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The languages of central Flores are all but devoid of affixation, despite that this is hardly typical of the Austronesian languages of their family, including closely related languages elsewhere on the island and nearby ones. A traditional approach to these central Flores languages’ typology is to ascribe their analyticity to grammar-internal drift, under which the disappearance of this affixal battery was due merely to fortuitous matters of stress, analogy, reanalysis, etc. Here I argue that a great deal of evidence suggests that these languages actually underwent heavy second-language acquisition by adults at some point in the relatively recent past, most likely by male invaders from a different island. The evidence includes phenomena familiar from recent developments in creolization theory, as well as a cross-linguistic approach to analyticity and its causes. more...

The typological classification of Mandarin Chinese as an isolating language lacking inflection brings about a theoretical consideration that word order in Mandarin serves as an interface between syntax and pragmatics. This paper provides from typological perspective a unified framework to examine the role that word order in Mandarin plays in marking case as well as topics. The study finds that Mandarin exhibits a mixed case-marking pattern through word order, namely that nominative-accusative pattern coexists with ergative-absolutive pattern. Both of the two case-marking patterns allow intra-clausal topics and extra-clausal topics, and it is the intra-clausal topics rather than the extra-clausal ones that are associated with case-marking patterns. With respect to the intra-clausal topics, in nominative-accusative pattern, topic assignment in unmarked constructions is A/S oriented, whereas in ergative-absolutive pattern, topic assignment in unmarked two/three-argument constructions is post-ba P oriented, and topic assignment in unmarked one-argument constructions is preverbal-S oriented. In light of the two case-marking patterns, context-independent topics in various constructions can be identified, and thus the controversial issue of distinguishing topics from other arguments can be properly addressed. more...

This chapter is based on the fieldwork experience of the Russian–Vietnamese Linguistic Expedition (1979–2019) of which the author was a member. The Expedition was dedicated to the study of languages spoken by ethnic minorities in Vietnam. The languages of Vietnam are part of the Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) linguistic area (See Enfield. Annual review of Anthropology 34:181–206, 2005) that includes five language macrofamilies. Almost all representatives of the MSEA linguistic area are isolating languages. Some typological features of isolating languages and consequences of the global monosyllabization of MSEA languages affecting the process of language documentation are considered. more...

Alorese is a prime example of a morphologically isolating language. This paper traces the process of morphological simplification it has undergone by addressing the following questions: (i) What was the morphological profile of its ancestor, pre-Alorese? (ii) When did Alorese start to lose its morphology? (iii) Which factors caused this loss? By comparing the morphological profile of current Alorese with its sister language, Lewoingu-Lamaholot, I conclude that the morphology of pre-Alorese was at least as complex as current Lewoingu-Lamaholot. Pre-Alorese underwent a process of drastic and swift morphological loss after its speakers migrated to Pantar island around 1300 AD. Pre-Alorese must have had a significant proportion of adult second language speakers who acquired it imperfectly, thus causing its morphology to be lost. Thus, this is a good example of morphological simplification due to imperfect adult learning in a small scale language variety more...

This paper revisits, from a historiographical perspective, the Grammaire de la langue chinoise orale et ecrite (1873–76) by French missionary Paul Perny, a fundamental and representative work of Fr... more...

In the first part, we show that the notion of transcategoriality, which is present in several types of languages (inflectional, isolating, agglutinative), serves to reconcile two antinomic forces of human linguistic activity: to satisfy cognitive-communicative needs and to limit the effort/to optimise linguistic systems. In the second part, we first examine our triangular dynamic model which comprises three macro-categories, namely lexeme, grammeme, pragmateme, and then, we discuss the differences between these three macro-categories. In the third and last part, we argue for the existence of transcategoriality in Vietnamese, an isolating language without inflectional morphology. We will discuss this issue by analyzing some markers such as: thành công, đẹp, mới, thì, and mà. more...

