Analogy-based theories assume that in situations of affix competition, language users create novel word forms on the basis of similar existing forms in their Mental Lexicons ( Baayen et al. 2011 ; Daelemans & van den Bosch 2005; Skousen 1989 ). Interestingly, however, simulation studies employing computational implementations of analogical theories have almost invariably adopted a rather abstractionist view of the Mental Lexicon, representing the word stock of the language, and abstracting away from differences between individual speakers (see, e.g., Arndt-Lappe 2014 ; Chapman & Skousen 2005 ; Eddington 2006 ; Nieder et al. 2021 ). This is a problem because it precludes the possibility of testing a central prediction of analogical theories: if affixes are assigned on the fly on the basis of similar words in the lexicon, then speakers with different lexicons should make different choices. The present paper provides a proof-of-concept study addressing this issue for the form-based rivalry between the two English adjectival suffixes - ic and - ical. Analogical Modeling of Language (AML; Skousen et al. 2013 ) is used as a computational model. On the basis of a survey of the distribution of derivatives in different registers in the British National Corpus, predictions of the analogical model are compared for a simulated speaker with a large vocabulary (including academic words) and a simulated speaker with a small vocabulary that is based mainly on words from spoken language. The statistical analysis of the simulations reveals that, while sharing some basic properties, the two models make very clear – and testable – predictions about speaker differences.
基于类比的理论认为，在词缀竞争的情况下，语言使用者在其心理词汇表中相似的现有形式的基础上创造新的词形(Baayen et al. 2011;Daelemans,van den Bosch 2005;Skousen 1989)。然而，有趣的是，使用类比理论的计算实现的模拟研究几乎总是采用一种相当抽象的心理词典观点，代表语言的单词库存，并抽象出个体说话者之间的差异(参见，例如，Arndt-Lappe 2014;查普曼,Skousen 2005;Eddington 2006;Nieder et al. 2021)。这是一个问题，因为它排除了测试类比理论的一个中心预测的可能性:如果词缀是根据词典中相似的单词动态分配的，那么使用不同词典的人应该做出不同的选择。本文针对英语两个形容词后缀- ic和ical之间基于形式的竞争进行了概念验证研究。语言的类比建模(AML)Skousen et al. 2013)被用作计算模型。在对英国国家语料库中不同语域的衍生词分布进行调查的基础上，对具有大量词汇(包括学术词汇)的模拟说话者和具有主要基于口语词汇的小词汇的模拟说话者进行了类比模型的预测比较。模拟的统计分析表明，尽管这两个模型有一些共同的基本特性，但它们对说话者的差异做出了非常清晰且可测试的预测。
{"title":"Different lexicons make different rivals","authors":"Sabine Arndt-Lappe","doi":"10.3366/word.2023.0219","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2023.0219","url":null,"abstract":"Analogy-based theories assume that in situations of affix competition, language users create novel word forms on the basis of similar existing forms in their Mental Lexicons ( Baayen et al. 2011 ; Daelemans & van den Bosch 2005; Skousen 1989 ). Interestingly, however, simulation studies employing computational implementations of analogical theories have almost invariably adopted a rather abstractionist view of the Mental Lexicon, representing the word stock of the language, and abstracting away from differences between individual speakers (see, e.g., Arndt-Lappe 2014 ; Chapman & Skousen 2005 ; Eddington 2006 ; Nieder et al. 2021 ). This is a problem because it precludes the possibility of testing a central prediction of analogical theories: if affixes are assigned on the fly on the basis of similar words in the lexicon, then speakers with different lexicons should make different choices. The present paper provides a proof-of-concept study addressing this issue for the form-based rivalry between the two English adjectival suffixes - ic and - ical. Analogical Modeling of Language (AML; Skousen et al. 2013 ) is used as a computational model. On the basis of a survey of the distribution of derivatives in different registers in the British National Corpus, predictions of the analogical model are compared for a simulated speaker with a large vocabulary (including academic words) and a simulated speaker with a small vocabulary that is based mainly on words from spoken language. The statistical analysis of the simulations reveals that, while sharing some basic properties, the two models make very clear – and testable – predictions about speaker differences.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":"98 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134950082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Blocking and elsewhere distribution have been at the forefront of morphological theory for half a century. Each involves the preemption of one word by another. Neither is fundamental. A combination of Gause’s Principle of Competitive Exclusion and Yang’s Tolerance Principle, both devised for other reasons and both formalized mathematically, provides an explanatory basis for both blocking and elsewhere distribution.
