Pub Date : 2021-09-04DOI: 10.23668/PSYCHARCHIVES.5083
Sabine Arndt-Lappe
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;daelmans & 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;Chapman & 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":"10.23668/PSYCHARCHIVES.5083","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23668/PSYCHARCHIVES.5083","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":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42911447","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 plural system of Mubi (East Chadic, Afroasiatic) stands out cross-linguistically within Chadic and worldwide for its extensive use of pattern morphology, fixing the output's vowel qualities and shape while preserving the input's consonants. This paper demonstrates that, while some elements of this system may be conserved from earlier stages of Afroasiatic, others reflect the influence of Chadian Arabic, the regional lingua franca. The process of influence, however, turns out to involve not just straightforward pattern morpheme borrowing (exemplified here by the iambic pattern BaCaaDiFe), but also the reshaping of inherited patterns. The most frequent quadriliteral plural pattern, BuCooDuF, reflects Arabic influence in its shape – mediated by a change in mapping directionality – but Chadic inheritance in its distribution. This result supports the hypothesis that pattern morphology is more easily transferred between related languages.
{"title":"Pattern borrowing and hybridization in Mubi (East Chadic): The importance of congruence","authors":"Lameen Souag","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2021.0189","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2021.0189","url":null,"abstract":"The plural system of Mubi (East Chadic, Afroasiatic) stands out cross-linguistically within Chadic and worldwide for its extensive use of pattern morphology, fixing the output's vowel qualities and shape while preserving the input's consonants. This paper demonstrates that, while some elements of this system may be conserved from earlier stages of Afroasiatic, others reflect the influence of Chadian Arabic, the regional lingua franca. The process of influence, however, turns out to involve not just straightforward pattern morpheme borrowing (exemplified here by the iambic pattern BaCaaDiFe), but also the reshaping of inherited patterns. The most frequent quadriliteral plural pattern, BuCooDuF, reflects Arabic influence in its shape – mediated by a change in mapping directionality – but Chadic inheritance in its distribution. This result supports the hypothesis that pattern morphology is more easily transferred between related languages.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41369433","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 explores the effects of language contact in the nominal morphology of central Sicilian dialects. In particular, this study is concerned with the contact-induced changes related to the distribution of three plural formatives that give rise to competition between different inflectional classes with respect to a number of lexemes. It is shown that sociolinguistic factors such as speaker age account for the distribution of the competing plural forms and the high degree of variation. As a consequence, a slow and gradual change is leading to the disappearance of the plural form that has no equivalent in the contact language, that is, in Italian.
{"title":"Language contact and morphological competition: Plurals in central Sicily","authors":"Silvio Cruschina","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2021.0186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2021.0186","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the effects of language contact in the nominal morphology of central Sicilian dialects. In particular, this study is concerned with the contact-induced changes related to the distribution of three plural formatives that give rise to competition between different inflectional classes with respect to a number of lexemes. It is shown that sociolinguistic factors such as speaker age account for the distribution of the competing plural forms and the high degree of variation. As a consequence, a slow and gradual change is leading to the disappearance of the plural form that has no equivalent in the contact language, that is, in Italian.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42533608","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 language’s grammar can be stratified, due to borrowing processes. While being a well-established term in the linguistic literature, the term ‘borrowing’ is sometimes used in a non-uniform way, particularly when it applies to bound morphological formatives. A Stratal Effect is hypothesized, which, applying to varying extent, gives rise to at least three distinct, psycholinguistically motivated types of morphological transfer. A typology of morphological spread is proposed, which consists of three main types: strictly compartmentalized co-morphologies, partially compartmentalized co-morphologies, and morphological borrowing. The widespread view that affix borrowing can be either direct or indirect is questioned and it is argued that most likely, morphological borrowing is always an intermediate process, involving the extraction of formatives and their diffusion within the lexicon.
{"title":"On how morphology spreads","authors":"F. Gardani","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2021.0184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2021.0184","url":null,"abstract":"A language’s grammar can be stratified, due to borrowing processes. While being a well-established term in the linguistic literature, the term ‘borrowing’ is sometimes used in a non-uniform way, particularly when it applies to bound morphological formatives. A Stratal Effect is hypothesized, which, applying to varying extent, gives rise to at least three distinct, psycholinguistically motivated types of morphological transfer. A typology of morphological spread is proposed, which consists of three main types: strictly compartmentalized co-morphologies, partially compartmentalized co-morphologies, and morphological borrowing. The widespread view that affix borrowing can be either direct or indirect is questioned and it is argued that most likely, morphological borrowing is always an intermediate process, involving the extraction of formatives and their diffusion within the lexicon.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43187324","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 traditional hypothesis of a typological cycle from agglutination via fusion to isolation and back to agglutination, still invoked by many linguists (albeit with caveats and limitations), would imply a natural drift behind typological changes. Accordingly, such typological changes would typically result from internal developments (such as reductive sound changes), while etymological counter-currents (such as segmentable suffixes replacing earlier stem alternations) could rather be due to language contact. On the other hand, the agglutinative type seems to be stable and resistant to typological change especially in Northern Eurasia, and for the change towards a more fusional type, characteristic of some Finnic and Saami languages in the northwestern periphery of Uralic, a contact explanation might seem plausible. However, a closer scrutiny of Estonian, often mentioned as an example of typological change and characteristically impacted by Germanic, shows that in typological change, internal and external motivations intertwine and interact.
