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Journal articles on the topic 'Noun inflection'
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1
Sinha, Yash. "Hindi nominal suffixes are bimorphemic: A Distributed Morphology analysis." Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 3, no. 1 (March 3, 2018): 20. http://dx.doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v3i1.4301.
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This paper provides a Distributed Morphology (DM) analysis for Hindi nominal (noun and adjectival) inflection. Contra Singh & Sarma (2010), I argue that nominal suffixes contain two morphemes – a basic morpheme, and a restrictedly distributed additional morpheme. The presence of two different morphemes is especially evident when one compares noun and adjectival inflectional suffixes, which Singh & Sarma (2010) do not, since they only look at noun inflection. I also show that the so-called adjectival inflectional suffixes are not limited to adjectives, and may occur on nouns, provided the noun is not at the right edge of the noun phrase. On the other hand, the regular noun inflection is only limited to nouns at the right edge of the noun phrase. This is demonstrated using a type of coordinative compound found in Hindi. Then, I take the fact that nouns can take either the regular noun inflection or the so-called “adjectival” inflection as motivation for a unified analysis for both sets of suffixes. I demonstrate that after undoing certain phonological rules, the difference between the “adjectival” and regular noun inflectional suffixes can be summarized by saying that the additional morpheme only surfaces in the regular noun inflectional suffixes. Finally, I provide vocabulary entries and morphological operations that can capture the facts about the distribution of the various basic and additional morphemes.
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KILBURY, JAMES. "German noun inflection revisited." Journal of Linguistics 37, no. 2 (July 2001): 339–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022226701008830.
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Cahill & Gazdar (henceforth C&G) have presented their analysis of German noun inflection in issue 35.1 (1999) of this journal. As they emphasize (on page 4), the lexical knowledge representation language DATR they employ is theoretically neutral and can serve to encode descriptions set in entirely diverse theoretical frameworks, not just those that are theoretically close to theirs. The formalism is just as amenable to ‘item and process’ and ‘word and paradigm’ analyses as it is to the affixal ‘item and arrangement’ perspective. Moreover, distinct DATR theories (i.e., concrete descriptions) may differ greatly in their input (queries) and output (returned values) while they share a common structure reflecting the inheritance relations arising from the described phenomena.In this paper I will present another analysis of German noun inflection, encoded in the same formalism but based on the theory of MINIMALIST MORPHOLOGY developed by Wunderlich and his associates (Wunderlich & Fabri 1995, Wunderlich 1997a, 1999b). In his account German nouns are mapped into tree-based representations of their inflectional paradigms, whereas C&G map tuples of lexemes and inflectional categories (case and number) into individual inflected word forms. The major linguistic gain of my analysis is that the principal strength of Wunderlich's account, the formal description of relations within paradigms, is combined with the formal description of hierarchical relations BETWEEN paradigms, which is central for C&G but given little attention by Wunderlich.
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Pounder, Amanda. "Inflection and the Paradigm in German Nouns." American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 8, no. 2 (1996): 219–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1040820700001852.
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The paper presents an analysis of noun inflection in Modern Standard German within a process framework. Familiar issues in the description of German inflectional morphology are discussed, such as analysis of weak nouns and of plural formation, and the establishment of inflectional classes, as well as broader theoretical issues such as postulation of identity relations (“zeros”). The elements of a process morphology are elaborated, including some that deviate from well-known models, such as recognition of a dynamic morphological component distinct from the static lexicon, expression of morphological semantics in the morphological component, and formalization of the notion of a paradigm. The paradigm is claimed to be an essential morphological structure, dynamic in nature, responsible for organization of the inflectional system and ensuring, in cooperation with operations applied to stems, correct sequencing and selection of these inflectional operations. It is also concluded that the inflectional class, derivative of the paradigm, may be a useful construct in some languages (including German), but is not a necessary one for all inflecting languages.
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Faust, Noam, and Mohamed Lahrouchi. "Asymmetric inflection in Berber." Brill’s Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 14, no. 2 (December 19, 2022): 194–209. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18776930-01402005.
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Abstract In Tashlhiyt Berber nouns, grammatical gender is usually expressed on both edges of the noun by the segment /t/. However, at the right edge, there is another, more minor pattern: many grammatically feminine nouns end in a vowel. The regular realization involves a final /t/ associated to a suffixal CV unit. Vowel-final feminine nouns are derived when a final stem vowel is associated to the V position of the suffix, blocking the association of the /t/. This right-edge effect is a mirror-image of Bendjaballah’s (2011) analysis of the left-edge inflection of vowel-initial stems. The distribution of gender marking in loans provides further supports to this analysis.
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CAHILL, LYNNE, and GERALD GAZDAR. "German noun inflection." Journal of Linguistics 35, no. 1 (March 1999): 1–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022226798007294.
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This is the second of a series of three papers that, taken together, will give an essentially complete account of inflection in standard German. In this paper we present that part of the account that covers nouns, one that captures all the regularities, subregularities and irregularities that are involved, but with a focus on the subregularities. Inflected forms are defined in terms of their syllable structure, as proposed in Cahill (1990a, b, 1993). The analysis is formulated as a DATR theory – a set of lexical axioms – from which all the relevant facts follow as theorems. DATR is a widely used formal lexical knowledge representation language developed for use in computational linguistics.
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ROTHOU, KYRIAKOULA M., and SUSANA PADELIADU. "Inflectional morphological awareness and word reading and reading comprehension in Greek." Applied Psycholinguistics 36, no. 4 (March 13, 2014): 1007–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0142716414000022.
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ABSTRACTThe study explored the contribution of two aspects of inflectional morphological awareness, verb inflection and noun–adjective inflection, to word reading and reading comprehension in the Greek language, which is an orthographically transparent language. Participants (120 first graders, 123 second graders, 126 third graders) were given two oral language experimental tasks of inflectional morphological awareness. Furthermore, phonological awareness, receptive vocabulary, expressive vocabulary, decoding, and reading comprehension were evaluated. It was revealed that noun–adjective inflectional morphology contributed significantly to decoding only in first grade, while verb inflectional morphology had a significant contribution to reading comprehension in third grade. It is interesting that inflectional morphological awareness did not predict reading skills for second graders. Phonological awareness was a firm predictor of word reading in all grades and made a unique contribution in Grades 2 and 3. Finally, in all grades, receptive vocabulary was a steady predictor of reading comprehension, whereas expressive vocabulary predicted only first-grade reading comprehension. It is suggested that inflectional morphological awareness may be an important predictor of early reading in a language with a shallow orthography and a rich morphology.
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Pereira, Bruna Karla. "INFLECTION OF CADA AND NUMBER FEATURE VALUATION IN BP." Estudos Linguísticos e Literários, no. 61 (June 15, 2019): 85. http://dx.doi.org/10.9771/ell.v0i61.27910.
