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With regard to change in inflection, historical linguistics fundamentally relies on the concept of morphological analogy, which is held responsible for nearly all change not attributable to phonological factors. Despite its central importance, how morphological analogy operates has never been established. Two different opinions are held in contemporary linguistics. The first position assumes that morphological analogy modifies inherited inflectional forms, making them more similar to other inflectional forms. According to the second position, in the course of morphological analogy, inherited inflectional forms are not merely modified but rather are replaced by forms created entirely anew on a model pattern already present in the grammar. This research report tries to establish what kind of data may constitute the evidence sufficient to differentiate between the two views. It argues that all relevant data point to whole-word replacement as the only mechanism of analogical change in inflection. [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]

Vocabular Clarity is a proposed restriction on the behaviour of inflectional classes and affixes grounded in the idea of synonymy avoidance. The proponents of Vocabular Clarity claim that it holds true for Icelandic and Faroese nominal inflections. In this article, data from these languages is examined and difficulties which have not been previously addressed are pointed out. It is argued that the Vocabular Clarity approach is somewhat vaguely specified. In particular, it needs a clear operational method for distinguishing affixes and stem allomorphy. Without this, it remains uncertain whether it makes any testable predictions. The paper shows that while the theory is intuitively appealing, it is-even under fairly generous assumptions-difficult to reconcile with the insular Scandinavian data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Construction Grammar is a linguistic framework which postulates that all grammar is based on a single, relatively simple entity, the construction, defined as a conventionalized mapping between a form and a meaning. Construction Morphology is a sub-theory of Construction Grammar which deals with the word-level domain. This article shows how Construction Morphology can account for the full range of inflectional types. It argues that Construction Morphology falls into the type of morphological theory which Stump (2001) has designated ‘inferential—realizational’, and which he contends is the only kind of theory that accounts for all the known facts of morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the logic behind the various morpho-phonological subdivisions in the verbal system of Palestinian Arabic. It argues for the importance in the understanding of Palestinian Arabic of the apophonic chain proposed for Classical Arabic in 1993). In Palestinian, it is first argued, the Measure 1 perfective template includes a hard-wired association of its two vocalic positions; the main differences in vocalization between the Palestinian and Classic varieties follow from this fact. The account is then extended to include three large subclasses of weak verbs. Following the analysis of Classical Arabic in 1996), it is argued that such verbs involve a null element ø, whose realization is determined by the apophonic chain. The second part of the paper provides an account of the entire inflectional paradigms of each of the verbs discussed, a task that was not fully undertaken in previous work. The mechanism of apophony is shown to be at work in this domain, too. An interesting case is discussed of an apparent shift in inflectional paradigm in some forms of the biradical verb. This shift is again shown to follow from the general mechanisms used in the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a descriptive analysis of the morphology of transitive verbs in Shilluk. Shilluk is a language in which stem-internal changes, many of them suprasegmental in nature, play an important role in the morphology, alongside affixal markers. In particular, tone, vowel length, Advanced Tongue Root (ATR), vowel height, and the stem-final consonant are involved in the morphological marking of a range inflections, expressing tense-aspect-modality, valency changes, agreement, and focus. The paper lays out the inflectional marking of these operations, for each of seven classes that can be distinguished among transitive verbs. In this way, the study extends our understanding of stem-internal morphology and its development in West Nilotic languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a typological characterization of a class of demonstratives so far neglected in the literature: demonstrative verbs expressing manner. First, the morphological characteristics and syntactic behaviors of these demonstratives are examined to illustrate their verbal properties and to justify categorizing them as verbs. Next, their exophoric and endophoric roles in narratives and interactions are described. As their discourse usages closely replicate that of nominal demonstratives, we argue that demonstrative verbs belong to the class of demonstratives and propose to integrate them in a general typology of demonstratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, I offer a summary of my 2013 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Patras on inflection and derivation from a Construction Morphology standpoint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] We propose a model of