The article is devoted to the syntactic analysis of sentences of isolating languages (Chinese), to the study of possible ways of such analysis based on various linguistic concepts, to the search for the most optimal variants. The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that the topic strategy naturally becomes one of the leading in the analysis of Chinese language material. The novelty of the work is seen in the fact that the question of the method of application of the strategy / statements of the predication concept of language in practice remains open: in the preparation of educational materials, processing of grammars and their details. The article provides an overview of the methods of syntactic analysis of the constructions in the languages of the isolating type. The algorithms of the analysis of sentences of the Chinese language on topical components are proposed. The author’s development of syntactic analysis of predication chains with the use of graphical method is presented. The author emphasizes that the identification and classification of topic structures is a scientifically sound and practically verifiable (subject to further expansion) analysis strategy that most fully reflects the typology and realities of the Chinese language. The question is raised about the possibility of creating a holistic, systematic and self-sufficient method of syntactic analysis without relying on the concept of European grammatical tradition. more...

The article studies the classification of uncountable English nouns. The topic is described largely both in grammar manuals and research works. However, it may be presented in more details. In the typological perspective English is not just an analytical language. It certainly demonstrates some features of an isolating language. Unlike such languages as French, German or Italian, it lacks the grammatical gender and that is the cause of a different ground for the classification of English nouns. They are divided into classes according to the way the things exist - either as separate single units forming quantities or some continuity with no definite limits both material and mental. This is the guideline to a more detailed description of countable and uncountable nouns. The analytical character of English also implies that noun classifiers are not imbedded into a noun in its basic form, but are either a separate root morpheme (article a) or are not expressed at all. That differs much from grammatical gender which is a permanent attribute of a noun. The initial class of a noun is not fixed and can change depending the meaning and context. A balance of those two factors determines the shift from being a countable noun to the opposite status and vice versa. That’s why a synthetic language speakers face a difficult task of mastering the English article and a detailed classification uncountable nouns may help them a lot. A statistical analysis of the word death which is both countable and uncountable was made to show the prevailing usage. more...

This paper examines English inflectional morpheme development among Korean EFL learners. Two groups of children, fourth graders (N=20) and sixth graders (N=19) were given both real-word sentence completion tasks and pseudoword sentence completion tasks. The task materials measuring the students’ knowledge of inflectional morpheme include six types of morphemes (plural -s, regular past -ed, 3rd person singular -s, progressive -ing, comparative -er, and superlative -est). Twenty four sentences (four sentences for each morphology) were created and children were asked to complete the sentences using a given base form of a word. The results indicated that, in learning of the regular past tense -ed, learners using L2 for communication do not seem to override EFL learners accustomed to the function of a written task, and that the grammatical morpheme, which does not exist in Korean L1, has a strong effect on the acquisition. This study concluded that Korean L1 absent morphemes seem to be difficult for Korean English learners to acquire regardless of language learning environments: namely natural language learning and classroom language learning. more...

The morphological status of affixes in Chinese has long been a matter of debate. How one might apply the conventional criteria of free/bound and content/function features to distinguish word-forming affixes from bound roots in Chinese is still far from clear. Issues involving polysemy and diachronic dynamics further blur the boundaries. In this paper, we propose three quantitative features in a computational model of affixoid behavior in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that, except for in a very few cases, there are no clear criteria that can be used to identify an affix’s status in an isolating language like Chinese. A diachronic check using contextualized embeddings with the WordNet Sense Inventory also demonstrates the possible role of the polysemy of lexical roots across diachronic settings. more...

There are three major asymmetries recognized between Mandarin and English denominal verbs (hereafter DNV): typological, aspectual and quantitative. These asymmetries receive a plausible account on the assumption that Mandarin DNVs are derived under syntactic constraints while the derivation of English DNVs is syntax-free. The different derivational mechanisms for Mandarin and English DNVs correlate with the different functions of zero morphemes in the two languages. To spell out the correlation, we posit three parameters in word derivation: the Rule Parameter (i.e., word formation is governed either morphologically or syntactically), the Morpheme Parameter (i.e., a certain kind of word derivation utilizes, in addition to a base form, either a full morpheme or a zero morpheme) and the Zero Morpheme Parameter (i.e., zero morphemes are geared to either syntactic or morphological operations in a given language). These parameters are assumedly set in such a way that DNV derivation in Mandarin is assigned to syntax but that in English to morphology. more...

