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The investigation of the grammatical level of syntax, particularly Indonesian, focuses exclusively on sentence formation and does not include the corpus. This renders Indonesian grammatical corpus data less relevant in corpus-based grammatical investigations. The study offers a detailed overview of the utilization of Android applications based on POS Tagging data. The method in this study was qualitative focusing on the development of an application that utilizes Rule and Probability-based POS Tagging data from Leipzig Indonesian Mix_2013 to determine the categories, functions, and roles of Indonesian syntax with lexical categories including V (copula, existence, and equative) as the predicate potential on function. The application was designed to be compatible with the Android system by Integrating POS tagging into the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), enabling wider accessibility to a larger user base. The result of this research introduces a program designed as a tool to search syntactic categories in Indonesian. The program uses a sequential search technique, which is a linear search method, to make it easier for users to find specific syntactic functions. By applying syntactic categories and functions using POS Tagging data from the Leipzig Indonesian Mix_2013 corpus, the study achieved significant insights into the roles of Indonesian syntax. POS Tagging based on the generated rules and probabilities achieves an accuracy rate of 92.53% for category tags and functions.

In this article, the situation of the Turkish varieties of Luristan province is studied. The main languages of the province are Luri and Laki, and i n some regions varieties of Persian impacted by Luri. However, in Aligudarz, Azna, and Borujerd counties of the province, there are a number of Turkish -speaking villages too. Turkish varieties spoken in these villages, lexically, and sometimes morphologically and syntactically, show their own specific properties. We can argue that these Turkish varieties have acquired these properties as a consequence of being in contact with Luri as the dominant language of the region. Investigations of this research shows that the Turkish varieties in question, in some lexical categories, clearly, are impacted by Luri and Persian more significantly than the other lexical categories. On the other hand, the Turkish varieties in the three aforementioned counties do not seem to be influenced by Luri equally. Therefore, regarding different conditions of the language communities these varieties are used in, we should imagine different perspectives for them in terms of language survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the classical debate between the discrete or continuous nature of linguistic phenomena, there is controversy regarding the relationship between different lexical categories and the internal relationship between the different words that are part of a specific category. In this contribution, we present the results of topological studies provided by Neurolinguistics and studies of acquisition, loss, processing, and storage conducted in Psycholinguistics to try to verify if there is any evidence in favor of or against the discrete nature of lexical categories, with special attention to the distinction between nouns and verbs and to the Indo-European languages. As a result of this work, we consider that there are sufficient indications to suggest that speakers distinguish lexical categories discreetly and homogeneously, but also establish a series of additional correlations between the members of these categories and different properties (among which the semantic component stands out). In this sense, we believe it is necessary to distinguish between these two levels of study: the discrete and automated nature of lexical categories and the various correlations that both speakers and researchers themselves can make with different study variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A crucial role in the process of reviving Ukrainian identity is played by the Ukrainian language, which in the conditions of war serves not only as a mark of the own/alien, but also weighs a lot as a kind of intellectual weapon. For centuries, the Russian Empire had been appropriating the civilizational, scientific, and cultural achievements of the Ukrainian people; in return, it imposed on them a complex of inferiority, encouraged them to mankurtism. A significant part of the population of Ukraine succumbed to Russian manipulations and renounced their native language in favour of Russian. The tolerant attitude of the Ukrainian citizens towards the dominance of the Russian language in Ukraine became one of the hundreds of reasons for the present Russia–Ukraine war, which has been taking the lives of many thousands of defenders of Ukraine, as well as the lives of many thousands of its civilian residents, for the tenth year now. The time has come to defend everything that is Ukrainian from the grasping hands of the Rashists. The Ukrainian nation has preserved its native language and literature in spite of all the bad weather and winds of history, developed it to match the world’s artistic peaks. Ukrainian literature desperately needs a modern, objective reading of works of art without ideological layers, restoration of the fair facts of writers’ biographies, freedom from the toxicity of Russian propaganda, under the influence of which even well-known philological scholars – not only in Ukraine, but also in emigration – fell under the influence. As an example, it would be appropriate to recall the debate on the language of Hryhorii Skovoroda’s works, which lasted for more than two centuries due to the fact that Russian scientific circles labelled the work of the outstanding Ukrainian humanist as Russian. The debate ended with the conclusions of Professor Leonid Ushkalov as late as in the 21st century. Restored by L. Ushkalov, the authenticity of the texts of the works of Hryhorii Skovoroda made it possible to eliminate the mistakes made by the scribes and free the thinker’s works from Russification layers, returning him to the bosom of the Ukrainian literary baroque. L. Ushkalov proved the predominant percentage of Ukrainian-language works of H. Skovoroda using the data of statistical calculations. The examples given by L. Ushkalov from the works of H. Skovoroda testify that such lexical, phonetic, grammatical categories are quite naturally used in the Ukrainian language and are completely absent in the Russian language. The lingua mixta of Hryhorii Skovoroda’s works consisted of Ukrainian, Church Slavonic, and Latin vocabulary, which was characteristic of Ukrainian baroque literature. This proves that Hryhorii Skovoroda’s work belongs to Ukrainian literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider two asymmetries reported in the literature on word prosodic systems: the tendency to allow more prosodic contrast in nouns than in verbs and the tendency to avoid stress on functional material. We focus on the interaction between these two tendencies and propose a formal mechanism to handle this interaction couched in Optimality Theory. In a case study on a group of standard Serbo-Croatian varieties that have predictable stress in verbs but contrastive stress in nouns, we develop an analysis of predictable and morphologically conditioned stress assignment. Our analysis features a family of constraints militating against stress on non-lexical material on three different levels: stress on inflection proper (*Infl-Stress-1), stress on non-lexical material in the locality domain of inflection (*Infl-Stress-2), and stress on non-lexical material altogether (*Infl-Stress-3). Analyzing a class of prosodically exceptional denominal and borrowed verbs, we show that lexical-category effects exist between and within categories: denominal verbs allow exceptional preservation of nominal stress, which leads to additional prosodic contrast in this class of verbs. Finally, we explore the option of subsuming exceptionally contrast-preserving borrowed verbs under denominal verbs, offering arguments in favor of the hotly debated view from the literature that verbs are universally borrowed as denominal.