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<p>This research investigates nominal concord in structures of non-standard Brazilian Portuguese (BP) where <em>cada</em> is inflected with the plural morpheme <em>-s</em> while the phrases following it may not bear any plural marking. In order to account for this, I will consider that cardinals and silent nouns work as a boundary dividing the DP into two domains such that phrases to their left are marked with the plural morpheme while phrases to their right are unmarked, a pattern found across languages. Additionally, I will argue that DPs with <em>cadas</em> have a silent noun SET and that this silent noun conveys a set reading as well as valued plural features. In this case, <em>cada</em> is interpreted as either ‘such’ or ‘every’ rather than ‘each’ and is followed by a noun or a cardinal ≥ 2 (plus a noun). Accordingly, because <em>cadas</em> precedes SET, it is marked with <em>-s</em>. This plural silent noun is followed by a preposition, which allows its embedded NP to be singular.</p>
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Friis, Louise S. "Tocharian B agent nouns in -ntsa and their origin." Indo-European Linguistics 9, no. 1 (November 2, 2021): 1–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22125892-bja10012.
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Abstract The agent noun suffix in -ntsa belongs to a complex of Tocharian B agent noun formations, similar in form, function, and inflection. Of these, two suffixes are widely believed to be related to -ntsa: the productive agent noun in -ñca and the lexicalised agent noun in -nta. The suffix -ntsa forms occupational titles to eleven verbs in Tocharian B and can be reconstructed for Proto-Tocharian through comparison with Tocharian A. In this paper, it is argued that the suffix originated in the feminine of the PIE active participle in *-nt. This is substantiated by the fact that several ntsa-nouns refer to primarily female professions, as well as the existence of the relic forms Bpreṃtsa ‘pregnant’ and Blāntsa ‘queen’. Furthermore, it is proposed that the masculine is reflected in the suffixes -ñca and -nta and that the disintegration of gendered inflection in the participle led to its development into several agent noun formations.
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BAECHLER, RAFFAELA. "Analogy, reanalysis and exaptation in Early Middle English: the emergence of a new inflectional system." English Language and Linguistics 24, no. 1 (May 23, 2019): 123–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1360674318000333.
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From Old English to Middle English inflection is gradually lost. It is assumed that this is mainly due to phonological and syntactic changes. This article, however, argues that the loss of inflection is not a linear process but new systems can emerge, and that morphological changes play an important role. The nominal inflection of the Lambeth Homilies – an Early Middle English manuscript from the southwest Midlands and dated around 1200 – is investigated in detail. It will be shown that analogical changes within and across inflection classes do not simply lead towards a reduction of inflection. The increase in syncretism and decrease in allomorphy result in a new inflectional system. This new system distinguishes singular from plural, feminine from non-feminine (in the singular and plural), and possessive from non-possessive (in the singular and plural). Additionally, the original inflection classes related to different stems are almost lost, except the weak inflection classes. The inflection classes are instead related to gender; that is, gender is the information that best predicts how a noun is inflected.
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BENÍTEZ-BURRACO, ANTONIO, ELENA GARAYZÁBAL, and FERNANDO CUETOS. "Morphology in Spanish-speaking children with Williams syndrome." Language and Cognition 9, no. 4 (May 9, 2017): 728–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2017.6.
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abstractAims. Morphological skills in Williams syndrome (WS) are a controversial issue, particularly cross-linguistically. Methods. We assessed pluralization patterns of nouns, inflection of verbs in the past, and gender assignment, inflection, and agreement within the noun phrase in a sample of Spanish-speaking children with WS compared to typically developing (TD) children matched on mental age (VA-TD) and on chronological age (CA-TD) age. Results. Children with WS attribute grammatical gender correctly in a production task, but they have problems with inferring the referent’s sex from the gender of the noun in a comprehension task. Additionally, they correctly pluralize nouns and properly inflect regular verbs, but they have problems with irregular verbs. Our findings suggest that they have mastered the productive rules, but they perform like younger children regarding irregular items.
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Munire, Muhetaer, Xiao Li, and Yating Yang. "Construction of the Uyghur Noun Morphological Re-Inflection Model Based on Hybrid Strategy." Applied Sciences 9, no. 4 (February 19, 2019): 722. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/app9040722.
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In this paper, a hybrid strategy of rules and statistics is employed to implement the Uyghur Noun Re-inflection model. More specifically, completed Uyghur sentences are taken as an input, and these Uyghur sentences are marked with part of speech tagging, and the nouns in the sentences remain the form of the stem. In this model, relevant linguistic rules and statistical algorithms are used to find the most probable noun suffixes and output the Uyghur sentences after the nouns are re-inflected. With rules of linguistics artificially summed up, the training corpora are formed by the human–machine exchange. The final experimental result shows that the Uyghur morphological re-inflection model is of high performance and can be applied to various fields of natural language processing, such as Uyghur machine translation and natural language generation.
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Opitz, Andreas, and Thomas Pechmann. "Gender Features in German." Linguistic Perspectives on Morphological Processing 11, no. 2 (July 18, 2016): 216–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ml.11.2.03opi.
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Current theoretical approaches to inflectional morphology make extensive use of the two concepts of abstract feature decomposition and underspecification. Psycholinguistic models of inflection, in contrast, generally lack such more differentiated morphological analyses. This paper reports a series of behavioral experiments that investigate the processing of grammatical gender of nouns in German. The results of these experiments support the idea that elements in the mental lexicon may be underspecified with regard to their grammatical features. However, contrary to all established morphological and psycholinguistic approaches, we provide evidence that even the lexical representation of bare noun stems is characterized by underspecified gender information. The observation that the domain of underspecification of grammatical features extends from inflectional markers to noun stems, supports the idea that underspecification is a more general characteristic of the mental lexicon. We conclude that this finding is mainly driven by economical reasons: a feature (or feature value) that is never used for grammatical operations (e.g., inflectional marking or evaluation of agreement) is not needed in the language system at all.
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Nephawe, Farisani Thomas. "English Second Language Strategies For Teaching Irregular Plural Noun Morphological Inflection." e-Journal of Linguistics 16, no. 2 (June 2, 2022): 156. http://dx.doi.org/10.24843/e-jl.2022.v16.i02.p01.
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Nouns are one basic component of the syntactic category of the English language because they can be used as subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, subject complements, object complements, appositives, or adjectives of sentences. Transforming regular nouns from singular to plural forms is comprehensible since the usual patterning is used. Converting irregular nouns from singular to plural forms causes difficulties to non-native learners of English since conversion does not follow the usual patterning. The study examined English second language strategies for teaching irregular plural noun morphological inflection to Grade 8 learners. The researcher used a quantitative research design because the results could be analysed mathematically and statistically. A probability technique was used to randomly sample 25 participants whose ages ranged from 14 to 16 at Ndaedzo Secondary School in Limpopo Province, South Africa. A statistical Package for Social Sciences version 22 was utilised to interpret the findings. Initially, the participants were incompetent in this regard but after utilising the ‘irregular plurals reversi memory game’, and ‘irregular plural nouns in movement game’ strategies, learners’ performance improved remarkably. The research recommends teaching irregular plural noun morphological inflection using the games.