This study proposes a new methodology for morpheme-based analysis designed to identify multi-word patterns in Korean, which is a typical example of agglutinative languages. The need for a new approach in corpus linguistics, which takes language typological characteristics into consideration, is also a crucial point of this paper. In Korean, functional words like prepositions or conjunctions are realized as bound morphemes (emi or cosa) that function as ‘minimal grammatical units’. When formulaic expressions in Korean are analyzed according to the morpheme unit, as it is the case in our study, the findings yielded show significant differences from those of previous studies. Based on this methodology, our results provide supporting evidence for the following: (1) lexical bundles are prevalent in Korean, just as in English; (2) computer-defined formulaicity might be language-universal; (3) finally, differences in distributions or discourse functions of morphemic bundles in various genres or registers can be language-specific. The external and internal language factors that may influence these differences are discussed. more...

Recent studies have shown that English-, French-, and German-learning infants begin to use determiners to segment adjacent nouns before their first birthday. The present research extended the investigation to a typologically different language, Japanese, focusing on infants’ use of a high-frequency particle ga, a subject-marker. In Japanese, a particle follows, rather than precedes, the noun, and is usually followed by a predicate verb; thus particles rarely occur at utterance edges. Furthermore, a particle is not a free morpheme (like a determiner) but a bound morpheme. Although particles are frequently omitted in colloquial speech, the frequency of their occurrence is comparable to that of high-frequency determiners in a previously studied language, French. The results demonstrated that Japanese-learning infants used particles for word segmentation not at 10 and 12 months but at 15 months, which is later than the age at which infants begin to use determiners in previously studied languages. The reason for this delay was discussed in light of the properties of Japanese particles. more...

Morphological analysis (finding the component morphemes of a word and tagging morphemes with part-of-speech information) is a useful preprocessing step in many natural language processing applications, especially for synthetic languages. Compound words from the constructed language Esperanto are formed by straightforward agglutination, but for many words, there is more than one possible sequence of component morphemes. However, one segmentation is usually more semantically probable than the others. This paper presents a modified n-gram Markov model that finds the most probable segmentation of any Esperanto word, where the model’s states represent morpheme part-of-speech and semantic classes. The overall segmentation accuracy was over 98% for a set of presegmented dictionary words. more...

This study investigates the relevance of the generalized semantic roles S, A, P, T, and G and whether there are constructions that treat subsets of these identically, defining Grammatical relations in Mon, (Austroasiatic). After establishing the notion of transitivity in Mon, the study looks at syntactic constructions that are cross-linguistically found to be relevant the selection of Grammatical Relations, including word order, case marking, control, reflexivization, among others. The results show that Mon exhibits identical treatment of S and A (‘Subject’) in most constructions, less prominently of P and T (‘Direct Object’), as well as a subset {P, G} in at least one construction. Grammatical Relations are found to be relevant for the description and analysis of Mon. more...

В статье описываются предварительные результаты исследования корпуса устных нарративов вьетского языка тхо-ньысуан, записанных во время полевой работы 2018 г. в пров. Тханьхоа (Вьетнам). Отмечаются различия в наборе критериев для выделения элементарных дискурсивных единиц в процессе сегментации дискурса в языках разной типологии. Рассматриваются особенности функционирования дискурсивных маркеров в языке тхо-ньысуан., The article describes the preliminary results in corpus study of oral narratives in the Tho (Nhu Xuan) language. The narratives were recorded during the fieldwork 2018 in Thanh Hoa province (Vietnam). Differences in the set of criteria for discourse segmentation in languages of different typologies are noted. The functioning of discursive markers in the Tho (Nhu Xuan) language are considered. more...