This article offers a lexical study of the abbreviated simple personal names in Ancient Greek. Rarer than abbreviated compound names and usually neglected in scientific literature, they can be sorted in different lexical categories: short forms related to gods' names and their derivatives, which are the commonest, ethnics, and, finally, other vocabulary, mainly descriptive adjectives and names of animals and different objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Across sign languages, nouns can be derived from verbs through morphophonological changes in movement by (1) movement reduplication and size reduction or (2) size reduction alone. We asked whether these cross-linguistic similarities arise from cognitive biases in how humans construe objects and actions. We tested nonsigners' sensitivity to differences in noun–verb pairs in American Sign Language (ASL) by asking MTurk workers to match images of actions and objects to videos of ASL noun–verb pairs. Experiment 1a's match-to-sample paradigm revealed that nonsigners interpreted all signs, regardless of lexical class, as actions. The remaining experiments used a forced-matching procedure to avoid this bias. Counter our predictions, nonsigners associated reduplicated movement with actions not objects (inversing the sign language pattern) and exhibited a minimal bias to associate large movements with actions (as found in sign languages). Whether signs had pantomimic iconicity did not alter nonsigners' judgments. We speculate that the morphophonological distinctions in noun–verb pairs observed in sign languages did not emerge as a result of cognitive biases, but rather as a result of the linguistic pressures of a growing lexicon and the use of space for verbal morphology. Such pressures may override an initial bias to map reduplicated movement to actions, but nevertheless reflect new iconic mappings shaped by linguistic and cognitive experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verbs and nouns gear θ-dependencies, Case, agreement, or construal relations. Building on Chomsky's 1974 decomposition of such categories into ±N, ±V features, by translating said features into ±1, ±i scalars that allow for the construction of a vector space, this paper studies the possibility of organizing said features into 2 × 2 square matrices. In the system proposed to explore "head-complement" relations, operating on nouns yields a measurable/observable (Hermitian matrix), which in turn limits other potential combinations with abstract lexical categories. Functional/grammatical categories in the system deploy the same features, albeit organized differently in the matrix diagonal and off-diagonal. The algebraic result is a group with well-defined mathematical properties, which properly includes the Pauli group of standard use in quantum computation. In the system, the presumed difference between categories and interactions—here, in a context of the head-complement sort—reduces to whether the magnitude of the matrix eigenvalue is 1 or not, in the latter instance inducing asymmetric interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Usage-based theories of children's syntactic acquisition (e.g., Tomasello, 2000a) predict that children's abstract lexical categories emerge from their experience with particular words in constructions in their input. Because modifiers in English are almost always prenominal, children might initially treat adjectives similarly to nouns when used in a prenominal position. In this study, we taught English-speaking preschoolers (between 2 and 6 years) novel nouns (object labels) and adjectives (words referring to attributes) in both prenominal and postnominal positions. The children corrected both postnominal adjectives and nouns to prenominal position, but corrected modifying nouns more often than adjectives. These results suggest that children differentiate between nouns and adjectives even when they occur in the same position and serve the same function (i.e., modification). Children were increasingly likely to correct postnominal adjectives (not nouns) with increasing age. We argue that children attend to word order more when it makes a difference in meaning.

