutes the idea that semantics is primarily responsible for whether an adjective surfaces as strong or weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do late proficient bilinguals process morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic information in their non-native language (L2)? How is this information represented in the L2 mental lexicon? And what are the neural signatures of L2 morphosyntactic and lexical-semantic processing? We addressed these questions in one behavioral and two ERP priming experiments on inflected German adjectives testing a group of advanced late Russian learners of German in comparison to native speaker (L1) controls. While in the behavioral experiment, the L2 learners performed native-like, the ERP data revealed clear L1/L2 differences with respect to the temporal dynamics of grammatical processing. Specifically, our results show that L2 morphosyntactic processing yielded temporally and spatially extended brain responses relative to L1 processing, indicating that grammatical processing of inflected words in an L2 is more demanding and less automatic than in the L1. However, this group of advanced L2 learners showed native-like lexical-semantic processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study uses event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the temporal sequencing of structural (grammatical) and lexical (semantic) properties of complex words during language comprehension. Morphologically complex words do not only consist of stems and affixes (e.g., ‘feel’+‘-s’), but affixes also contain grammatical structure, viz. feature bundles specifying their morpho-syntactic functions (e.g., -s= [3rd person, singular, present tense]). We examined inflected adjectives of German, which consist of an unaltered stem plus a portmanteau affix encoding case, number and gender. The same group of 24 adult native speakers was tested in two cross-modal ERP priming experiments separately studying effects of lexical–semantic relatedness and related affixes. The results of these experiments revealed clearly distinct brain potentials. Prime-target overlap with respect to morpho-syntactic features was associated with a reduced positivity, whereas lexical-level priming led to a reduced negativity. The former was most pronounced between 200 and 300ms and the latter in a later time window, between 300 and 400ms. We interpret the reduced early positivity as reflecting ease of grammatical processing effort in case of primed (relative to unprimed) morpho-syntactic features and the reduced negativity as signaling facilitation in lexical retrieval for primed (compared to unprimed) words. Our ERP results indicate that grammatical information becomes available earlier than semantic information providing support for structure-first models of language processing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article adds to the evidence that the Split Morphology Hypothesis (SMH) (Anderson 1982; Scalise 1984; Perlmutter 1988) is incorrect. Scalise (1984) and Anderson (1992) claim that inflectional morphology must always be ‘peripheral with respect to derivation’. Booij (1994) challenges the SMH with evidence from a range of languages, and concludes that while this may hold for contextual inflection (e.g. agreement and case marking), it does not hold true for inherent inflection (e.g. noun number or verb tense). The isiZulu language contains some clear counter-examples to the SMH, namely quantifiers based on adjectives, presentatives and demonstratives. Each of these word-types is analysed to show that they contradict the SMH. Furthermore, they contradict Booij's prediction that the SMH is more likely to be violated when new words are derived from inherently inflected forms than from contextually inflected ones. The unsustainability of the SMH suggests that lexicalist and non-derivational models of grammar are likely to be correct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. It is concluded that by virtually any standard Quechua shows clear evidence for a distinct class of attributive noun modifiers, and that in the future Quechua should not be considered a 'flexible' noun/adjective language for the purposes of crosslinguistic comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies testing the knowledge of syntactic properties have resulted in two potentially contrasting proposals in relation to third language acquisition (TLA); the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn et al., 2004), which proposes that previously learned languages will positively affect the acquisition of a third language (L3); and the ‘second language (L2) status factor’ hypothesis (Bardel and Falk, 2007), which proposes that the primacy of the L2 can block the potential positive effects that may be transferable from the first language (L1). This article attempts to extend these hypotheses to the domain of morphosyntax, in relation to the TLA of the properties of grammatical number and gender concord marking on German attributive adjectives; these properties not present in the L1 of Japanese, or the L2 of English. Two further factors are of interest in the current study; first, the performance of the learners according to their L3 and their L2 proficiency levels, a variable not discussed in the above-mentioned studies; and, second, the role that the type of task has on the performance of these learners. Three groups of Japanese native speakers (matched for proficiency within each German group), but with differing English proficiencies, completed a carefully balanced gap-filling task, together with two oral elicitation tasks in the form of games; both of these elicited tokens of adjectival inflection. Initial results offer partial support for weaker versions of the two hypotheses mentioned above. However, neither of the L3 models tested can fully account for the results obtained, which are more consistent with a feature-based account of the organization of grammar in the domain of morphosyntax, such as that of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz, 1993). DM is a model for language acquisition which — coupled with a view that the Subset Principle proposed by this account is not observed by non-primary language learners — has recently been proposed to explain the optionality observed in L2 learners’ production (Hawkins et al., 2006). The data presented here suggest that it could be extended to L3 learners’ production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]