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VIHMAN, VIRVE-ANNELI, FELIX ENGELMANN, ELENA V. M. LIEVEN, and ANNA L. THEAKSTON. "Many ways to decline a noun: elicitation of children’s novel noun inflection in Estonian." Language and Cognition 13, no. 4 (November 2, 2021): 693–733. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2021.19.
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abstractAimsThis study investigated three- to five-year-olds’ ability to generalise knowledge of case inflection to novel nouns in Estonian, which has complex morphology and lacks a default declension pattern. We explored whether Estonian-speaking children use similar strategies to adults, and whether they default to a preferred pattern or use analogy to phonological neighbours.MethodWe taught children novel nouns in nominative or allative case and elicited partitive and genitive case forms based on pictures of unfamiliar creatures. Participants included 66 children (3;0–6;0) and 21 adults. Because of multiple grammatical inflection patterns, children’s responses were compared with those of adults for variability, accuracy, and morphological neighbourhood density. Errors were analysed to reveal how children differed from adults.ConclusionsYoung children make use of varied available patterns, but find generalisation difficult. Children’s responses showed much variability, yet even three-year-olds used the same general declension patterns as adults. Accuracy increased with age but responses were not fully adult-like by age five. Neighbourhood density of responses increased with age, indicating that analogy over a larger store of examples underlies proficiency with productive noun inflection. Children did not default to the more transparent, affixal patterns available, preferring instead to use the more frequent, stem-changing patterns.
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Rauhut, Alexander. "Exploring the Effect of Conversion on the Distribution of Inflectional Suffixes: A Multivariate Corpus Study." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 69, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 267–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/zaa-2021-2024.
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Abstract Lexical ambiguity in the English language is abundant. Word-class ambiguity is even inherently tied to the productive process of conversion. Most lexemes are rather flexible when it comes to word class, which is facilitated by the minimal morphology that English has preserved. This study takes a multivariate quantitative approach to examine potential patterns that arise in a lexicon where verb-noun and noun-verb conversion are pervasive. The distributions of three inflectional suffixes, verbal -s, nominal -s, and -ed are explored for their interaction with degrees of verb-noun conversion. In order to achieve that, the lexical dispersion, context-dependency, and lexical similarity between the inflected and bare forms were taken into consideration and controlled for in a Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape (GAMLSS; Stasinopoulos, M. D., R. A. Rigby, and F. De Bastiani. 2018. “GAMLSS: A Distributional Regression Approach.” Statistical Modelling 18 (3–4): 248–73). The results of a series of zero-one-inflated beta models suggest that there is a clear “uncanny” valley of lexemes that show similar proportions of verbal and nominal uses. Such lexemes have a lower proportion of inflectional uses when textual dispersion and context-dependency are controlled for. Furthermore, as soon as there is some degree of conversion, the probability that a lexeme is always encountered without inflection sharply rises. Disambiguation by means of inflection is unlikely to play a uniform role depending on the inflectional distribution of a lexeme.
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Syarifaturrahman, Wahyu Kamil, Nurachman Hanafi, and Nuriadi. "The inflection of Sasak language in Kuripan village." International journal of social sciences and humanities 1, no. 3 (December 31, 2017): 155–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.29332/ijssh.v1n3.69.
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This writing is about inflection of Sasak language in Kuripan. The people of Kuripan use Meno-Mene dialect as their daily communication. Sasak language in Kuripan has the uniqueness based on its position (lay on a boundary area of West Lombok and Central Lombok) wherein Kuripan uses Meno-Mene dialect and the other part of Central Lombok which is close to Kuripan Use Meriaq-Meriku dialect so that it makes Meno-Mene dialect of Kuripan has its own character. Based on the phenomenon about varieties of the words and utterances which have different structure is used in Sasak language especially in Kuripan, so I interest in doing the research about inflection as a subfield of morphology which influences the sentences or utterances structurally. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the types and the functions of inflection in the Meno-Mene dialect of Kuripan. This study used a descriptive and qualitative method where the data gathered through some methods: observation, and an interview. The data gathered are analyzed using some steps: Representing the data obtained, then classifying the class category of the base words (whether they are verb, noun, or adjective), then Identifying the types of inflection in Meno-Mene Dialect of Kuripan, and the last Analyzing various functions of inflection in Meno-Mene dialect of Kuripan. This study found there is 34 (thirty-four) inflection morpheme that classified according to the lexical category, namely; noun, verb, and adjective. Furthermore, all of the inflectional affixes above have the difference function depend on their affixes and their base-form category. Hence, this study found that the use Meno-Mene dialect of Kuripan has the various affixes especially in term of inflection which influences the utterances or expressions grammatically.
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Browne, Wayles. "Adjacent vs. separated placement of preposition and noun as a factor in noun inflection: The cases of Bosnian- Croatian-Serbian pazuho ‘armpit’." Vilnius University Open Series 16 (July 26, 2021): 67–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.15388/sbol.2021.3.
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The alternations k~c, g~z, and x~s occurring before i in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS) noun declension stem from the Second Palatalization of Velars, but are no longer phonologically conditioned. In the dative-locative singular of nouns with nominative in -a, they are favored or hindered by a combination of morphological criteria. In the dative-instrumental-locative plural of masculine nouns, they are almost exceptionless. In the same three cases of neuter nouns they occur more when the noun is directly after a preposition, less when other words intervene between the preposition and the noun, a phenomenon that has not previously been remarked in the literature. We exemplify it with the noun pazuho ‘armpit’.
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Fichtner, Edward G. "Noun Modifier Inflection in German: A Morphological System in Flux." American Journal of Germanic Linguistics and Literatures 2, no. 1 (January 1990): 23–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1040820700000366.
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ABSTRACTTraditionally, noun modifiers in German fall into two classes, the so-called der- and ein-words, and descriptive or attributive adjectives. In the noun phrase, members of these word classes are inflected by the addition of one or another of two sets of endings, i.e., the primary, strong, or pronominal endings, or the secondary, weak, or nominal endings, in highly predictable combinations. In the data collected by Ljungerud (1955), however, sequences of endings in noun phrases containing nine modifiers occur with noticeable departures from the norm, i.e., folgend, sämtlich, ander-, einig-, viel-, manch-, welch-, irgendwelch-, and solch-. It is concluded that the anomalous sequences of endings in phrases containing these modifers are motivated by the growing association of certain sequences of endings with the feature +/-Generality as a component of the meaning of the noun phrase as a whole.
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Acquaviva, Paolo. "Structures for plurals." Lexical plurals and beyond 39, no. 2 (December 31, 2016): 217–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/li.39.2.01acq.