Abstract: This study is intended to investigate lexical borrowing in Kalhori Kurdish. The main lexical categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs were examined to find whether native speakers prefer to use native words or loan words (of Farsi). This study was carried out in relation to three social variables as gender, age and educational backgrounds. To collect data, a researcher-made questionnaire consisting of 339 items was employed. The results indicate that in all lexical categories, native words (as apposed to loan words) are mainly chosen by the subjects in all groups. In addition, there is no basic difference in all investigated lexical categories. Almost the same amount of borrowing is reported in all lexical categories, while in all borrowing hierarchies (Treffers-Daller, 2010; Muysken, 1988; Thomason and Kaufman, 1988), nouns were easier to borrow than the elements lower in the hierarchy. The results of this study, however, suggest that the reasons for borrowing are beyond the position in the hierarchy. The importance of lexical gap in borrowing is identified as an alternative to hierarchical approaches in the present study. Keywords: Borrowing, Borrowing hierarchy, Kalhori Kurdish, Lexical categories Introduction Language contact is an important issue which has received a lot of attention in the literature (Bloomfield, 1933; Haugen, 1950; Treffers Daller, 2010). In the earlier stage, the focus was on lexical borrowing. However, in recent studies, structural borrowing is also investigated (Matras, 2009). It is an axiom that the lexical borrowing is more common than structural and phonological borrowing. Moreover, it seems that some linguistic elements are easier to borrow than others (Treffers-daller, 2010). Accordingly, some researchers were trying to discover the hierarchy of borrowing of linguistic elements in different languages. Muysken (1981) presented an implicational hierarchy in which he tried to find the degree of ease (or difficulty) of borrowability of different linguistic elements. According to his hierarchy, lexical elements are easier than structural elements to borrow. Another influential study was Thomason and Kaufman (1988) dealing with a wide range of issues including language contact, borrowing, mixed languages, language interference, pidgin and creole languages, code-switching, etc. They focused on the role of external factors such as language contact on language change. Materials and methods This study is intended to investigate borrowing in Kalhori Kurdish. The main lexical categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs were examined to find whether native speakers prefer to use native words or loan words (of Farsi). This study was carried out in relation to three social variables as gender, age and educational backgrounds. To collect data, a researcher-made questionnaire consisting of 339 items was employed. Based on gender, age and educational backgrounds, the subjects were divided to eight groups: young male/ female educated; old male/ female educated; young male/ female uneducated; old male/ female uneducated participants. For each group, 10 people were selected randomly. Therefore, a total number of 80 participants were selected to respond to the provided list through interview. For each intended word, different contexts were provided and then the participants were asked to choose either the local word or the borrowed one from Persian. To analyze the data, SPSS (version 23) was employed. As for the statistical test, ANOVA was employed to find any meaningful relation between the three independent variables of the study (age, gender and educational background) and the participants’ choice among the Kurdish words and Persian borrowed ones (dependent variable). Discussion of Results and Conclusions The results indicated that in all investigated categories, native speakers of Kalhori Kurdish used a higher amount of native words rather than Persian borrowed equivalents. However, in all groups, some Persian borrowed words are also used. As for women, the results indicated that educated (both young and old) female participants used the least amount of native words. In contrast, uneducated female participants employed the highest amount of native words of Kalhori Kurdish. In the same way, educated men used a lower amount of native words of Kurdish comparing with their uneducated counterparts. Furthermore, young men tend to use a higher amount of borrowed words comparing their older counterparts. Accordingly, it can be concluded that in the four investigated categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs), education and age were found to be statistically effective variables, while the variations due to gender were found to be statistically insignificant. Unlike the predictions of the theory of borrowing hierarchy (Muysken (1987), the results indicated the Kurdish terms were used much more frequently than their (more prestigious) Persian equivalents in Kalhori Kurdish. The results indicated that in all investigated categories, native words (as apposed to loan words) are mainly chosen by the subjects in all groups. In addition, there is no basic difference in all investigated categories. Almost the same amount of borrowing is reported in the investigated categories, while in all borrowing hierarchies (Treffers-Daller, 2010; Muysken, 1988; Thomason and Kaufman, 1988), nouns were easier to borrow than the elements lower in the hierarchy. The results of this study, however, suggest that the reasons for borrowing are beyond the position in the hierarchy. The importance of lexical gap in borrowing is emphasized in the present study as an alternative to hierarchical approaches.

This study reveals a linguistic stylistic analysis for Paul Beatty’s novel The Sellout through using Leech’s linguistic checklist. The study embodies two chief goals; a linguistic goal that depends on applying Leech’s Linguistic checklist on the entire novel by utilizing its different categories and a literary aim that relies on exposing the issue of racial segregation in the American society between the Whites and the Blacks. The proficiency in a writing style that Beatty displays in his novel is embodied evidently via this study.