В статье исследуется проблема лексики вьетнамского языка как системы. На ма­ териалах двуязычных словарей выделена и описана исконная лексическая система и заимствованная ханвьетская подсистема вьетнамского языка. Определяются критерии отнесения слова к исконно вьетнамским либо ханвьетским. В исконной лексической системе абсолютное большинство много­ сложных номинативных образований состоит из свободных слогоморфем. Большинство ханвьетских морфем никогда не употреблялись самостоятельно. Отмечается, что вьетнамский язык является в большей степени эксплицирующим языком, чем имплицирующим, и для него в большей степени ха­ рактерен прогрессивный порядок слов, чем регрессивный. Показано, что к исходной системе также относятся и заимствованные слова, прошедшие полную вьетнамизацию и обладающие теми же структурно-функциональными особенностями, что и исконные., The article discusses the Vietnamese lexicon as a system. The native lexical system and the borrowed Sino-Vietnamese sub-system of the Vietnamese language are identified and described on the basis of bilingual dictionaries. The article establishes criteria for determining whether a word is native Vietnamese or Sino-Vietnamese. An absolute majority of polysyllabic words of native lexical system is comprised of unbound morphemes/syllables. Most Sino-Vietnamese morphemes are never used independently by themselves. The conclusion has been drawn that Vietnamese is an explication language to a greater extent than an implication one and usually the word order in Vietnamese is progressive, not regressive. It has been shown that the native system also includes loanwords that have fully integrated in the Vietnamese language and have the same structure and functional features as native words. more...

In this paper, we analyse features of the grammatical descriptions in Manchu grammar books from the Qing Dynasty. Manchu grammar books exemplify how Chinese scholars gave Chinese names to grammatical concepts in Manchu such as case, conjugation, and derivation which exist in agglutinating languages but not in isolating languages. A thorough examination reveals that Chinese scholarly understanding of Manchu grammar at the time had attained a high degree of sophistication. We conclude that the reason they did not apply modern grammatical concepts until the end of the 19th century was not a lack of ability but because the object of their grammatical descriptions was Chinese, a typical isolating language., Dans cet article, nous analysons les descriptions du mandchou des grammaires de la dynastie Qing. Ces grammaires du mandchou nous montrent les termes choisis par les lettrés Chinois pour rendre dans leur langue les concepts grammaticaux du mandchou tels que le cas, la conjugaison et la dérivation, qui existent dans les langues agglutinantes mais pas dans les langues isolantes. Un examen approfondi de ces ouvrages révèle que les Chinois avaient atteint un haut degré de sophistication dans leur compréhension linguistique de la grammaire mandchoue. Nous en concluons que si ceux-ci n’ont pas appliqué au chinois les concepts grammaticaux modernes jusqu’à la fin du XXe siècle, ce n’est pas parce qu’ils n’en étaient pas capables, mais parce que leurs descriptions grammaticales portaient sur le chinois, une langue typiquement isolante., Takekoshi Takashi. Grammatical Descriptions in Manchu Grammar Books from the Qing Dynasty. In: Histoire Épistémologie Langage, tome 41, fascicule 1, 2019. La linguistique chinoise : influences étrangères entre XIXe et XXe siècles. pp. 39-55. more...

Automatic word segmentation of Vietnamese is the primary step in Vietnamese text information processing, which would be an important support for cross-language information processing tasks in China and Vietnam. Since the Vietnamese language is an isolating language with tones, each syllable can not only form a word individually, but also create a new word by combining with left and/or right syllables. Therefore, automatic word segmentation of Vietnamese cannot be simply based on spaces. This paper takes automatic word segmentation of the Vietnamese language as the research object. First, it makes a rough segmentation of Vietnamese sentences with the N-shortest path model. Then, syllables in each sentence are abstracted into a directed acyclic graph. Finally, the Vietnamese word segmentation is obtained by calculating the shortest path with the help of the BEMS marking system. The results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a satisfactory performance in Vietnamese word segmentation. more...

This chapter consists of four related arguments. We first review the claims about the nature of grammaticalization in isolating languages, specifically those of East and Mainland Southeast Asia (EMSEA); based on this, we present a view that suggests that grammaticalization is indeed a type-specific, or areal, phenomenon. Following on that, we propose that morphological elaboration is likewise type- or area-specific; and to conclude we discuss the significance of this in terms of language evolution. Our arguments lead us to posit that elaboration of morphological structure only happens in a certain type of languages, and cannot be taken as an overall diagnostic of age across the world?s languages. In other words, ‘mature’ linguistic phenomena are not necessarily morphologically complex, nor are all morphologically free languages ‘young’. more...