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This paper presents a hypothesis about the innermost structure of noun phrases, which aims at explaining the interaction of number and countability in nouns. This is based on a constructionist approach which views nouns as substructures of the noun phrase, and word formation and inflection as the morphological spellout of structures assembled and interpreted at an abstract syntactic level. It argues that nouns fundamentally identify entity types, and the rest of the DP specifies their denotation in part-structural and quantificational terms. This provides the framework for a new unified analysis of nouns like furniture, waters, and contents, where number and countability interact in a non-canonical way, which accounts for their morphology and their semantics.
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Edeleva, Julia, Anna Chrabaszcz, and Valeriia Demareva. "Resolving conflicting cues in processing of ambiguous words: The role of case, word order, and animacy." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 73, no. 8 (February 13, 2020): 1173–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1747021820902429.
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We report results from a self-paced silent-reading study and a self-paced reading-aloud study examining ambiguous forms (heteronyms) of Russian animate and inanimate nouns which are differentiated in speech through word stress, for example, uCHItelja.TEACHER.GEN/ACC.SG and uchiteLJA.TEACHERS.NOM.PL.1 During reading, the absence of the auditory cue (word stress) to word identification results in morphologically ambiguous forms since both words have the same inflectional marking, -ja. Because word inflection is a reliable cue to syntactic role assignment, the ambiguity affects the level of morphology and of syntactic structure. However, word order constraints and frequency advantage of the GEN over both the NOM and the ACC noun forms with the - a/-ja inflection should pre-empt two different syntactic parses (OVS vs. SVO) when the heteronym is sentence-initial. We inquired into whether the parser is aware of the multi-level ambiguity and whether selected conflicting cues (case, word order, animacy) can prime parallel access to several structural parses. We found that animate and inanimate nouns patterned differently. The difference was consistent across the experiments. Against the backdrop of classical sentence processing dichotomies, the emergent pattern fits with the serial interactive or the parallel modular parser hypothesis.
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Karatsareas, Petros. "Convergence in word structure." Diachronica 33, no. 1 (April 29, 2016): 31–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dia.33.1.02kar.
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Cappadocian Greek is reported to display agglutinative inflection in its nominal system, namely, mono-exponential formatives for the marking of case and number, and nom.sg-looking forms as the morphemic units to which inflection applies. Previous scholarship has interpreted these developments as indicating a shift in morphological type from fusion to agglutination, brought about by contact with Turkish. This study takes issue with these conclusions. By casting a wider net over the inflectional system of the language, it shows that, of the two types of agglutinative formations identified, only one evidences a radical departure from the inherited structural properties of Cappadocian noun inflection. The other, on the contrary, represents a typologically more conservative innovation. The study presents evidence that a combination of system-internal and -external motivations triggered the development of both types, it describes the mechanisms through which the innovation was implemented, and discusses the factors that favoured change.
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HATCHARD, RACHEL, and ELENA LIEVEN. "Inflection of nouns for grammatical number in spoken narratives by people with aphasia: how glass slippers challenge the rule-based approach." Language and Cognition 11, no. 3 (September 2019): 341–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2019.21.
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abstractInflection impairments are commonly noted in aphasia, particularly non-fluent variants, where descriptions of such difficulties often focus on inflection omission. This aligns withrule-basedtheory, in which inflected forms should be more difficult to produce than their uninflected counterparts. Recent studies address noun inflection for number and potential effects of the relative frequency of singular and plural forms (dominance effects). However, none examine number errors qualitatively or in spontaneous speech. We present quantitative and qualitative analyses of such errors in nouns produced by twelve people with aphasia in spoken Cinderella narratives, examining: error rate; error types and nouns involved; relationship between error production and dominance; and speakers’ consistency with error production and flexibility in varying the noun forms concerned. Twelve unimpaired speakers provide comparison data. While error rates were low, arguably more important is error type. Singularisation and pluralisation errors were observed, all on regular nouns and involving production of the dominant form. The pluralisation errors, all occurring on references to Cinderella’s glass slipper, arguably challenge rule-based predictions that the singular is easier to retrieve than the plural. We suggestconstructivist, usage-basedtheory as a promising framework to characterise such productions. Implications for aphasiology and clinical practice are also discussed.
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BASSANO, DOMINIQUE. "Early development of nouns and verbs in French: exploring the interface between lexicon and grammar." Journal of Child Language 27, no. 3 (October 2000): 521–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000900004396.
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Early acquisition of nouns and verbs across languages is a key issue for a number of recent studies that question the reality of the ‘noun-bias’ and wonder about the reasons why it exists as they explore the role of cognitive vs. more language-specific input factors. Addressing this issue, the present study investigates how the noun and verb word classes develop in the free speech of a French child between the ages of 1;2 and 2;6, from the perspective of semantic and grammatical development. The analyses indicate that, in French acquisition, nouns clearly predominate over verbs until age 1;8 at least, but that verbs are produced in the early stages. Concrete object names among nouns and concrete action verbs among verbs were found to be the most prevalent categories, but they were not the earliest to appear and their distribution revealed an asymmetry in the conceptual packaging of nouns and verbs. Verb grammaticalization, assessed through inflection and auxiliary use, lagged somewhat behind noun grammaticalization, assessed through determiner use. This result supports the hypothesized noun–verb grammatical asynchrony. Verb grammaticalization seems to be related to the production of concrete action verbs, and noun grammaticalization to that of concrete object nouns, indicating interactions between semantic and grammatical development. These findings, discussed in a cross-linguistic perspective, suggest that both conceptual and grammatical packaging are important and interacting factors in noun and verb development, and argue in favour of a constructivist approach to language acquisition.
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Indefrey, Peter. "Some problems with the lexical status of nondefault inflection." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22, no. 6 (December 1999): 1025. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x99342229.
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Clahsen's characterization of nondefault inflection as based exclusively on lexical entries does not capture the full range of empirical data on German inflection. In the verb system differential effects of lexical frequency seem to be input-related rather than affecting morphological production. In the noun system, the generalization properties of -n and -e plurals exceed mere analogy-based productivity.
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Hofherr, Patricia Cabredo, and Denis Creissels. "Morphology-syntax mismatches in agreement systems: The case of Jóola Fóoñi." Word Structure 15, no. 3 (November 2022): 252–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/word.2022.0210.