The present study aimed at stylistically analyzing the short story of "after twenty years" written by O. Henry, a pen name for William Sydney Porter. This American short story writer has a rich canon of more than 250 short stories and his stories are well known throughout the globe. He wrote in a dry and humorous style and famous for his use of surprise or twist endings of his stories, mostly, for the aim of underlying ironies. Since the study is both theoretical and descriptive in nature, the researcher paid a close reading to the text. The short story is stylistically analyzed applying only two categories, namely lexical categories and cohesion and context in the linguistic and stylistic checklist suggested by Leech and Short (2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patterns of object naming often differ between languages, butbilingual speakers develop convergent naming patterns intheir two languages that are distinct from those ofmonolingual speakers of each language. This convergenceappears to reflect dynamic interactions between lexicalrepresentations for the two languages. In this study, wepresent a self-organizing neural network model to simulatesemantic convergence in the bilingual lexicon and investigatemechanisms underlying semantic convergence. Our resultsdemonstrate that connections between two languages can beestablished through the simultaneous activations of relatedwords in both languages, and these connections between twolanguages pull the two lexicons toward each other. Theseresults suggest that connections between words in thebilingual lexicon play a major role in bilinguals’ semanticconvergence. The model provides a foundation for exploringhow various input variables will affect bilingual patterns ofoutput.

This paper presents a description of the adjective class in Dinka, and an exploration of its typological relevance to the existence of adjectives cross-linguistically. In Dinka, a subset of intransitive verbs can be defined by two morphophonological characteristics. The overwhelming majority of these are property concepts, despite the fact that the defining characteristics are unrelated to semantic properties. This calls into question whether or not properties provide a useful semantic context in the investigation of adjectives, even in languages where the adjective class is clearly a subclass of another lexical category. While the analysis is based primarily on the Bor South dialect of Dinka, it has been corroborated using evidence from other dialects. Therefore, it is likely that this characterization holds across the language.

The Cambridge grammar of the English language (HUDDLESTON; PULLUM, 2002) attempts to present a comprehensive and rigorous description of Modern Standard English. Much of the book is taken up with describing the properties of the various lexical categories, including determinative and pronoun. The distinction between these categories has been questioned by various authors in English (ABNEY, 1987; CROFT, 2001; HUDSON, 2004; MATTHEWS, 2014; POSTAL, 2014/1966; SOMMERSTEIN, 1972) and other languages (e.g., NAU, 2016). Here, I employ energy distance, a novel family of non-parametric statistics, to adjudicate between these positions. Following Crystal (1967), I binarily encode the features (has/doesn’t have feature) of the determinatives and pronouns from CGEL in a 138 word-forms by 232 features matrix. The results provide support for CGEL’s analysis (k-groups produces a 93% correspondence with CGEL’s categorization) and show that energy distance statistics applied to such matrices can help us adjudicate between competing lexical category analyses without resorting to methodological opportunism (CROFT, 2001).

We examined the vocabulary growth of lexical categories in 719 children (age 13–24 months) as part of a longitudinal cohort study (the STEPS Study) and found a discrepancy in how these categories were affected depending on the child’s sex. In girls, attending day care at 24 months of age predicted a positive vocabulary growth in the lexical categories sound effects, nouns, people, and games and routines, compared to girls staying at home. Firstborn girls had a greater vocabulary growth in descriptive and function words, in contrast to those born later. A boy attending day care at age 24 months was likely to have greater growth in sound effects and animal sounds, compared to boys not in day care. A family history of late onset of speech predicted less vocabulary growth in all lexical categories in boys, except for sound effects and animal sounds. Early vocabulary is of importance for later language and literacy development. Vocabulary is not an impenetrable entirety but consists of various types of words (lexical categories) developing at different tempos as they contribute to the developing language. Factors influencing early vocabulary development in boys and girls have been painstakingly studied, but fewer have examined these factors across lexical categories, let alone whether they have an equal effect in both sexes. More knowledge of what affects the variation in early vocabulary in boys and girls is needed for clinical practice and preventive purposes. Vocabulary was measured with the Finnish version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory. The effect of child and family factors on vocabulary growth in various lexical categories was analyzed separately for boys and girls using structural equational modelling. The results of the present study indicate that vocabulary development in the lexical categories is affected differently by child and parental factors in girls and boys as early as the second year of life, which gives new insights into the factors that need consideration in clinical practice and preventive work.

Verbs and nouns gear θ-dependencies, Case, agreement, or construal relations. Building on Chomsky’s 1974 decomposition of such categories into ±N, ±V features, by translating said features into ±1, ±i scalars that allow for the construction of a vector space, this paper studies the possibility of organizing said features into 2 × 2 square matrices. In the system proposed to explore “head-complement” relations, operating on nouns yields a measurable/observable (Hermitian matrix), which in turn limits other potential combinations with abstract lexical categories. Functional/grammatical categories in the system deploy the same features, albeit organized differently in the matrix diagonal and off-diagonal. The algebraic result is a group with well-defined mathematical properties, which properly includes the Pauli group of standard use in quantum computation. In the system, the presumed difference between categories and interactions—here, in a context of the head-complement sort—reduces to whether the magnitude of the matrix eigenvalue is 1 or not, in the latter instance inducing asymmetric interactions.

