Morphology最新文献

This paper investigates stem-marker allomorphy in Czech adjectives. It shows that an analysis based on the frequently used context-sensitive rules comes at the expense of having to postulate widespread accidental homophony or disjunctive rules. The paper further demonstrates that the allomorphy can be accounted for within an approach based on portmanteau realisation of features, specifically the version of Nanosyntax proposed in Starke (2018), although alternative implementations are conceivable. Along the way, we explore a fine-grained decomposition of adjectival meaning and we also discuss the implications of these observations for the general issues surrounding context-sensitive rules compared to other systems of dealing with allomorphy.

The exact nature of French liaison as a phonological or morphological alternation is still debated. Under the phonological analysis, liaison is allophony: liaison consonants are special phonemes that alternate between a consonant allophone and zero (e.g., [t] ∼ ∅), the zero allophone being derived from the consonant phoneme through deletion (/t/ → ∅). Under the morphological analysis, liaison is allomorphy: liaison words have two underlyingly listed allomorphs, a consonant-final allomorph and a shorter allomorph that lacks this consonant (e.g., grand ‘great’ /gʁɑ̃t, gʁɑ̃/). This paper uses evidence from lexical statistics to arbitrate between these two analyses. The form without liaison consonant (and with deletion, under the phonological analysis) has been found in previous research to become less likely with increasing lexical frequency. The paper shows that this is problematic for the phonological analysis of French liaison, as deletion typically applies more frequently in high-frequency words across languages. The paper further shows, using evidence from a large lexical database, that words involved in liaison alternations generally have lower type frequency but higher token frequency than non-liaison words when phonotactic and morphological effects on lexical frequency are controlled for. This result is in line with the predictions of the morphological analysis, as allomorphy typically involves a relatively small number of words that occur frequently. Due to its empirical nature, this argument constitutes to date one of the strongest arguments in favor of the morphological analysis.

Using distributional semantics, we show that English nominal pluralization exhibits semantic clusters. For instance, the change in semantic space from singulars to plurals differs depending on whether a word denotes, e.g., a fruit, or an animal. Languages with extensive noun classes such as Swahili and Kiowa distinguish between these kind of words in their morphology. In English, even though not marked morphologically, plural semantics actually also varies by semantic class. A semantically informed method, CosClassAvg, is introduced that is compared to two other methods, one implementing a fixed shift from singular to plural, and one creating plural vectors from singular vectors using a linear mapping (FRACSS). Compared to FRACSS, CosClassAvg predicted plural vectors that were more similar to the corpus-extracted plural vectors in terms of vector length, but somewhat less similar in terms of orientation. Both FRACSS and CosClassAvg outperform the method using a fixed shift vector to create plural vectors, which does not do justice to the intricacies of English plural semantics. A computational modeling study revealed that the observed difference between the plural semantics generated by these three methods carries over to how well a computational model of the listener can understand previously unencountered plural forms. Among all methods, CosClassAvg provides a good balance for the trade-off between productivity (being able to understand novel plural forms) and faithfulness to corpus-extracted plural vectors (i.e., understanding the particulars of the meaning of a given plural form).

This paper presents a typology of tonal exponence. Couched within an Abstractive Word-and-Paradigm approach to morphology, the present study builds on previous studies on exponence typology and morphological organization by extending it to the study of tone. About half the languages of the world have tone systems, and tone is an important dimension in the morphologies of numerous languages. Tone is therefore a necessary part of a comprehensive typology of exponence. This paper shows that like segmental exponents, tonal exponents may be involved in a diversity of form-function mappings, but they also pose unique challenges due to their autosegmental nature. This study aims to advance our understanding of the role of tone in the organization of morphological systems by addressing deviations from form-function isomorphism, polyfunctionality, morphomic distributions, paradigmatic layers, and inflectional class organization. It is argued that the attested diversity of form-function mappings constitutes an empirical argument for a paradigm-based view of morphology, where the attested diversity is taken at face value and the range of encoding strategies are treated as equivalent, as opposed to choosing form-function isomorphism as the theoretical ‘ideal’.

This paper reports on the compilation and quantitative analysis of VeLePa, an inflected lexicon containing paradigms of 216 Central Pame verbs and a total of 12528 elicited words, in phonological form, supplied with cell and lexeme frequency information. The language (Otomanguean) is of interest due to both its extraordinary morphological complexity, as well as due to the organization of the inflection into a four-fold concurrent classification system where prefixes, stems, tone-stress, and suffixes all display inflection classes and irregularities which are only partially predictable from each other. A quantitative analysis of morphological predictability as per the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem is conducted for every layer, and for the whole word, as well as of the uncertainties language users face to learn or predict the morphosyntactic values or lexical meaning of a verb form from its morphology.

Abstract

This study examines the correlation between derivational paradigms and morphological variation and change. I will examine a case study of Hebrew location nouns formation. Semitic morphology relies highly on non-concatenative morphology, where words are formed in patterns. Some Hebrew location nouns that are formed in one pattern, receive an additional form in another pattern with no change of their meaning. In contrast, there are location nouns, which are also formed in the same pattern, but do not have morphological doublets. Previous studies accounted for this change and proposed phonological and semantic criteria that trigger it. However, such explanation only account for why the change occurs, but not for cases where there is no doublet formation. I argue that morphological change is highly motivated in cases where the forms that undergo a change are part of a derivational paradigm. Specifically, I will show that only location nouns that are derivationally related to a verbal counterpart, such that the semantic relation between them is highly transparent, can undergo such change and have doublets. In contrast, words that are not part of such a paradigm are less likely to undergo change. The study highlights the important role of semantic transparency and derivational paradigms in morphological variation and change, showing that properties of words are not the only criteria that are taken into consideration, but also their relations with other words within a derivational paradigm.