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The present study examines the agreement system of Jóola Fóoñi (Atlantic, Niger-Congo). In Niger-Congo languages, noun forms divide into subsets according to their agreement patterns. The morphological paradigm of the agreement targets is generally analysed as a reflex of agreement triggered by nominal controllers. For Jóola Fóoñi this view is not correct since (i) the range of subsets of noun forms and the range of values on the agreement targets do not match and (ii) inflection for a subset of class values is associated with its own semantic and syntactic properties, independent of agreement configurations with nouns. In Jóola Fóoñi the classification of noun forms based on their agreement properties and the cells of the inflectional paradigm of adnominal and pronominal agreement targets are related but independent components of the grammar. Of the 15 class-values that structure the inflectional paradigm of adnominals and pronouns involved in the expression of agreement with heads or antecedents, only 13 class-values function as agreement values with nominal controllers; the other 2 class-values only appear on agreement targets. The inflectional paradigm characterising agreeing adnominals and pronouns is heterogeneous in several respects. (i) Of the 15 class-values in the inflectional paradigm, only 12 allow non-contextual uses without a nominal controller, each associated with a particular meaning. (ii) Non-contextual uses of the 5 class-values expressing time, manner and different conceptualizations of space display adverbial syntax, while the other class-values show pronominal syntax. (iii) Of the 5 class-values associated with adverbial syntax, the 3 locative classes differ from the classes associated with time and manner with respect to relativisation. We propose that the forms inflected for class that express place, time or manner in their non-contextual use have become adverbs, and the locative relativisers have been reanalysed as locative relative pronouns.
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Mel’čuk, Igor. "The notion of inflection and the expression of nominal gender in Spanish." Studies in Language 37, no. 4 (December 20, 2013): 736–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.37.4.02mel.
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The paper discusses the morphological status and the function of Spanish nominal endings -o and -a (ciel+o ‘sky’ vs. caj+a ‘box’); it is shown that both endings, plus the endings -e and -Ø, are inflectional suffixes that mark, however, not the values of an inflectional category (like nominal number or verbal tense), but the values of a feature of the syntactics of the noun — the nominal gender. The ‘nominal gender’ is defined as a cluster concept based on eight properties; it is a particular case of ‘agreement class’ opposed to ‘noun class.’ Some particularities of Spanish nominal gender are examined: its interaction with diminutive suffixes, gender conversion, and its “non-prototypical” character (a parallel is drawn between Spanish nominal genders and noun classes in Fula).
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Baechler, Raffaela, and Simon Pröll. "Nicht-phonologisch konditionierter Wandel in der Kasusmorphologie isolierter germanischer Varietäten." Linguistik Online 98, no. 5 (November 8, 2019): 289–305. http://dx.doi.org/10.13092/lo.98.5941.
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This article deals with structure and change of the nominal case systems of two isolated Germanic varieties, Visperterminen Alemannic (Valais, Switzerland) and Övdalian (Älvdal, Sweden). As both varieties inherited and retained the full vocalism in unstressed syllables of their predecessors (Old High German and Old Swedish, respectively), they provide a suitable testing ground for the examination of processes of morphological change independently of phonological processes. By comparing the particular changes in nominal inflection we analyse syncretisms, inflectional reductions and (purely morphological) strategies for compensating syncretisms in both varieties.
Despite different trajectories of case loss, both varieties yield strikingly parallel results in terms of compensation at the level of the noun phrase. The modern noun system displays nominative-accusative syncretism in the singular (minor exceptions in Övdalian) and plural, as well as nominative/accusative-dative syncretism in the singular (minor exceptions in both varieties), caused by one of two factors: We can observe that a new, non-phonologically conditioned collapse and reorganisation of inflection developed, but there is also inherited syncretism, dating back to the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, at the level of the full noun phrase (i. e. including the article and the adjective), the dative is still clearly marked as an oblique case, whereas nominative and accusative syncretise.
The diachronic comparison of these two isolated varieties with their historical precursors shows that these changes in the respective case systems – towards a ± dative system – are to be regarded as a process that is largely internal to morphology, as it is neither a side effect of phonological change nor the result of contact.
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BOUSSAYER, ABDELAAZIZ. "Gender and Number Marking in Amazigh Language." International Journal of Linguistics and Translation Studies 2, no. 1 (January 24, 2021): 91–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.36892/ijlts.v2i1.100.
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This article studies the derivational system of gender and number in Ait Atta variety of Amazigh language. Thus, the following claims are made: first, gender is overtly marked on feminine nouns by the prefixation of the gender morpheme t-. The paper argues that [t…t] is not a circumfix or a discontinuous morpheme, but it is an asymmetric inflection. In the derivational system of gender, large majority of nouns allow for gender opposition. However, mass nouns allow only for one lexically determined gender and number. Moreover, masculine has no overt realization in Amazigh language. Vocalic initial nouns fall into the category of masculine nouns. I argue that the initial vowel is a nominal marker. I submit that the noun, in general, consists of maximally three main parts: a prefix, a lexical base, and a suffix. Second, the majority of Berber noun stems involve, at least, one vowel in addition to the prefixal vowel (e.g. ‘a-ḍar’ foot, ‘a-funas’ bull, 'a-ɣrum’ bread). Third, when the plural noun is specified as [+feminine], it takes the gender morpheme t-. Fourth, number takes the form of a feature assigned lexically to the noun. The study provides a templatic analysis to account for internal noun change. It implements Lahrouchi and Ridouane (2016) analysis of diminutives and plurals in Moroccan Arabic and argues that sound plurals in Amazigh language are associated with standard Num projection, while id/istt-plurals are associated with lower in the structure with n projection.
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Vaknin-Nussbaum, Vered, and Joseph Shimron. "Hebrew plural inflection." Mental Lexicon 6, no. 2 (August 3, 2011): 197–244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ml.6.2.01vak.
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Research on several Indo-European languages attests to notable difficulties in inflecting irregular nouns and verbs. In these languages morphological and phonological factors are often intertwined in a way that obscures the source of the problem. Hebrew by contrast allows isolation of morphological and phonological factors in nominal inflection. Three experiments demonstrated that as in Indo-European languages, nominal inflection of Hebrew irregular nouns is slower than that of regular nouns and involves more errors. The occurrence of phonological alterations to the noun’s stem with the inflection is an additional source of irregularity, which also taxes the inflectional process in reaction time and error rate. The empirical results underline the power of the default automatic suffixation process as the main obstacle to irregular inflection. A theoretical contribution of this study is an interpretation of the irregularity effect based on a morphological analysis that views Hebrew as having a linear rather than a non-linear morphology. The stem–suffix match is suggested as the dominant factor affecting the inflectional process, responsible for the difficulties in irregular inflections. It is argued that in Hebrew, the differences between inflecting regular and irregular nouns can be easily and adequately explained as resulting from a mismatch between a stem and an affix.
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Ma, Weiyi, Peng Zhou, Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Joanne Lee, and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek. "Syntactic cues to the noun and verb distinction in Mandarin child-directed speech." First Language 39, no. 4 (April 24, 2019): 433–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0142723719845175.
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The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word’s form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ( a/ an/ the), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in identifying a word’s form class and thus glean some information about its meaning. This study examined whether Mandarin, a language that has a relatively impoverished morphosyntactic system, offers reliable morphosyntactic cues to the noun–verb distinction in child-directed speech (CDS). Using the CHILDES Beijing corpora, Study 1 found that Mandarin CDS has reliable morphosyntactic markers to the noun–verb distinction. Study 2 examined the relationship between mothers’ use of a set of early-acquired nouns and verbs in the Beijing corpora and the age of acquisition (AoA) of these words. Results showed that the occurrence of the form class markers is a reliable predictor of the AoA for the early-acquired nouns and verbs.