{"title":"Three ways of looking at morphological rivalry","authors":"Mark Aronoff","doi":"10.3366/word.2023.0220","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2023.0220","url":null,"abstract":"Blocking and elsewhere distribution have been at the forefront of morphological theory for half a century. Each involves the preemption of one word by another. Neither is fundamental. A combination of Gause’s Principle of Competitive Exclusion and Yang’s Tolerance Principle, both devised for other reasons and both formalized mathematically, provides an explanatory basis for both blocking and elsewhere distribution.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44593969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the area of agreement with noun phrases displaying reference problems, “evasive forms” may be used to avoid problematic choices. When referring to people of more than one or unknown social gender, masculine or feminine forms might be inappropriate. An “evasive construction” solves this problem by turning to a form that is neither masculine nor feminine. A well-known example is “singular they” in English (e.g. anyone can do it if they try hard enough). In literary New High German, neuter singular forms of indefinite pronouns could be used in similar contexts. This construction is largely obsolete in present-day Standard German but well attested until the nineteenth century and still current in some modern regional dialects. In this paper, the grammatical properties of this construction are discussed. It is shown that neuter gender is used for a specific semantic value, namely, to indicate more than one social gender simultaneously or to leave social gender explicitly open.
{"title":"An “evasive neuter”? A study on neuter singular indefinite pronouns with human reference in seventeenth–nineteenth century literary German","authors":"Jürg Fleischer","doi":"10.3366/word.2022.0212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2022.0212","url":null,"abstract":"In the area of agreement with noun phrases displaying reference problems, “evasive forms” may be used to avoid problematic choices. When referring to people of more than one or unknown social gender, masculine or feminine forms might be inappropriate. An “evasive construction” solves this problem by turning to a form that is neither masculine nor feminine. A well-known example is “singular they” in English (e.g. anyone can do it if they try hard enough). In literary New High German, neuter singular forms of indefinite pronouns could be used in similar contexts. This construction is largely obsolete in present-day Standard German but well attested until the nineteenth century and still current in some modern regional dialects. In this paper, the grammatical properties of this construction are discussed. It is shown that neuter gender is used for a specific semantic value, namely, to indicate more than one social gender simultaneously or to leave social gender explicitly open.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46419536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The Agreement Hierarchy consists of four principal target positions: attributive, predicate, relative pronoun and anaphoric personal pronoun. It constrains the distribution of alternative agreements, in that the likelihood of agreement with greater semantic justification increases monotonically as we move rightwards along the hierarchy. The Agreement Hierarchy covers a wide range of disparate data, and continues to figure regularly in work on theoretical syntax. Since the hierarchy was first proposed, typology has moved on. This means that to remain fit for the purposes for which it is currently used, the hierarchy needs an overhaul. The typology of agreement controllers is the area where the need is most urgent; this is therefore our focus. The canonical typology of controllers is shown to have two dimensions: lexeme to phrase, and local to extraneous (the latter involving honorific agreement, associative agreement, back agreement and “pancake sentences”). These two dimensions are amply illustrated. Finally, interactions between the different types of agreement controller are investigated, since these prove revealing for the typology. Besides making progress on the typology of agreement, the paper contributes to typology more generally, in incorporating insights from other typological disciplines.
{"title":"The Agreement Hierarchy revisited: The typology of controllers","authors":"Greville G. Corbett","doi":"10.3366/word.2022.0208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2022.0208","url":null,"abstract":"The Agreement Hierarchy consists of four principal target positions: attributive, predicate, relative pronoun and anaphoric personal pronoun. It constrains the distribution of alternative agreements, in that the likelihood of agreement with greater semantic justification increases monotonically as we move rightwards along the hierarchy. The Agreement Hierarchy covers a wide range of disparate data, and continues to figure regularly in work on theoretical syntax. Since the hierarchy was first proposed, typology has moved on. This means that to remain fit for the purposes for which it is currently used, the hierarchy needs an overhaul. The typology of agreement controllers is the area where the need is most urgent; this is therefore our focus. The canonical typology of controllers is shown to have two dimensions: lexeme to phrase, and local to extraneous (the latter involving honorific agreement, associative agreement, back agreement and “pancake sentences”). These two dimensions are amply illustrated. Finally, interactions between the different types of agreement controller are investigated, since these prove revealing for the typology. Besides making progress on the typology of agreement, the paper contributes to typology more generally, in incorporating insights from other typological disciplines.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49290470","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the relationship between the presence and shape of subject clitics and verbal endings in a sample of 187 Italo-Romance dialects. It is found that in the majority of languages subject clitics outnumber distinctive inflectional endings. The absence of underspecified systems militates in favour of diachronic and synchronic explanations claiming that the presence of subject clitics is related to the richness of inflection. At the same time, however, the predominance of overspecified systems indicates that further factors are at play in shaping inventories of subject clitics. The second result is that, from a geolinguistic perspective, close dialects exhibit more similarities in the inflectional system than in clitic systems. This brings further support to the claim that inventories of subject clitics do not reflect the array of inflectional endings, whereas some further factors are probably involved in the emergence of subject clitics. Such factors might be either feature geometries/filters, as proposed in the previous literature, or third factors in Chomsky’s sense, i.e. factors that are related to computational efficiency and/or processing costs.