The study aims to account for differences in switching behavior of lexical and functional categories in intra-sentential codeswitchingwithin the provisions of the Minimalist Program (Chosmky, 1995, 2000, 2001). It employs both negative and positive Urdu/English code-switching data to support the argument. The positive data examined consists of 58 sentences selected from a corpus of naturally-occurring interactions involving competent Urdu/English bilinguals. The negative data consist of judgments about the well-formedness of 88 different constructed versions of the positive data. Both positive and negative data examined demonstratethat switching of lexical categories is unconstrained whereas functional categories are not only not switched but are also invariably supplied byv-contributing lexicon; however, C, being the phase head itself, may be supplied by either of the lexicons. It is concluded that since lexical categories originate as unspecified lexical roots in the lexicon as proposed by Hale and Keyser (1993), Chomsky (1995), Marantz (1997) and Borer (2005), they may randomly be supplied by either of the lexicons involved but since functional categories carry crucial language-specific information i.e., parameters and define feature specifications and categorial status of unspecified lexical roots, switching of these categories must be highly constrained in order to avoid 'crash'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how adjectives are derived within a featural system comprising only two categories. It argues that adjectivisers, a heads, do not exist, leaving the repertory of categorisers with two members only: verbalisers, v heads, and nominalisers, n heads. We proceed to argue that the adjective category is possibly universal insofar as it involves prima facie dual categorisation: adjectives obtain when a root or an already categorised element combines with a complex categorial structure, one that involves both a verbaliser and nominaliser. This proposal is supported by grammar-internal evidence (viz. the external modification of adjectives by adverbs and the nominal character of their internal structure) and by broader typological facts (the distribution of which follows from our analysis). Several consequences and predictions are beneficially derived.

Dan, a Mandean language of the Ivory Coast, marks the alienable possessors of simple nonrelational nouns differently from the inalienable possessors of relational nouns: only the former occur with the particle ɓa. This difference also shows up in nominalizations. When a verb is nominalized, its theme argument is expressed like the possessor of a relational noun, without ɓa, whereas when an adjective is nominalized, its theme argument is expressed like the possessor of a nonrelational noun, with ɓa. We show that this generalization holds for both a low type of nominalization, in which the nominalizer combines directly with the root before that root combines with any arguments, and for a high type of nominalization, in which the nominalizer combines with a larger phrase. We account for this difference between deverbal nominalization and deadjectival nominalization using Baker’s (2003) theory of the lexical categories, according to which verbs intrinsically combine directly with a theme argument, whereas adjectives do not, but only become predicates of a theme argument with the help of a functional head Pred. This theory also accounts for the fact that denominal nouns like ‘childhood’ pattern with deadjectival nominalizations in this respect. This study thus provides new empirical support for Baker’s theory of lexical categories, as opposed to theories which assume a stronger parallelism across the various lexical categories.

Using computational simulations, this work demonstrates that it is possible to learn a systematic relation between words' sound and their meanings. The sound–meaning relation was learned from a corpus of phonologically transcribed child-directed speech by using the linear discriminative learning (LDL) framework (Baayen, Chuang, Shafaei-Bajestan, & Blevins, 2019), which implements linear mappings between words' form vectors and semantic vectors. Presented with the form vectors of 16 nonwords, taken from a study on word learning (Fitneva, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2009), the network generated the estimated semantic vectors of the nonwords. As half of these nonwords were created to phonologically resemble English nouns and the other half were phonologically similar to English verbs, we assessed whether the estimated semantic vectors for these nonwords reflect this word category difference. In 7 different simulations, linear discriminant analysis (LDA) successfully discriminated between noun-like nonwords and verb-like nonwords, based on their semantic relation to the words in the lexicon. Furthermore, how well LDA categorized a nonword correlated well with a phonological typicality measure (i.e., the degree of its form being noun-like or verb-like) and with children's performance in an entity/action discrimination task. On the one hand, the results suggest that children can infer the implicit meaning of a word directly from its sound. On the other hand, this study shows that nonwords do land in semantic space, such that children can capitalize on their semantic relations with other elements in the lexicon to decide whether a nonword is more likely to denote an entity or an action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is intended to investigate lexical borrowing in Kalhori Kurdish. The main lexical categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs were examined to find whether native speakers prefer to use native words or loan words (of Farsi). This study was carried out in relation to three social variables as gender, age and educational backgrounds. To collect data, a researchermade questionnaire consisting of 339 items was employed. The results indicate that in all lexical categories, native words (as apposed to loan words) are mainly chosen by the subjects in all groups. In addition, there is no basic difference in all investigated lexical categories. Almost the same amount of borrowing is reported in all lexical categories, while in all borrowing hierarchies (Treffers-Daller, 2010; Muysken, 1988; Thomason and Kaufman, 1988), nouns were easier to borrow than the elements lower in the hierarchy. The results of this study, however, suggest that the reasons for borrowing are beyond the position in the hierarchy. The importance of lexical gap in borrowing is identified as an alternative to hierarchical approaches in the present study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is intended to investigate lexical borrowing in Kalhori Kurdish. The main lexical categories such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs were examined to find whether native speakers prefer to use native words or loan words (of Farsi). This study was carried out in relation to three social variables as gender, age and educational backgrounds. To collect data, a researchermade questionnaire consisting of 339 items was employed. The results indicate that in all lexical categories, native words (as apposed to loan words) are mainly chosen by the subjects in all groups. In addition, there is no basic difference in all investigated lexical categories. Almost the same amount of borrowing is reported in all lexical categories, while in all borrowing hierarchies (Treffers-Daller, 2010; Muysken, 1988; Thomason and Kaufman, 1988), nouns were easier to borrow than the elements lower in the hierarchy. The results of this study, however, suggest that the reasons for borrowing are beyond the position in the hierarchy. The importance of lexical gap in borrowing is identified as an alternative to hierarchical approaches in the present study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Harry Potter franchise has proven an incredible success since the publication of J. K. Rowling’sdebut novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in 1997. Achieving a worldwide success, theHarry Potter novels have been translated into many languages, including those spoken in Bosnia andHerzegovina. However, many of those translations originate from Serbia or Croatia. Our goal is toexamine strategies the Bosnian translator opted for in her translation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, published by Buybook, Sarajevo, in 2015. Translating literature for children is a demanding task since children are the most honest critics, hence, failure of the writer to enchant, and of the translator to successfully transpose the magic of a fairy tale, a poem, etc., is made clear upon first reading. In that sense, the Harry Potter novels are no exception. What is more, the translation process is even more challenging because Rowling created a new fantasy world, abundant with new phenomena (creatures, games, spells, geographical locations, etc.). How does a translator find suitable solutions for notions that had not been known prior to the publication of the first Harry Potter novel, and, at the same time, feel comfortable with the quality of the translated text, keeping in mind the young recipients? Our paper will focus on analysis of lexical categories and translation procedures observed in the translation of this novel into the Bosnian langugage.