Très honorable avec Félicitations du jury (summa cum laude); Since Haiman (1985), the iconicity of syntax is a hot topic. This subject is particularly important in the case of isolating languages, with reduced morphology, in which the word order is the main marker of syntactic structures, and, is, therefore, at the centre of grammar. Does the word order in a sentence mimic the order of the events one is speaking of or does it reflect the very order of the discourse, or is it arbitrary? In the line of Peirce (1930), Haiman (1980, 1985), Tai (1985), etc., we call ‘temporal iconicity’ the fact that succession in the time, or in the spoken chain, of constituents of a statement mimics the succession of events in a world of reference. We have extended the scope of this ‘temporal iconicity’ from events to processes and hence to the phases that compose them. The objective of this thesis is to try to develop the idea of ‘iconicity of the temporal sequence’ to its very end, starting from a definition of SVC (serial verb construction) as wide as possible to encompass any sequence of verbal constituents without overt connector. In such a way, it becomes possible to extend the study to any sequence of decomposable processes in sub-tracks in the reference world or in sub-events in the discourse world (conditional and temporal protasis-apodosis systems). If the iconicity is everywhere, it is because that the sequential marks (the constituents order), with the informations about the predicates (valence and Aktionsart) encoded in the lexicon, are essential to the functioning of the isolating languages of the type of Chinese, and that these sequential marks obey most often, at least in the case of Chinese, to iconicity.; Depuis les travaux de Haiman (1985), l’iconicité de la syntaxe est un sujet à la mode. Ce sujet s’impose particulièrement dans le cas des langues isolantes, à morphologie réduite, où l’ordre des mots est le marqueur principal des structures syntaxiques et se trouve, par là, au centre de la grammaire. L’ordre des mots dans une phrase mime-t-il l’ordre des événements dont on parle ou reflète-t-il l’ordre même du discours, ou est-il arbitraire ? Dans la lignée des travaux sur l’iconicité de Peirce (1930), Haiman (1980, 1985), Tai (1985) etc., nous appelons ‘iconicité temporelle’ le fait que la succession dans le temps, c’est-à-dire dans la chaîne parlée, des constituants d’un énoncé mime la succession des événements dans un monde de référence. Nous avons étendu le champ d’application de cette ‘iconicité temporelle’ des événements aux procès et, de là, aux phases qui les composent. L’objectif de cette thèse est de tenter de ‘faire marcher’ l’idée d’‘iconicité de la séquence 'jusqu’au bout, en partant d’une définition des CVS la plus large possible permettant d’englober toute suite de constituants verbaux ne présentant aucun connecteur. Cela permet d’étendre l’étude à toute séquence de procès décomposable en sous-procès dans le monde de référence ou en sous-événements dans le monde du discours (systèmes protase-apodose hypothétique et temporel). Si l’iconicité est partout, c’est que les marques séquentielles (l’ordre des constituants), avec les informations sur les prédicats (valence et Aktionsart) codées dans le lexique, sont essentielles au fonctionnement des langues isolantes du type du chinois, et que ces marques séquentielles obéissent le plus souvent, au moins dans le cas du chinois, à l’iconicité. more...

Purpose:This paper offers an overview of the 4-M model from its inception, but pays special attention to how the characterization of morpheme types in the model has evolved. A new proposal is that the level at which morpheme types are “elected” in an abstract model of language production is a critical factor in predicting morpheme distribution across languages in bilingual data.Methodology:A new addition to the model, the Variable Election Hypothesis, predicts which language is likely to be the source of morphemes in certain structures in bilingual speech, based on how they are elected.Data and analysis:Data from available codeswitching literature illustrate the classification of morphemes according to the 4-M model and test this new hypothesis. Much of the analysis focuses on the role of Embedded Language nonfinite verb forms and the structure of mixed determiner phrases (DPs), as well as subordinators in codeswitching data.Findings:Both the 4-M model and the Variable Election Hypothesis make predictions... more...

Towards an operational word formationIn this article the selected theoretical and practical problems associated with placing the word formation in the model of operational grammar (by Andrzej Bogusławski) are discussed. The aim of the paper is to prepare the ground for a possible description of morpheme units of language in this model. The proposed way to enter word formation in the model is to divide it into operational and etymological word formation. more...