{"title":"Microvariation in agreement inflection: Subject clitics vs inflection","authors":"Diego Pescarini","doi":"10.3366/word.2022.0214","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2022.0214","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the relationship between the presence and shape of subject clitics and verbal endings in a sample of 187 Italo-Romance dialects. It is found that in the majority of languages subject clitics outnumber distinctive inflectional endings. The absence of underspecified systems militates in favour of diachronic and synchronic explanations claiming that the presence of subject clitics is related to the richness of inflection. At the same time, however, the predominance of overspecified systems indicates that further factors are at play in shaping inventories of subject clitics. The second result is that, from a geolinguistic perspective, close dialects exhibit more similarities in the inflectional system than in clitic systems. This brings further support to the claim that inventories of subject clitics do not reflect the array of inflectional endings, whereas some further factors are probably involved in the emergence of subject clitics. Such factors might be either feature geometries/filters, as proposed in the previous literature, or third factors in Chomsky’s sense, i.e. factors that are related to computational efficiency and/or processing costs.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44599832","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this paper, I analyse the intricate agreement pattern attested with inflected quantifiers, intensifiers and anaphors in Tatar, which can trigger not only a default 3rd person agreement, but also the marked person agreement reflecting the features of their restrictor or binder. I claim that in these constructions, inflected quantifiers, intensifiers and anaphors bear the features the agreement reveals, and propose a mechanism allowing them to acquire the features of their restrictor or binder. I build on the idea that agreeing inflected quantifiers, intensifiers and anaphors contain a minimal pronoun equipped with a set of unvalued interpretable features, and that this feature set gets valued via agreement.
{"title":"Agreeing inflected quantifiers, intensifiers and anaphors as derived personal pronouns: Evidence from Tatar","authors":"E. Lyutikova","doi":"10.3366/word.2022.0215","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2022.0215","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper, I analyse the intricate agreement pattern attested with inflected quantifiers, intensifiers and anaphors in Tatar, which can trigger not only a default 3rd person agreement, but also the marked person agreement reflecting the features of their restrictor or binder. I claim that in these constructions, inflected quantifiers, intensifiers and anaphors bear the features the agreement reveals, and propose a mechanism allowing them to acquire the features of their restrictor or binder. I build on the idea that agreeing inflected quantifiers, intensifiers and anaphors contain a minimal pronoun equipped with a set of unvalued interpretable features, and that this feature set gets valued via agreement.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48932923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A common assumption about the function of gender agreement in discourse is that it serves referent identification and reference tracking. There is some evidence in favour of this view, and an increasing body of research which finds no foundation for it; this study further supports the latter perspective. It is based on a fully annotated corpus of the Papuan language Mian and uses a noteworthy property of the Mian agreement system: object agreement in transitive verbs is “sporadic”, i.e. it depends on the lexical type of a transitive verb whether it agrees with its object. Therefore we can measure whether speakers of Mian manipulate overt vs. null arguments in discourse to compensate whenever lack of agreement might make argument reference ambiguous. The results clearly show that the proportions of overtly realized objects for agreeing verbs and non-agreeing verbs do not differ significantly, thus lending little support to the claim that gender agreement serves a major function in reference tracking in discourse.