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Cetnarowska, Bożena. "Variability in inflectional forms of attributive-appositive composite lexical units in Polish." Word Structure 14, no. 1 (March 2021): 59–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/word.2021.0180.
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This paper examines inflectional markers (signalling number, case and gender) of selected types of NN complexes in Polish, which can be regarded as attributive-appositive (ATAP) lexical units in the cross-linguistic classification of compounds proposed by Scalise & Bisetto (2009) . Polish compounds proper show externalization of inflection and take inflectional markers on their right-hand constituents only. In contrast, Polish juxtapositions are expected to display double inflectional marking (on both their components). However, data from the National Corpus of Polish demonstrate that ATAP juxtapositions containing the lexeme widmo ‘ghost, phantom’ as their right-hand component exhibit variability in their inflectional paradigms. The right-hand (i.e. the modifier) constituent of such juxtapositions either shows number and case agreement with the head noun, or it appears in the default (nom.sg) form. Potential reasons for the instability of inflectional paradigms of such NN juxtapositions are considered.
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Bertinetto, Pier Marco, Luca Ciucci, and Margherita Farina. "Two types of morphologically expressed non-verbal predication." Studies in Language 43, no. 1 (June 12, 2019): 120–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/sl.17013.ber.
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Abstract The morphological expression of non-verbal predication is a geographically widespread, although not very frequent, typological feature. This paper highlights the existence of two radically contrasting types of non-verbal predicative inflection. Construction A has already been described in the literature. It consists of attaching person-sensitive inflection markers to non-verbal predicates, possibly extending this treatment to adverbs and adverbial phrases (locational and temporal), pronouns and quantifiers. This type is well attested in Uralic, Turkic, and Paleosiberian, as well as in some Amazonian language families (most notably Chicham), but it has also been pointed out for some sparse languages of Oceania and Africa. Such non-verbal person inflections diachronically stem from incorporation of conjugated copula elements. Construction B, by contrast, is much rarer and is described here for the first time. It also consists of a dedicated morphological form of the non-verbal predicate (limited, however, to nouns and adjectives), but such form stands out as morphologically lighter than any other form to be found in nouns or adjectives in argument or attribute position. While the latter forms carry some kind of case marker, the noun/adjective predicate merely consists (or historically did) of the word’s root. This type of construction can be found in the small Zamucoan family and still survives in some Tupí-Guaraní languages. Diachronic inspection of Semitic indicates, however, that this predicative strategy was possibly adopted in some ancient varieties, although at later stages it intertwined with the expression of referential specificity. The paper compares the two construction types, highlighting similarities and differences.
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Nkollo, Mikołaj, and Magdalena Tkaczyk. "Inflection – semantics interfaces in a typological setting: number and non-specific nominal items in Old Spanish legal codices." Lingua Posnaniensis 57, no. 2 (December 1, 2015): 17–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/linpo-2015-0008.
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Abstract Mikołaj Nkollo & Magdalena Tkaczyk. Inflection - semantics interfaces in a typological setting: number and non-specific nominal items in Old Spanish legal codices. The Poznań Society for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences, PL ISSN 0079-4740, pp. 17-29 The present inquiry has been spurred by the observation of the morphological behaviour of human-denoting common nouns in Old Spanish codices (13th to 15th century). In spite of the fact that legal norms are designed to apply to an unrestricted number of potential addressees, this class of nominal items surfaces nearly exclusively in the singular, with plural forms being strongly underrepresented. A series of parameters converge to account for this form - function mismatch, thus revealing an essentially interdependent nature of linguistic mechanisms underlying it: type of inflection (inherent vs. contextual), text genre characteristics (distance pole vs proximate pole) and syntactic environment (conditional protases). The pervasiveness of the singular is traced back to non-specificity. Out of two mutually exclusive typological clines accounting for the likelihood of inflectional variation in noun morphology, Definiteness Hierarchy is given preference over degrees of animacy: non-specifically used items, even if highly ranked on animacy scale, are the least likely to surface as plural forms. Competing motivations are assumed to provide a suitable analytical framework to account for typological conflicts such as the one exemplified in Old Spanish legal codices.
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Manzini, Maria Rita, and Leonardo M. Savoia. "Reducing ‘case’ to denotational primitives." Linguistic Variation 11, no. 1 (December 5, 2011): 76–120. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lv.11.1.03man.
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The nominal inflection system of Albanian includes specifications of case, definiteness, number and nominal class (gender). Our analysis recognizes three types of properties as theoretically relevant, namely N(ominal class), Q(quantification), D(efiniteness). Q inflections are responsible for the so-called oblique case - effectively a dyadic operator yielding a ‘zonal inclusion’ (possession) relation between the element to which it attaches and the internal argument of the verb (dative) or the head of a noun phrase (genitive). Q inflections are further responsible for plurality, while N inflections satisfy argument-of contexts (accusative)and D characterizes EPP contexts(nominative). Syncretisms (e.g. of dative and genitive, nominative and accusative) are not the result of morphological rules requiring Late Insertion of exponents (Distributed Morphology). Rather they are instances of ambiguity, resolved in the syntax (different embeddings) or at the interpretive interface. As such they are compatible with projection of the morphosyntax from lexical entries. Keywords: Case, nominative, accusative, oblique, syncretism, nominal class, plural, definiteness, possessor, locative.
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Enger, Hans-Olav. "Type frequency is not the only factor that determines productivity, so the Tolerance Principle is not enough." Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 144, no. 2 (May 19, 2022): 161–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/bgsl-2022-0013.
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Abstract Inflection classes that have many members often gain members from classes that have fewer. While this tendency is often pointed out in diachronic linguistics, the American psycholinguist Charles Yang (2016) goes further. He claims this to be always the case, so that minority classes cannot be productive at the expense of majority classes, and that productivity actually can be predicted. By this view, productivity is a direct function of type frequency; there are no other factors determining whether a pattern is productive. The claim of this paper is that type frequency is not the only factor determining productivity, and that while Yang’s approach, the ›Tolerance Principle‹, is interesting, it cannot be upheld in its present form. The paper presents an example of suppletion spreading in Germanic, and it presents examples of minority patterns spreading in North Germanic. Parallels outside of Germanic are pointed out. Also, it is argued that Yang’s (2016) analysis of English verb inflection and German noun inflection is insufficient, so these important case-studies, presented in favour of the Tolerance Principle, do not support it. In general, the paper emphasises the importance of ›local generalisations‹ and of seeing language as a ›system‹ of low-level regularities, not all-encompassing rules. While type frequency certainly seems important for productivity, inflectional morphology is a complex matter; productivity is also influenced by various factors of a more structural nature.