In this paper we present a review of the literature on the role of a word’s morphological structure in written language processing, with an emphasis on spelling. First, we describe that many orthographies have opted for a representation of a word’s morphological structure. Second, we discuss experiments that have demonstrated the importance of a word’s morphological structure in reading, both in isolated word recognition experiments (so-called blind morphological decomposition) and in reading for meaning. Third, we discuss experimental findings that the written representation of a word’s morphological structure can have beneficial effects in spelling, already in young children with a good morphological awareness. However, several experiments have also shown that, in some circumstances, the speller’s task of representing morphology in written words creates considerable challenges and causes spelling errors rather than providing assistance. Closer inspection of this dissociation between beneficial and harmful effects reveals that two factors play a crucial role in determining the error risk: (a) the distinction between stems and affixes (i.e., morphological accessibility based on semantic transparency) and (b) the frequency with which a morpheme type in a language (stem, affix) must be retrieved in writing texts (accessibility based on type and token frequency). The review offers a theoretical framework against which the other papers in this special issue can be situated.

The process by which awareness and/or knowledge of linguistic categories arises from exposure to patterns in data alone, known as emergence, is the corner stone of usage-based approaches to language. The present paper zooms in on the types of patterns that language users may detect in the input to determine the content, and hence the nature, of the hypothesised morphological category of aspect.

The large-scale corpus and computational studies we present focus on the morphological encoding of temporal information as exemplified by aspect (imperfective/perfective) in Polish. Aspect is so heavily grammaticalized that it is marked on every verb form, yielding the practice of positing infinitival verb pairs (‘do’ = ‘robićimpf/zrobićpf’) to represent a complete aspectual paradigm. As has been shown for nominal declension, however, aspectual usage appears uneven, with 90% of verbs strongly preferring one aspect over the other. This makes the theoretical aspectual paradigm in practice very gappy, triggering an acute sense of partialness in usage. Operationalising emergence as learnability, we simulate learning to use aspect from exposure with a computational implementation of the Rescorla-Wager rule of associative learning. We find that paradigmatic gappiness in usage does not diminish learnability; to the contrary, a very high prediction accuracy is achieved using as cues only the verb and its tense; contextual information does not further improve performance. Aspect emerges as a strongly lexical phenomenon. Hence, the question of cognitive reality of aspectual categories, as an example of morphological categories in general, should be reformulated to ask which continuous cues must be learned to enable categorisation of aspectual outcomes. We discuss how the gappiness of the paradigm plays a crucial role in this process, and how an iteratively learned, continuously developing association presents a possible mechanism by which language users process their experience of cue-outcome co-occurrences and learn to use morphological forms, without the need for abstractions.

Abstract

French plural markers and German noun capitalization encode syntactic information. Both syntactic markers present the syntactic information needed reliably and saliently, and both are unrelated to phonology. A main difference between both is that French plural spelling is part of inflection morphology and encodes the plural morphemes in written French. German noun capitalization is not a morpheme or a grapheme, but an allograph licensed in a particular function of the sentence, the head of the NP. Although both are substantially different, studies have shown that syntactic training is effective at improving the spelling of these syntactic markers. The current study presents two intervention studies in Grade 4 (N = 176) to examine whether learners who become literate in German and French benefit from a syntactic training in French plural spelling and German noun capitalization. All participants were trained in both languages and tested at four test points. Instruction was provided through learner videos (10 × 10 minutes) shown in a classroom setting. In both languages, the main goal of the training was to raise awareness of the syntactic unit of the NP as well as the syntactic information encoded in spelling. The results show large, short-term and long-term effects of the French training. However, unlike in previous studies, no training effects were found in German when compared with the control group. The paper discusses the results with a focus on the detailed comparison of French plural spelling and German noun capitalization as well as the feedback of the participating teachers in order to provide hypothetical explanations of the mixed training results. The discussed findings have an impact on the conception of syntactic spelling, as well as its teaching and learning.

This article presents a comparative study of the semantics of conversion between verbs and nouns in two languages with different morphological structures – English and Czech. To make the cross-linguistic comparison of semantic relations possible, a cognitive approach is used to provide conceptual semantic categories applicable within both languages. The semantic categories, based on event schemata introduced by Radden and Dirven (2007) primarily for syntactic description, are applied to data samples of verb–noun conversion pairs in both languages, using a dictionary-based approach. We analyse a corpus sample of 300 conversion pairs of verbs and nouns in each language (e.g., run.v – run.n, pepper.n – pepper.v; běhat ‘run.v’– běh ‘run.n’, pepř ‘pepper.n’ – pepřit ‘pepper.v’) annotated for the semantic relation between the verb and the noun. We analyse which relations appear in the two languages and how often, looking for sizeable differences to answer the question of whether the morphological characteristics of a language influence the semantics of conversion. The analysis of the annotated samples documents that the languages most often employ conversion for the same concepts (namely, instance of action/process and result) and that the range of semantic categories in English and Czech is generally the same, suggesting that the differences in the morphology of the two languages do not affect the range of possible meanings that conversion is employed for. The data also show a difference in the number of types of combinations of multiple semantic relations between the verb and the noun in a single conversion pair, which was found to be larger in English than in Czech, and also in the frequency with which certain individual semantic relations occur, and these differences seem to be at least partially related to the morphological characteristics of Czech and English.