Linguistically and cognitively speaking, functional (extended) projections are more abstract and structurally more complicated than lexical projections. Acquiring functional projections could be problematic for second language learners and thus a crucial issue to be considered by language instructors and curriculum developers. The present study investigates the learners’ level of grammatical proficiency relationship with their access to extended projections. A sample of 270 Iranian female students learning English as a foreign language took part in this correlational study. Oxford Placement Test was conducted to obtain a grammatical proficiency score for each learner. To assess the amount of access to extended projections, two tests were administered with a 10-day interval. A Grammaticality Judgment Task was administered 10 days after the test of proficiency to assess the learners’ recognition of extended projections. After 10 days, a Picture Description Task was administered to evaluate the learners’ production of extended projections. The data then were analyzed using Pearson Correlation-Coefficient Test. Results revealed that there was a significant though a moderate relationship between the learners’ level of grammatical proficiency and their Recognition of extended projections and a significant but weak relationship in their Production of extended projections. Our findings suggest that learners may avoid using certain functional categories despite having the knowledge of those functional categories. Thus, it might be concluded that learners may not have complete access to extended projection and they are still in the process of acquisition.

In a number of signed languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs is evident in the morphophonology of the signs themselves. Here we use a novel elicitation paradigm to investigate the systematicity, emergence, and development of the noun-verb distinction (qua objects vs. actions) in an established sign language, American Sign Language (ASL), an emerging sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), and in the precursor to NSL, Nicaraguan homesigns. We show that a distinction between nouns and verbs is marked (by utterance position and movement size) and thus present in all groups--even homesigners, who have invented their systems without a conventional language model. However, there is also evidence of emerging crosslinguistic variation in whether a base hand is used to mark the noun-verb contrast. Finally, variation in how movement repetition and base hand are used across Nicaraguan groups offers insight into the pressures that influence the development of a linguistic system. Specifically, early signers of NSL use movement repetition and base hand in ways similar to homesigners but different from signers who entered the NSL community more recently, suggesting that intergenerational transmission to new learners (not just sharing a language with a community) plays a key role in the development of these devices. These results bear not only on the importance of the noun-verb distinction in human communication, but also on how this distinction emerges and develops in a new (sign) language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study demonstrates that lexicons of individual languages reflect some of the functions encoded in their grammatical system. These functions determine the syntactic properties of lexical items. Since the grammatical functions coded across languages vary, so do lexicons in individual languages. This study explains the origin of features of lexical items that affect their syntactic properties. Such features have been noted by others, e.g. Levin and Rappaport-Hovav, 2005 and Ramchand, 2014, but their origin has been left unexplained. The study also raises one fundamental question that remains to be answered: Is there some principle by which some functions encoded in the grammatical system of a language are reflected in the lexicon and other functions are not? The present study considers several hypotheses to answer this question. The study also explains a long-time question in the theory of lexical semantics, viz. why verbs that refer to the same notions or events, e.g. breaking, hearing, or running, and nouns that refer to the same entities, e.g. the place where one lives, body parts, or water, have different syntactic properties across languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a well-known observation as its starting point, that is, languages vary with respect to headedness, with the standard head-initial and head-final types well attested. Is there a connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class? Although this question seems quite straightforward, there are formidable methodological and theoretical challenges in addressing it. Building on initial results by several researchers, we refine our methodology and consider the proportion of nouns to simplex verbs (as opposed to light verb constructions) in a varied sample of 33 languages to evaluate the connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class. We demonstrate a robust correlation between this proportion and headedness. While the proportion of nouns in a lexicon is relatively stable, head-final/object-verb (OV)-type languages (e.g., Japanese or Hungarian) have a relatively small number of simplex verbs, whereas head-initial/verb-initial languages (e.g., Irish or Zapotec) have a considerably larger percentage of such verbs. The difference between the head-final and head-initial type is statistically significant. We, then, consider a subset of languages characterized as subject-verb-object (SVO) and show that this group is not uniform. Those SVO languages that have strong head-initial characteristics (as shown by the order of constituents in a set of phrases and word order alternations) are characterized by a relatively large proportion of lexical verbs. SVO languages that have strong head-final traits (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) pattern with head-final languages, and a small subset of SVO languages are genuinely in the middle (e.g., English, Russian). We offer a tentative explanation for this headedness asymmetry, couched in terms of informativity and parsing principles, and discuss additional evidence in support of our account. All told, the fewer simplex verbs in head-final/OV-type languages is an adaptation in response to their particular pattern of headedness. The object-verb/verb-object (OV/VO) difference with respect to noun/verb ratios also reveals itself in SVO languages; some languages, Chinese and Latin among them, show a strongly OV ratio, whereas others, such as Romance or Bantu, are VO-like in their noun/verb ratios. The proportion of nouns to verbs thus emerges as a new linguistic characteristic that is correlated with headedness.