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Picallo, M. Carme. "A note on the locus and function of formal gender." Borealis – An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics 6, no. 1 (May 30, 2017): 1. http://dx.doi.org/10.7557/1.6.1.4097.
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This paper examines some aspects of nominal inflection. It focuses in particular on noun classification with evidence drawn mainly from Spanish where noun classification surfaces as formal Gender. Under a minimalist lens, this feature is a puzzling grammatical element because it seems uncongenial to the idea of optimal design. I examine some syntactic evidence to assess the syntactic locus of Gender features in nominal structures, and conjecture that noun classification simply externalizes some basic properties of the linguistic system in the functional domain. I motivate my conclusions on the basis of empirical evidence and recent theoretical proposals that argue for the adoption of a much more abstract conception of syntactic constructs than those we have generally been considering.
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SPENCER, ANDREW. "Gender as an inflectional category." Journal of Linguistics 38, no. 2 (July 2002): 279–312. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022226702001421.
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Russian adjectives, especially participles, can be used as nouns denoting people, e.g. bol′noj/bol′naja ‘(male/female) patient’ from bol′noj ‘sick’, učaščijsja/učaščajasja ‘(boy/girl) pupil’, participle from the verb učit′sja ‘to learn, study’. These are unusual in that they formally reflect the sex of their referent by means of inflectional morphology. Moreover, many surnames inflect like adjectives and they, too, inflect for gender: Mr. Puškin, Čexov, Tolstoj, Dostoevskij but Ms. Puškina, Čexova, Tolstaja, Dostoevskaja. Lexemes such as ‘patient, pupil’ are genuine nouns and not just adjectives modifying null nouns. The latter type do exist and have different properties from converted nouns. Converted nouns and adjectival surnames thus form systematic gender pairs which are forms of a single lexeme. However, gender is not conventionally regarded as an inflection category of the kind which induces word forms of lexemes in this way, rather it is an inherent ‘classificatory’ property of nouns. The paper discusses the peculiar nature of this type of inflectional marking and provides an explicit analysis of the construction. On the semantic side, nouns such as bol′noj, učaščijsja have a similar representation to that of a phrase person who is sick/studies and we effectively have an instance of the poorly researched phenomenon of de-phrasal word formation. On the morphosyntactic side, the lexical entry of the deadjectival noun or surname shares crucial properties with 3rd person pronouns. The analysis raises questions about the nature of lexical categories (especially ‘mixed categories’) and the structure of lexical entries generally.
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Kester, Ellen-Petra. "Adjectival inflection and the licensing of empty categories in DP." Journal of Linguistics 32, no. 1 (March 1996): 57–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022226700000761.
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This paper is about the licensing conditions on empty categories in DP, dealing in particular with the distribution of the null noun pro in adjectival contexts. I will show that N-pro is submitted to requirements of formal licensing and identification, in which inflexional morphology plays a crucial role. Under this scenario, the contrast between English and other languages with respect to N-pro can be attributed to the absence versus presence of inflexional morphology within the nominal domain.
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Langdon, Margaret. "Yuman Plurals: From Derivation to Inflection to Noun Agreement." International Journal of American Linguistics 58, no. 4 (October 1992): 405–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/ijal.58.4.3519776.
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Dabašinskienė, Ineta. "The acquisition of compounds in Lithuanian." Baltic Linguistics 1 (December 31, 2010): 51–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.32798/bl.435.
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This study analyzes longitudinal data of two Lithuanian children, a boy and a girl, with the aim of investigating children’s ability to produce compounds. In contrast to such languages as German or English, Lithuanian does not show a marked preference for noun-compounding. It is not surprising, then that compounds in the analyzed child language data appear quite rarely, although in Lithuanian compounding is a productive pattern of word formation. The analysis of the data shows that compounds emerge quite early as pure imitations of adult utterances; however, even in later stages of language acquisition, when used spontaneously, they occur mostly as lexicalized items. Our data show that the first compounds appear after the emergence of noun and verb inflection and diminutives. These first compounds belong to the type of subordinate, endocentric two-member noun+noun compounds without interfixes.
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Tribout, Delphine. "Nominalization, verbalization or both? Insights from the directionality of noun-verb conversion in French." Zeitschrift für Wortbildung / Journal of Word Formation 4, no. 2 (January 1, 2020): 187–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/zwjw.2020.02.10.
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Abstract Nominalization in French can be done by means of conversion, which is characterized by the identity between the base and the derived lexeme. Since both noun→verb and verb→noun conversions exist, this property raises directionality issues, and sometimes leads to contradictory analyses of the same examples. The paper presents two approaches of conversion: derivational and non-derivational ones. Then it discusses various criteria used in derivational approaches to determine the direction of conversion: diachronic ones, such as dates of first attestation or etymology; and synchronic ones, such as semantic relations, noun gender or verb inflection. All criteria are evaluated on a corpus of 3,241 French noun~verb pairs. It is shown that none of them enables to identify the direction of conversion in French. Finally, the consequences for the theory of morphology are discussed.
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Zou, Xiao-Ling, Ju-Lan Feng, and Ya-Ping Zheng. "Grammatical number of English nouns in English Learners' Dictionaries." English Today 29, no. 3 (August 15, 2013): 40–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266078413000308.
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Chinese and English belong to different language families, so they often have different forms of expression. Chinese has no definite grammatical category of number and has almost no number inflection. Plural meaning is usually implied in the syntactic structure or in the context by a bare noun, or is expressed through the plural marker 们 and the numerical adjectives such as many, numerous and each, as well as by quantifiers and reduplications. However, English nouns express number category by inflection as well as by quantifiers at times, so their grammatical number is far more complicated than that of Chinese nouns. From the point of view of grammatical form, English nouns are often considered as countable and uncountable nouns. Uncountable nouns cannot be directly modified by a numeral without unit specification, nor can they be combined with an indefinite article. Thus, cheese is quantified as three slices of cheese. However, uncountable nouns can also be quantified without specifying a unit of measurement, such as much coal. A number of uncountable nouns can be used in the plural form to mean ‘a large amount of’ as in the following example from Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (hereinafter, LDCE) ‘The ship drifted into Turkish territorial waters’. In such cases, although water is uncountable, it has the plural form. In some cases, native English speakers can turn the theoretical uncountable nouns into countable ones (Landau, 2001). There seems to be no absolute boundary between countable and uncountable nouns.
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LARGY, PIERRE, MARIE-PAULE COUSIN, PETER BRYANT, and MICHEL FAYOL. "When memorized instances compete with rules: The case of number-noun agreement in written French." Journal of Child Language 34, no. 2 (April 2, 2007): 425–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000906007914.
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It is claimed by Totereau, Thévenin & Fayol (1997) that French children understand the rule for spelling the plural inflection very early on. However, no evidence contradicts the alternative that they learn the spelling of a word's singular and plural forms by treating the two forms as entirely different words. We tested this by asking French first and second graders (85 six-year-old and 89 seven-year-old children, respectively) to read and write rare words, either in just the singular or in just the plural, and then testing their spelling. The children tended to attach plural inflections to words which they had encountered only as plural and to omit them from words encountered before only as singular.