Since Haiman (1985), the iconicity of syntax is a hot topic. This subject is particularly important in the case of isolating languages, with reduced morphology, in which the word order is the main marker of syntactic structures, and, is, therefore, at the centre of grammar. Does the word order in a sentence mimic the order of the events one is speaking of or does it reflect the very order of the discourse, or is it arbitrary? In the line of Peirce (1930), Haiman (1980, 1985), Tai (1985), etc., we call ‘temporal iconicity’ the fact that succession in the time, or in the spoken chain, of constituents of a statement mimics the succession of events in a world of reference. We have extended the scope of this ‘temporal iconicity’ from events to processes and hence to the phases that compose them. The objective of this thesis is to try to develop the idea of ‘iconicity of the temporal sequence’ to its very end, starting from a definition of SVC (serial verb construction) as wide as possible to encompass any sequence of verbal constituents without overt connector. In such a way, it becomes possible to extend the study to any sequence of decomposable processes in sub-tracks in the reference world or in sub-events in the discourse world (conditional and temporal protasis-apodosis systems). If the iconicity is everywhere, it is because that the sequential marks (the constituents order), with the informations about the predicates (valence and Aktionsart) encoded in the lexicon, are essential to the functioning of the isolating languages of the type of Chinese, and that these sequential marks obey most often, at least in the case of Chinese, to iconicity., Depuis les travaux de Haiman (1985), l’iconicité de la syntaxe est un sujet à la mode. Ce sujet s’impose particulièrement dans le cas des langues isolantes, à morphologie réduite, où l’ordre des mots est le marqueur principal des structures syntaxiques et se trouve, par là, au centre de la grammaire. L’ordre des mots dans une phrase mime-t-il l’ordre des événements dont on parle ou reflète-t-il l’ordre même du discours, ou est-il arbitraire ? Dans la lignée des travaux sur l’iconicité de Peirce (1930), Haiman (1980, 1985), Tai (1985) etc., nous appelons ‘iconicité temporelle’ le fait que la succession dans le temps, c’est-à-dire dans la chaîne parlée, des constituants d’un énoncé mime la succession des événements dans un monde de référence. Nous avons étendu le champ d’application de cette ‘iconicité temporelle’ des événements aux procès et, de là, aux phases qui les composent. L’objectif de cette thèse est de tenter de ‘faire marcher’ l’idée d’‘iconicité de la séquence 'jusqu’au bout, en partant d’une définition des CVS la plus large possible permettant d’englober toute suite de constituants verbaux ne présentant aucun connecteur. Cela permet d’étendre l’étude à toute séquence de procès décomposable en sous-procès dans le monde de référence ou en sous-événements dans le monde du discours (systèmes protase-apodose hypothétique et temporel). Si l’iconicité est partout, c’est que les marques séquentielles (l’ordre des constituants), avec les informations sur les prédicats (valence et Aktionsart) codées dans le lexique, sont essentielles au fonctionnement des langues isolantes du type du chinois, et que ces marques séquentielles obéissent le plus souvent, au moins dans le cas du chinois, à l’iconicité. more...

In this paper, we describe the development of an end-to-end factoid question answering system for the Vietnamese language. This system combines both statistical models and ontology-based methods in a chain of processing modules to provide high-quality mappings from natural language text to entities. We present the challenges in the development of such an intelligent user interface for an isolating language like Vietnamese and show that techniques developed for inflectional languages cannot be applied "as is". Our question answering system can answer a wide range of general knowledge questions with promising accuracy on a test set., In the proceedings of the HQA'18 workshop, The Web Conference Companion, Lyon, France more...

Modern NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis, semantic analysis, text entity extraction and others depend on the language model quality. Language structure influences quality: a model that fits well the analytic languages for some NLP tasks, doesn’t fit well enough the synthetic languages for the same tasks. For example, a well known Word2Vec [27] model shows good results for the English language which is rather an analytic language than a synthetic one, but Word2Vec has some problems with synthetic languages due to their high inflection for some NLP tasks. Since every morpheme in synthetic languages provides some information, we propose to discuss morpheme level-model to solve different NLP tasks. We consider the Russian language in our experiments. Firstly, we describe how to build morpheme extractor from prepared vocabularies. Our extractor reached 91% accuracy on the vocabularies of known morpheme segmentation. Secondly we show the way how it can be applied for NLP tasks, and then we discuss our results, pros and cons, and our future work. more...