There are two different views on the nature of Universal Grammar at birth; namely, the lexical view and Full Tree view. Lexicalists contend that UG is incomplete, and maturity is the main factor for its development. But the advocates of Full Tree view insist on the child’s language tree being complete/full since the beginning, and believe interaction and input to be the reason for its actualization and development. Both views firmly believe that in the process of language acquisition, the child learns lexical categories before the functional ones.The consequence of this shared idea is a belief in a lack of representation of functional nodes, such as TP, CP, TopP, and FP in the early child syntax. Longitudinally studying the process of learning Persian of a Persian-speaking child, this study assesses this shared idea, and, presents several considerable evidence, to show that in the acquisition of Persian, firstly, the functional categories are learnt concurrently with the lexical categories, not after them, and, secondly, the functional nodes are fully discernable in child language, and the activity of functional categories is so extensive that it is even possible to present evidence of the child’s access to information structure.

We present evidence from experiments on novel blend formation showing that adult English speakers have access to constraints that give phonological privilege to heads, nouns, and proper nouns, even though the nonblend phonology provides no evidence that such constraints are generally active in the grammar of English. Our results (i) demonstrate that these positional constraints are universally available; (ii) confirm that the lexical category 'proper noun' has the status of a strong position, which has broader implications for the role of lexical categories in positional privilege effects; and (iii) confirm that strong positions based on salience from nonphonetic sources (such as morphosyntactic, semantic, or psycholinguistic salience) participate in positionspecific phonological phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article overviews the main questions that emerge from cross-linguistic analysis of morphologically complex adjectives. It is discussed that the problems arise from the fact that it is difficult to identify any positive properties of adjectives capable of singling them out with respect to other categories. Thus, what has been classified as a derived adjective frequently is a version of the base category that lacks some of the definitional properties of that category. This article examines the questions related to deverbal adjectives, participles and denominal adjectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical categories of CDS were examined among 40 Hebrew-speaking parents of infants in early pre-verbal, late-preverbal, single-word and early grammar stages during spontaneous parent–infant interactions. Two hundred utterances from each sample were transcribed, coded for types and tokens, and analyzed. Findings demonstrated a significant growth in types of content words from early to late pre-verbal stages, significant decline at the single-word stage, and an increase at the early grammar stage. Apparently, parents change their use of content words to accommodate their child's linguistic development, attesting to dynamic/reciprocal parent–child interactions. Additionally, findings support that verb use is similar to or higher than noun use by parents at all developmental stages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adjectives in Kurdish language is studied in this article, examples are taken in Northern Kurmanji dialect, while the phonetic of the most adjectives are shown in Central Kurmanji „Sorani‟, and Zazaki as well. It is found that there are not major differences between Kurdish dialects in terms of morphology. The taken adjectives mostly are same or have a minor phonetical change. Types of Kurdish adjectives in terms of semantics and structure are noticed. Also, three kinds of comparative degree are analysed. Kurdish adjectives are compared with Persian and English adjectives; as generally observed, Kurdish and Persian languages have a lot in common, and it is clear in our examples. In contrast, Kurdish and English have little in common. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychologists have used experimental methods to study language for more than a century. However, only with the recent availability of large-scale linguistic databases has a more complete picture begun to emerge of how language is actually used, and what information is available as input to language acquisition. Analyses of such 'big data' have resulted in reappraisals of key assumptions about the nature of language. As an example, we focus on corpus-based research that has shed new light on the arbitrariness of the sign: the longstanding assumption that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. The results reveal a systematic relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, which is stronger for early acquired words. Moreover, the analyses further uncover a systematic relationship between words and their lexical categories-nouns and verbs sound differently from each other-affecting how we learn new words and use them in sentences. Together, these results point to a division of labor between arbitrariness and systematicity in sound-meaning mappings. We conclude by arguing in favor of including 'big data' analyses into the language scientist's methodological toolbox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research is concerned with the syntactic changes that