{"title":"Agreement and argument realization in Mian discourse","authors":"S. Fedden","doi":"10.3366/word.2022.0211","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2022.0211","url":null,"abstract":"A common assumption about the function of gender agreement in discourse is that it serves referent identification and reference tracking. There is some evidence in favour of this view, and an increasing body of research which finds no foundation for it; this study further supports the latter perspective. It is based on a fully annotated corpus of the Papuan language Mian and uses a noteworthy property of the Mian agreement system: object agreement in transitive verbs is “sporadic”, i.e. it depends on the lexical type of a transitive verb whether it agrees with its object. Therefore we can measure whether speakers of Mian manipulate overt vs. null arguments in discourse to compensate whenever lack of agreement might make argument reference ambiguous. The results clearly show that the proportions of overtly realized objects for agreeing verbs and non-agreeing verbs do not differ significantly, thus lending little support to the claim that gender agreement serves a major function in reference tracking in discourse.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42738607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Serge Sagna, Virve Vihman, M. Vihman, Dunstan Brown
We present an exploratory study of 2- to 3-year-old children’s acquisition of the demonstrative system of Eegimaa (ISO 369–3 bqj), an endangered language belonging to the Jóola cluster of the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo phylum, spoken by about 13,000 speakers in southwestern Senegal. Eegimaa demonstratives express distance from speaker (proximal, medial and distal) and the agreement categories of number and gender, as well as having four morphological types that create an additional dimension of complexity for children to learn. These demonstrative types are each associated with a range of syntactic functions with partial overlaps. From nearly seven hours of recordings, including children at three age points (2;0, 2;6 and 3;0), we extracted 218 demonstrative tokens from the children’s speech, matched with 205 tokens from a sub-sample of caregiver speech. The youngest children can be described as restricting their use of demonstratives to a small set of learned items, with evidence of generalisation and productivity arising over the course of development, alongside an increase in frequency and development in distribution patterns of the various demonstrative forms to more target-like usage in the 3;0 sample. At age three we observe more variation by syntactic function. As has been found in other languages, children acquiring Eegimaa seem to make use of the diverse forms of demonstratives early, but they do not yet make use of the full range of forms even at age three, when they are beginning to produce more systematic forms of the demonstratives across syntactic contexts and with a variety of genders.
{"title":"The acquisition of demonstratives in a complex noun class system","authors":"Serge Sagna, Virve Vihman, M. Vihman, Dunstan Brown","doi":"10.3366/word.2022.0209","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2022.0209","url":null,"abstract":"We present an exploratory study of 2- to 3-year-old children’s acquisition of the demonstrative system of Eegimaa (ISO 369–3 bqj), an endangered language belonging to the Jóola cluster of the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo phylum, spoken by about 13,000 speakers in southwestern Senegal. Eegimaa demonstratives express distance from speaker (proximal, medial and distal) and the agreement categories of number and gender, as well as having four morphological types that create an additional dimension of complexity for children to learn. These demonstrative types are each associated with a range of syntactic functions with partial overlaps. From nearly seven hours of recordings, including children at three age points (2;0, 2;6 and 3;0), we extracted 218 demonstrative tokens from the children’s speech, matched with 205 tokens from a sub-sample of caregiver speech. The youngest children can be described as restricting their use of demonstratives to a small set of learned items, with evidence of generalisation and productivity arising over the course of development, alongside an increase in frequency and development in distribution patterns of the various demonstrative forms to more target-like usage in the 3;0 sample. At age three we observe more variation by syntactic function. As has been found in other languages, children acquiring Eegimaa seem to make use of the diverse forms of demonstratives early, but they do not yet make use of the full range of forms even at age three, when they are beginning to produce more systematic forms of the demonstratives across syntactic contexts and with a variety of genders.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48540352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper deals with the distribution of agreement patterns for target adjectives or past participles in Swiss German dialects focussing on non-attributive domains. While agreement outside the nominal phrase has been lost in the development towards Standard German and in most dialects, in some Swiss German dialects certain syntactic domains still show formal agreement. Against this backdrop, two topics will be addressed in this paper. It gives an overview of the extent, function and distribution of formal agreement within the clausal domain on the basis of survey data, as far as possible. Another focus is default neuter inflection, which no longer shows canonical gender agreement with a neuter controller, but has developed a new function in the field of aspectuality.
{"title":"Canonical and non-canonical (co)predicate agreement in Highest Alemannic dialects","authors":"Elvira Glaser, Sandro Bachmann","doi":"10.3366/word.2022.0213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2022.0213","url":null,"abstract":"This paper deals with the distribution of agreement patterns for target adjectives or past participles in Swiss German dialects focussing on non-attributive domains. While agreement outside the nominal phrase has been lost in the development towards Standard German and in most dialects, in some Swiss German dialects certain syntactic domains still show formal agreement. Against this backdrop, two topics will be addressed in this paper. It gives an overview of the extent, function and distribution of formal agreement within the clausal domain on the basis of survey data, as far as possible. Another focus is default neuter inflection, which no longer shows canonical gender agreement with a neuter controller, but has developed a new function in the field of aspectuality.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45833483","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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