description of inflectional morphology of Arabic nouns. [•] A taxonomy of ‘broken’ plurals based on the notions of pattern and root. [•] The model is tested on 3200 lexical entries representing fully diacriticized lemmas. [•] Entries are inflected by using finite-state transducers. [•] The language resources can be easily updated by Arabic-speaking linguists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The No Blur Principle (NBP) or Vocabulary Clarity (VC) approach (Carstairs- McCarthy 1994, 2010) is a possible restriction on the behaviour of inflectional affixes (grammatical units), originally motivated by an analogy with words (lexical units). The restriction is grounded in synonymy avoidance, in the observation that 'Every two forms contrast in meaning' (Clark 1993) and in behaviour in multivocabular situations, where speakers have more than one vocabulary although they have only one grammar (e.g. Dyirbal, Javanese). There have not been many suggestions for restrictions on the behaviour of affixes in the morphological literature, so the approach deserves attention. In this article, the NBP or VC-approach is applied to Faroese noun declensions. While these Faroese data seem problematic at first, it is argued that they can be perfectly accommodated within the NBP/ VC-aproach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: We review and discuss some issues to do with the relation between morphology and syntax which have played a prominent part in generative linguistic research in the past three decades. Focusing on verbal inflection, we first discuss the relation between inflection and verb placement, with special attention given to verb-initial languages. We then discuss the relation between pro-drop and agreement, where we articulate a partly new understanding of Huang''s (1989) generalization that pro-drop is characteristic of languages with rich agreement and languages with no agreement, but not languages that are in-between. We then present and discuss the Mirror Principle, one of the most significant findings in recent linguistic research. We pay special attention to the Mirror Principle as it applies in head-final languages, in the context of a model adopting Kayne''s (1994) Linear Correspondence Axiom. The idea is to show how fairly complex aspects of clausal syntax, including word order and the possibility of phonetically silent arguments of a predicate, may be correlated with readily observable and, in themselves, rather simple properties of verbal inflection, and to show how, given a restrictive theory of Universal Grammar, this follows from the fact that inflections are syntactic categories, albeit realized as parts of words. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Individuals with semantic dementia (SD) show progressive worsening of lexical-conceptual single word knowledge alongside preservation of nonsemantic aspects of language. The current study exam-ines morphological processing in SD. S.H.S., a Hebrew-speaking person with SD, completed eight tasks that tested inflection, linear derivation, and nonlinear derivation at three time points over six and a half years. S.H.S. correctly produced plural nouns and judged the grammaticality of noun-verb and noun-adjective inflectional agreement. A steeper decline was seen in the ability to judge irre-gularly versus regularly inflected forms. S.H.S. judged nationality suffixes accurately and produced diminutive and agentive suffixes successfully. He also relied on morphological decomposition when performing lexical decision. Judgement of sentences consisting of derived verbal participles was intact with regard to morphological considerations alone, but impaired when semantic considerations determined grammaticality. S.H.S.'s performance suggests that structural aspects of word knowledge might be functional in the face of a severe semantic impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Do the production and interpretation of patterns of plural forms in noun-noun compounds reveal the workings of innate constraints that govern morphological processing? The results of previous studies on compounding have been taken to support a number of important theoretical claims: first, that there are fundamental differences in the way that children and adults learn and process regular and irregular plurals, second, that these differences reflect formal constraints that govern the way the way regular and irregular plurals are processed in language, and third, that these constraints are unlikely to be the product of learning. In a series of seven experiments, we critically assess the evidence that is cited in support of these arguments. The results of our experiments provide little support for the idea that substantively different factors govern the patterns of acquisition, production and interpretation patterns of regular and irregular plural forms in compounds. Once frequency differences between regular and irregular plurals are accounted for, we find no evidence of any qualitative difference in the patterns of interpretation and production of regular and irregular plural nouns in compounds, in either adults or children. Accordingly, we suggest that the pattern of acquisition of both regular and irregular plurals in compounds is consistent with a simple account, in which children learn the conventions that govern plural compounding using evidence that is readily available in the distribution patterns of adult speech. [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]

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]