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Bergström, Ulf. "The Discourse Functions of Overspecified Anaphoric Expressions in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: Genesis 12-24 as a Test Case1." Journal of Semitic Studies 65, no. 2 (September 1, 2020): 275–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgaa001.
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Abstract In Biblical Hebrew, as in other languages, anaphoric reference is often overspecified; that is, an anaphoric noun (lexical anaphora) is used in a place where the inflection of the verb (inflectional anaphora) would be a sufficient indicator as to who is being referred to. The present study investigates the function of overspecified subject referents in Biblical Hebrew narrative discourse. It is found that overspecification can be associated with three main textual phenomena, namely, events of general relevance, subject referent initiative, and various textual discontinuities. The function of indicating subject referent initiative lies behind many of the occurrences of lexical anaphora at the beginning of episodic units, but it may also occur within episodes. The different functions of overspecification and inflectional anaphora arise as a result of the different mental processes triggered by lexical and deictic anaphora, whereby the former evokes general, contextindependent knowledge about the referent and impedes the access to the information contained in the previous clause, whereas the latter makes it immediately available.
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Carstairs-McCarthy, Andrew. "Affixes and stem alternants in Latvian nouns: implications for inflectional theory." Baltic Linguistics 5 (December 31, 2014): 59–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.32798/bl.403.
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Baerman (2012) suggests that noun inflection in Latvian presents a problem for Carstairs-McCarthy’s (1994) No Blur Principle, a successor to the Paradigm Economy Hypothesis (Carstairs 1983; 1987; Carstairs-McCarthy 2010). On closer examination, however, this turns out not to be so. Some other languages (such as Nuer) do appear to violate the No Blur Principle. However, when one takes into account the relationship between affixal inflection and stem alternation patterns, Latvian emerges as perfectly compliant. The discussion involves the distinction between patterns of stem alternation that have traditional morphosyntactic functions (such a signalling ‘plural’) and ones that are ‘morphomic’ (Aronoff 1994). The role of thematic vowels and the location of stem-affix boundaries are also relevant.
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Sahel, Said. "Entwicklung und Durchsetzung der Monoflexion im 18. Jahrhundert." Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 144, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): 1–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/bgsl-2022-0001.
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Abstract In this paper, it is argued that the principle of monoinflection governing the distribution of strong and weak adjective inflection in the New High German noun phrase (NP) definitively became established in the 18th century. Empirical evidence for this assumption is provided by the findings of three corpus studies based on the historical corpus ›Deutsches Textarchiv‹ (German Text Archive). Focusing on three different constructional types within the NP, the evolving distribution of strong and weak adjective inflection is studied for the period from 1600 to 1900. Based on the findings of the three corpus studies, further structural tendencies in the (re)organization of the New High German NP and their interaction with the principle of monoinflection are discussed.
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ABDALLA, FAUZIA, KHAWLA ALJENAIE, and ABDESSATAR MAHFOUDHI. "Plural noun inflection in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without Specific Language Impairment." Journal of Child Language 40, no. 1 (December 5, 2012): 139–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0305000912000499.
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ABSTRACTThis study examined the production of three types of noun plural inflections, feminine sound plural (FSP), masculine sound plural (MSP), and broken plural (BP) in Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children with and without language impairment. A total of thirty-six Kuwaiti participants – twelve adults, twelve children with specific language impairment (SLI), and twelve typically developing age-matched controls (TD) were presented with twenty-seven pictured stimuli of real and nonsense words. The results showed that the TD children were significantly more accurate in using the required noun plural inflections than the SLI group. The TD children's preferred overgeneralization strategy was to substitute FSP for the regular MSP and irregular BP contexts much more than their peers with SLI. The performance of the SLI group also differed from that of their age-matched counterparts in the number of errors and their distribution across categories. The results are discussed in the light of relevant theories of atypical language development.
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Creissels, Denis, and Alain Christian Bassène. "The emergence of an alternative set of prefixes in the class inflection of adnominals and pronouns in Jóola Fóoñi (Atlantic)." Language in Africa 3, no. 2 (July 23, 2022): 121–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.37892/2686-8946-2022-3-2-121-140.
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In this article, we describe and analyze a set of alternative forms of class prefixes found in the inflection of adnominals and pronouns that have never been mentioned so far in the literature on Jóola Fóoñi. This alternative form of class prefixes differs from the standard form by the presence of a vowel a. We argue that the existence of the Ca-variant of the class prefixes of adnominals and pronouns is not related to the fact that some nouns have a Ca prefix, and results rather from the reanalysis of the prefixal sequence that characterizes participles as an alternative set of class prefixes whose use tends to be extended to other types of noun modifiers.
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Peyman, Shahram, and Vali Rezai. "Noun Phrase or Compound Noun? An Investigation of N + A and N + N Boundary Cases in Persian." Theory and Practice in Language Studies 6, no. 8 (August 1, 2016): 1687. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.0608.25.
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The present study seeks to investigate the demarcation between noun phrases (NPs) and compound nouns (CNs) in Persian at the syntax-morphology interface. This objective is accomplished through the examination of two most complex nominal patterns, viz. N + A, N + N, with special focus on boundary cases, i.e. the intermediate constructs which possess some properties of both NPs and CNs simultaneously and thus demonstrate contradictory reactions to the various NP-CN demarcation criteria. The results indicate that boundary cases ensue from partial syntactic erosion of NPs through pure lexicalization, whereby NPs turn into CNs without center-switching or category change. This study also shows that almost all boundary cases have no potential for syntactic modification of their elements. It is further demonstrated that N + A and N + N boundary cases are endocentric, head-initial constructs with optional or obligatory internal inflection as well as Ezafe. Syntactic modifiability is also introduced as the most efficient NP-CN demarcation criterion in Persian since it is the first property lost in NP lexicalization process.
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Müller, Gereon. "Syncretism without underspecification: The role of leading forms." Word Structure 4, no. 1 (April 2011): 53–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/word.2011.0004.
Full textAbstract:
The main goal of this article is to outline a new approach to syncretism in optimality theory, one that does not rely on the concept of underspecification taken over from grammatical theories which do not recognize constraint ranking and constraint violability. The analysis is based on a concept of morphological exponents as leading forms. Instances of syncretism can be traced back to the selection of unfaithful leading forms as a last resort to avoid paradigmatic gaps: The minimally unfaithful leading form exponent spreads to an empty paradigm cell. Three well-studied empirical domains figure in the analysis: (i) determiner inflection in German ( Bierwisch 1967 , Wiese 1999 ), (ii) Italian object clitics ( Grimshaw 2001 ), and (iii) animacy effects with noun inflection in Russian ( Wunderlich 2004 ).