This research focuses on the cognitive process in Thai language because the written nature of Thai language does not have spaces in a sentence like English and does not have Kanji characters as in Japanese. Words will be written continuously until the end of the sentence, which sometimes leads to ambiguity. This research studies the cognitive processing and influence of final consonants and non-final consonants by using word identification tasks to verify the differences in time spent to answer and correct data consisting of 4 main variables: Types of question divided by single words and sentences; Types of option word or word choices divided by words with consonants and without consonants. The level of difficulty was divided into 3 levels: easy, middle, and hard, while the Type of word was divided into 4 types: Uncontrolled, Homophone, Homograph, and Semantic. The differences of average duration for identifying target words were analyzed by ANOVA and t-test that is statistical analysis. The results showed that final consonants work as the space in English is used for separating words and sentences, and can make the Thai language easier. It works as the accelerator of competency in cognition of Thai language and helps learners to receive more precise and faster information. more...

This study examines comparison constructions in Mon, a predominantly isolating language of western Mainland Southeast Asia. Comparison constructions, which I take to include comparative, similative, and equative, do not form a homogeneous class, but employ various constructions. The uses and functions of these constructions, as well as their development in Mon over the past 1000 years, are the topic of this study, which is the first to deal with comparison in Mon. more...

This paper analyses the encoding of perfectivity in Chinese, focusing on its form, interpretation, and grounding functions. Three major points are made based on examinations of narrative text. First, perfectivity is indicated not only by the perfective marker -le, but also by an array of “bounding expressions” that explicitly designate the endpoint of events. Second, Chinese perfective clauses as currently defined vary in grounding roles. They may present bounded dynamic events and play a foregrounding role or denote stative situations and have a backgrounding function. The different grounding functions are determined not by the verb form but by the transitivity features of the clauses and the context in which they occur. Third, the flexibility is closely related to the nature and semantics of perfectivity and the structural components of the Chinese perfective constructions. The study adds unique features of an isolating language to our existing knowledge of grounding. more...

One of the major challenges in acquiring a language is being able to use morphology as an adult would, and thus, a considerable amount of acquisition research has focused on morphological production and comprehension. Most of this research, however, has focused on the acquisition of morphology in isolating languages, or languages (such as English) with limited inflectional morphology. The nature of the learning task is different, and potentially more challenging, when the child is learning a polysynthetic language – a language in which words are highly morphologically complex, expressing in a single word what in English takes a multi-word clause. To date, there has been no cross-linguistic survey of how children approach thispuzzle and learnpolysynthetic languages.Thispaperaimstoprovide suchasurvey, including a discussion of some of the general findings in the literature regarding the acquisition of polysynthetic systems. more...

Sinitic languages are normally classified as isolating; as to Mandarin Chinese, it is often assumed that grammaticalisation processes are strongly constrained by its typological features. It has been claimed that secondary grammaticalisation, i.e. increase in morphological bonding/fusion, phonetic erosion, and semantic bleaching, does not generally occur in isolating languages; moreover, Bisang (2008) proposes that the lack of "coevolution of meaning and form" in grammaticalisation is an areal feature of the languages of East and mainland Southeast Asia. Basing on data from Northern Chinese dialects, I shall show that there are many counterexamples to the proposed typological and areal restrictions; I shall also argue that although the evolution on the formal level of signs is triggered by (primary) grammaticalisation, it may be carried on independently of the degree of grammaticalisation of the sign and of the context. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. more...

Any approach to understanding morphological processing must begin with assumptions about the role of morphemes in linguistic representations. Contemporary linguistic theory proposes that such representations are centred on a syntactic organisation of morphemes, where a morpheme is an abstract syntactic unit that finds an interpretation in form and in meaning. From the linguist's perspective, then, morphological processing falls together with syntactic processing, and both involve the central exploitation of a grammar of morphemes. Recent computational work has challenged this perspective, proposing instead that morphological structure emerges from the acquisition of form/meaning connections. Here we show that these challenges to the role of morphemes in word and sentence processing rest on a misunderstanding of the morpheme within linguistic theory. Once we understand the notion of a morpheme and its explanatory role within linguistic theory, we can see that apparent challenges to the morpheme, rather tha... more...