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated how advanced adult second language (L2) learners process morphologically complex words. The studies reported here have used different kinds of experimental tasks (including speeded grammaticality judgments, lexical decision, and priming) to examine three domains of morphological processing (regular and irregular inflection, derived word forms, and morphosyntactic phenomena) in L2 learners from typologically different first language (L1) backgrounds. The results from these studies demonstrate clear differences between native and nonnative processing in all three domains, indicating that adult L2 learners are less sensitive to morphological structure than native speakers and rely more on lexical storage than on morphological parsing during processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the storage versus composition of Spanish inflected verbal forms in first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers of Spanish. L2 participants were selected to have mid-to-advanced proficiency, high classroom experience, and low immersion experience, typical of medium-to-advanced foreign language learners. Participants were shown the infinitival forms of verbs from either Class I (the default class, which takes new verbs) or Classes II and III (nondefault classes) and were asked to produce either first-person singular present tense or imperfect forms, in separate tasks. In the present tense, the L1 speakers showed inflected-form frequency effects (i.e., higher frequency forms were produced faster, which is taken as a reflection of storage) for stem-changing (irregular) verb forms from both Class I (e.g., pensar-pienso) and Classes II and III (e.g., perder-pierdo), as well as for non-stem-changing (regular) forms in Classes II/III (e.g., vender-vendo), in which the regular transformation does not appear to constitute a default. In contrast, Class I regulars (e.g., pescar-pesco), whose non-stem-changing transformation constitutes a default (e.g., it is applied to new verbs), showed no frequency effects. L2 speakers showed frequency effects for all four conditions (Classes I and II/III, regulars and irregulars). In the imperfect tense, the L1 speakers showed frequency effects for Class II/III (- ía-suffixed) but not Class I (- aba-suffixed) forms, even though both involve non-stem-change (regular) default transformations. The L2 speakers showed frequency effects for both types of forms. The pattern of results was not explained by a wide range of potentially confounding experimental and statistical factors and does not appear to be compatible with single-mechanism models, which argue that all linguistic forms are learned and processed in associative memory. The findings are consistent with a dual-system view in which both verb class and regularity influence the storage versus composition of inflected forms. Specifically, the data suggest that in L1, inflected verbal forms are stored (as evidenced by frequency effects) unless they are both from Class I and undergo non-stem-changing default transformations. In contrast, the findings suggest that at least these L2 participants may store all inflected verb forms. Taken together, the results support dual-system models of L1 and L2 processing in which, at least at mid-to-advanced L2 proficiency and lower levels of immersion experience, the processing of rule-governed forms may depend not on L1 combinatorial processes, but instead on memorized representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors compared sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing with unambiguous and ambiguous inflected words and words with ambiguous stems in 3 masked and unmasked priming experiments in Finnish. Experiment I showed equal facilitation for all prime types with a short 60-ms stimulus Onset asynchrony (SOA) but significant facilitation for unambiguous words only with a long 300-ms SOA. Experiment 2 showed that all potential readings of ambiguous inflections were activated under a short SOA. Whereas the prime-target form overlap did not affect the results under a short SOA, it significantly modulated the results with a long SOA. Experiment 3 confirmed that the results from masked priming were modulated by the morphological structure of the words but not by the prime-target form overlap alone. The results support approaches in which early prelexical morphological processing is driven by morph-based segmentation and form is used to cue selection between 2 candidates only during later processing. [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]

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]

Reference grammars often set out the personal pronouns in paradigms similar to those of nouns. When the pronoun stems are phonologically different, this approach implies that we have instances of suppletion, though this is typically not discussed explicitly. In contrast, those linguists who have raised the issue directly tend to suggest that we are not dealing with suppletion. They claim rather that personal pronouns are not opposed for number (thus we would not be the plural of I ). The issue is particularly important if we wish to develop a typology of suppletion, since personal pronouns are potentially one of the commonest instances. If we separate out the two parts of suppletion (irregularity of form and regularity of meaning), the question becomes clearer. As far as form is concerned, while personal pronouns are frequently irregular, there are languages with morphologically regular pronouns (which makes the suppletion analysis for irregulars more plausible). And in terms of meaning, we find different types of number at different points on the Animacy Hierarchy; it is not a major issue that the plural of personal pronouns frequently involves associativity, since this may be found also for other items high on the hierarchy. These two main points lead us to conclude that there are languages where the personal pronouns show suppletion for number. Two subsidiary arguments, based on data from Latvian and Bengali, support this conclusion. Thus a typology of suppletion should include personal pronouns as an important part. This interesting but specific problem is set in the broader context of the need for reproducibility in typology. [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]