occur during the process of translation of Quran verses from Arabic to Persian. Since it helps to evaluate syntactic structures and changes, the X- bar Theory is adopted to classify the type of these changes. For the purpose of this research, the type of syntactic groups is determined and the changes of them are comprised in both of Arabic and Persian texts. In this research the scientific study of syntactic groups contains of the study of lexical categorizes (NP,VP) and functional categorizes (IP,CP,DP) in Quran text and its Persian translations. Therefore the syntactic structures are comprised in two languages and different structures are determined in them. The purpose of this research is to study the data of Quran which includes recognizing the lexical and functional categories and determining of the type of their changes in Persian translations. It shows how the semantic and grammatical changes are represented during the translation of Arabic Quran to Persian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the study was to examine whether the ‘noun-bias’ phenomenon, which exists in the lexicon of Hebrew-speaking children, also exists in Hebrew child-directed speech (CDS) as well as in Hebrew adult-directed speech (ADS). In addition, we aimed to describe the use of the different classes of content words in the speech of Hebrew-speaking parents to their children at different ages compared to the speech of parents to adults (ADS). Thirty infants (age range 8:5–33 months) were divided into three stages according to age: pre-lexical, single-word, and early grammar. The ADS corpus included 18 Hebrew-speaking parents of children at the same three stages of language development as in the CDS corpus. The CDS corpus was collected from parent–child dyads during naturalistic activities at home: mealtime, bathing, and play. The ADS corpus was collected from parent–experimenter interactions including the parent watching a video and then being interviewed by the experimenter. 200 utterances of each sample were transcribed, coded for types and tokens and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results show that in CDS, when speaking to infants of all ages, parents’ use of types and tokens of verbs and nouns was similar and significantly higher than their use of adjectives or adverbs. In ADS, however, verbs were the main lexical category used by Hebrew-speaking parents in both types and tokens. It seems that both the properties of the input language (e.g. the pro-drop parameter) and the interactional styles of the caregivers are important factors that may influence the high presence of verbs in Hebrew-speaking parents’ ADS and CDS. The negative correlation between the widespread use of verbs in the speech of parents to their infants and the ‘noun-bias’ phenomenon in the Hebrew-child lexicon will be discussed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With negative and positive evidence from Urdu/English intra-sentential code-switching data, the paper attempts to determine the empirical adequacy of two contrasting proposals regarding the placement of complements in mixed sentences. Although Mahootian and Santorini (1996) and Chan (2008) employ different theoretical frameworks, they uniformly reject the possibility of a 'third' grammar and attempt to account for the data in terms of existing apparatus. Employing Tree Adjoining Grammar as framework, Mahootian and Santorini (1996) claim that lexical categories as heads of elementary trees determine the position of their complements whereas Chan (2008), working in Principle and Parameters Theory, proposes that functional categories being associated with a particular value of head-parameter determine placement of their respective complements. The paper rejects both the proposals with counter-evidence from the corpus of Urdu/English code-switching. The pre-head placement of complements selected by English Vs and Ns in mixed sentences contradict Mahootian and Santorini's (1996) proposal regarding lexical heads whereas post-head placement of complement TPs and placement of complement PPs/PosPs in projections without overt functional heads pose challenges to Chan's proposal regarding the distinction between lexical and functional categories. Thus, with empirical evidence, the paper rejects both the proposals regarding placement of complements in code-switched data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspectual notions, although displayed most clearly in verbs, manifest across categories, with notions like (un)boundedness manifesting themselves in several instantiations which are sometimes specific of individual grammatical categories. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on how aspectual notions emerge in different categorial domains by an analysis of subject-experiencer and object-experiencer psychological predicates (SEPVs and OEPVs, respectively). We review the evidence that SEPVs denote individual level (IL) states, and provide new facts - taken from the behaviour of participles - in favour of that diagnostic; we also argue that OEPVs should be classified as states of the stage level (SL) class. We argue that OEPVs denote states with an onset, which corresponds to the denotation of SLs. SEPVs simply denote states without boundaries, which we argue to correspond to IL predicates. Finally, we show how these two denotations follow without further assumptions from the structures proposed for SEPVs and OEPVs in previous work, specially Pesetsky (1995), making it unnecessary to postulate that the distinction is of lexical nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]