Taking Paul (2015) as a starting point, this article discusses different approaches concerning the contribution made by Chinese to general syntactic theory and typology. It demonstrates that the solution of basic questions such as the precise inventory of lexical categories can have far-reaching consequences for more general issues such as case theory, linearization, head parameter and the status of typological universals. more...

This paper describes the challenges in Uyghur speech recognition caused by rich morphology of this language and a new morpheme-based approach to overcome them. Standard morpheme-based approach is also investigated in this paper and outperforms word-based approach. However, this approach pays no attention to frequent vowel weakening of Uyghur that potentially increases the number of morphemes and reduces the effect of the morpheme-based approach. In the new approach, vowel weakening surface forms are replaced by their corresponding stems in lexicon building and language modeling in order to make more effective vocabulary and more robust language model. Then, The vocabulary and language model are utilized in the experiments. Experimental results show that this new approach gives the best result and performs better than standard morpheme-based approach. more...

The aim of this article is to examine one kind of cross linguistic influence, or transfer, in language contact situations. This is “functional transfer”, defined as applying the grammatical functions of a morpheme from one language to a morpheme in another language that does not normally have these functions. With regard to language contact, most reported instances of this kind of transfer concern the creation of a new grammatical morpheme in an expanded pidgin or creole, resulting from the use of a lexical morpheme of the lexifier (here the recipient language, RL) with semantic and syntactic properties of a grammatical morpheme of the substrate language(s) (here the source language(s), SL). Another kind of functional transfer, however, results in an already existing grammatical morpheme in the RL being used with semantic properties, but not syntactic properties, of a grammatical morpheme in the SL that speakers perceive as equivalent. Thus, the two types of functional transfer differ in that the first entails morphological augmentation while the second involves functional alteration of an existing morpheme. Other differences between the two types of transfer are that certain constraints appear to apply to the first type but not to the second. In addition, the first type of transfer, as opposed to the second, does not commonly occur in the process of second language acquisition. Explanations proposed for these distinctions concern different strategies used for morphological expansion in the development of a contact language. Different contact languages can be placed along a continuum based on the prevalence and type of functional transfer. more...

The article illustrates morphosyntactic characteristics of Thai, an isolating language, in contrast to the modern European languages. Thai is characterized as a topic-prominent language, where the voluntary–spontaneous contrast rather than transitive–intransitive one plays significant roles in forming basic sentence constructions. By assuming non-hierarchical serial verb constructions as its basic sentence structures, the author claims that the modern hierarchical view of language structure is not appropriate for Thai. In Thai, verbs are serialized to denote not only successive actions or an action and its objective, but also a cause and its result, an action and its evaluation. Furthermore, causative and passive constructions are analyzed as part of verb serializations which are structurally identical, but antiparallel to each other in the direction of affectedness. more...

This paper treats the problem of possible correlation between the current order of morphemes in a word and the order of syntactic elements from which they evolved at some point in the language history. A well-documented morpheme formation, the Ukrainian synthetic imperfective future, is examined in the grammaticalization framework, and numerous attested examples from different stages of the change from imati ‘have’ to a future affix are presented. The history of this change clarifies the relation between a single case of grammaticalization and the syntactic structure of a language by showing that the position of the affix has never marked the typological category of the language. more...

This paper argues that wordhood in the polysynthetic Inuit language is predictable from syntactic structure and that words correspond to the domains of CP and DP. This entails that Inuit's morphological component need not be any more complex than that of more isolating languages and that individual morphemes are not idiosyncratically specified as affixes. As evidence for our approach, we contrast a variety of free and bound elements, showing that in every case, subparts of words are smaller than CP/DP and full words correspond to CP/DP. We also discuss “stem” ellipsis, which we argue is further evidence that the elements which are usually bound in Inuit are not genuinely affixes. more...