{"title":"Language contact and typological change: The case of Estonian revisited","authors":"J. Laakso","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2021.0188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2021.0188","url":null,"abstract":"The traditional hypothesis of a typological cycle from agglutination via fusion to isolation and back to agglutination, still invoked by many linguists (albeit with caveats and limitations), would imply a natural drift behind typological changes. Accordingly, such typological changes would typically result from internal developments (such as reductive sound changes), while etymological counter-currents (such as segmentable suffixes replacing earlier stem alternations) could rather be due to language contact. On the other hand, the agglutinative type seems to be stable and resistant to typological change especially in Northern Eurasia, and for the change towards a more fusional type, characteristic of some Finnic and Saami languages in the northwestern periphery of Uralic, a contact explanation might seem plausible. However, a closer scrutiny of Estonian, often mentioned as an example of typological change and characteristically impacted by Germanic, shows that in typological change, internal and external motivations intertwine and interact.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43760706","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}
Abaza, a polysynthetic ergative Northwest Caucasian language, shares with its neighbour and distant relative Kabardian a typologically peculiar use of the deictic directional prefixes monitoring the relative ranking of the subject and indirect object on the person hierarchy. In both languages, the cislocative (‘hither’) prefixes are used if the indirect object outranks the subject on the person hierarchy, and the translocative (‘thither’) prefixes are used in combinations of first person subjects with second person singular indirect objects. This pattern, reminiscent of the more familiar inverse marking and hence called ‘quasi-inverse’, is observed with ditransitive and bivalent intransitive verbs and is almost fully redundant, since all participants are unequivocally indexed on verbs by pronominal prefixes. I argue that this isogloss, shared by West Circassian (a close relative to Kabardian) but not with Abkhaz, the sister-language of Abaza, is a result of pattern replication under intense language contact, which has led to an increase of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic complexity of Abaza verbal morphology.
{"title":"Borrowing non-canonical inverse between Kabardian and Abaza","authors":"P. Arkadiev","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2021.0185","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2021.0185","url":null,"abstract":"Abaza, a polysynthetic ergative Northwest Caucasian language, shares with its neighbour and distant relative Kabardian a typologically peculiar use of the deictic directional prefixes monitoring the relative ranking of the subject and indirect object on the person hierarchy. In both languages, the cislocative (‘hither’) prefixes are used if the indirect object outranks the subject on the person hierarchy, and the translocative (‘thither’) prefixes are used in combinations of first person subjects with second person singular indirect objects. This pattern, reminiscent of the more familiar inverse marking and hence called ‘quasi-inverse’, is observed with ditransitive and bivalent intransitive verbs and is almost fully redundant, since all participants are unequivocally indexed on verbs by pronominal prefixes. I argue that this isogloss, shared by West Circassian (a close relative to Kabardian) but not with Abkhaz, the sister-language of Abaza, is a result of pattern replication under intense language contact, which has led to an increase of both paradigmatic and syntagmatic complexity of Abaza verbal morphology.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46995522","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 study investigates the plural form uni/une deriving from the numeral ‘one’ in the Istriot dialect of Sissano. Sissano is located in the Istrian peninsula, an area characterized by high intensity of linguistic contact. We argue that the rise of such a peculiar form is indeed induced by contact with Croatian and that uni/une is unique in the Italo-Romance domain since, generally, the plural indefinite forms derived from the Latin numeral ‘one’ are pronouns and never occur in attributive position. The use of uni/ une is not attested in the few grammars of Istriot varieties because it is recent and still undergoing a process of grammaticalization. Therefore, we conducted interviews to verify how and to what extent contact with Croatian affects the meaning and the use of uni/une in Sissano. We found that this form is mostly used as a quantifier, bearing mainly the meaning ‘a pair of’, ‘one group of’, in the context of pluralia tantum and plural dominant nouns. We further observe that this quantifier has achieved a more advanced stage of grammaticalization in the younger generation of speakers than in the older ones. We discuss the role played by pluralia tantum as well as by the growing prestige of Croatian in triggering this borrowing and in fostering the grammaticalization process of uni/une on its way to become a marker of indefiniteness.
{"title":"A plural indefinite quantifier on the Romance-Slavic border","authors":"A. Giudici, Chiara Zanini","doi":"10.3366/WORD.2021.0187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/WORD.2021.0187","url":null,"abstract":"This study investigates the plural form uni/une deriving from the numeral ‘one’ in the Istriot dialect of Sissano. Sissano is located in the Istrian peninsula, an area characterized by high intensity of linguistic contact. We argue that the rise of such a peculiar form is indeed induced by contact with Croatian and that uni/une is unique in the Italo-Romance domain since, generally, the plural indefinite forms derived from the Latin numeral ‘one’ are pronouns and never occur in attributive position. The use of uni/ une is not attested in the few grammars of Istriot varieties because it is recent and still undergoing a process of grammaticalization. Therefore, we conducted interviews to verify how and to what extent contact with Croatian affects the meaning and the use of uni/une in Sissano. We found that this form is mostly used as a quantifier, bearing mainly the meaning ‘a pair of’, ‘one group of’, in the context of pluralia tantum and plural dominant nouns. We further observe that this quantifier has achieved a more advanced stage of grammaticalization in the younger generation of speakers than in the older ones. We discuss the role played by pluralia tantum as well as by the growing prestige of Croatian in triggering this borrowing and in fostering the grammaticalization process of uni/une on its way to become a marker of indefiniteness.","PeriodicalId":43166,"journal":{"name":"Word Structure","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46555881","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}