Morphology in Kra-Dai Languages

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongxian Luo
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Serial Verb Constructions ◽  
Auxiliary Verbs ◽  
Word Families ◽  
Word Classes ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Basic Vocabulary ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Syntactic Relations

The Kra-Dai languages (also known as Kam-Tai, Tai-Kadai, Tai-Kradai, Daic) are generally described as one of the most representative and extreme examples of isolating and analytic types; they are tonal, lacking in inflectional morphology of the type found in Indo-European. Kra-Dai languages can be said to have no distinction for number and gender in morphology, although many languages have lexical items to indicate number and gender, and some of these are increasingly used as prefixable morphemes. The majority of basic vocabulary items are monosyllabic, but disyllabic and multi-syllabic words also abound. The main strategies of morphological devices in Kra-Dai include the use of prefixes, suffixes, infixes, compounding, and reduplication. There are also phonological alternations involving stem-internal initial, vowel, or tone changes to form doublets or word families. In compounding, a significant number of compounds are idiosyncratic. Some are exocentric compounds. Opinions are divided over the identification of certain word classes due to their multifunctionality. Questions have been raised about the distinction between nouns and classifiers, and between verbs and prepositions, between adjectives and adverbs, among others. These word classes exhibit cross-boundary morphosyntactic features. Kra-Dai languages possess a rich system of noun classifiers. Some of them play a crucial role in ethno-biological taxonomy imbedded in morphological systems. A number of lexical items function as grammatical morphemes in morphosyntactic operations to mark case and other semantico-syntactic relations. Serial verb constructions are widely used without overt marking to indicate grammatical relations. Temporal and aspectual meanings are expressed through tense-aspect markers typically derived from verbs, while mood and modality are conveyed via a rich array of discourse particles as well as a set of modal-auxiliary verbs and pragmatic devices. Word formation and related morphosyntactic processes in Kra-Dai are shown to exhibit features, some of which reflect what is the universal, but others, what is culture specific.

The Kra-Dai Languages

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongxian Luo
Keyword(s):  
Southern China ◽  
Northeast India ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Writing Systems ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
The Government ◽  
Basic Vocabulary ◽  
And Gender ◽  
National Languages

Kra-Dai, also known as Tai–Kadai, Daic, and Kadai, is a family of diverse languages found in southern China, northeast India, and Southeast Asia. The number of these languages is estimated to be close to a hundred, with approximately 100 million speakers all over the world. As the name itself suggests, Kra-Dai is made up of two major groups, Kra and Dai. The former refers to a number of lesser-known languages, some of which have only a few hundred fluent speakers or even less. The latter (also known as Tai, or Kam-Tai) is well established, and comprises the best-known members of the family, Thai and Lao, the national languages of Thailand and Laos respectively, whose speakers account for over half of the Kra-Dai population. The ultimate genetic affiliation of Kra-Dai remains controversial, although a consensus among western scholars holds that it belongs under Austronesian. The majority of Kra-Dai languages have no writing systems of their own, particularly Kra. Languages with writing systems include Thai, Lao, Sipsongpanna Dai, and Tai Lue. These use Indic-based scripts. Others use Chinese character-based scripts, such as the Zhuang and Kam-Sui in southern China and surrounding regions. The government introduced Romanized scripts in the 1950s for the Zhuang and the Kam-Sui languages. Almost every group within Kra-Dai has a rich oral history tradition. The languages are typically tonal, isolating, and analytic, lacking in inflectional morphology, with no distinction for number and gender. A significant number of basic vocabulary items are monosyllabic, but bisyllabic and multisyllabic compounds also abound. There are morphological processes in which etymologically related words manifest themselves in groups through tonal, initial, or vowel alternations. Reduplication is a salient word formation mechanism. In syntax, the Kra-Dai languages can be said to have basic SVO word order. They possess a rich system of noun classifiers. Other features include verb serialization without overt marking to indicate grammatical relations. A number of lexical items (mostly verbs) may function as grammatical morphemes in syntactic operations. Temporal and aspectual meanings are expressed through tense-aspect markers typically derived from verbs, while mood and modality are conveyed via a rich array of discourse particles.

Van Basiscursus Naar "Authentieke" Tekst

1981 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 273-281
Author(s):  
S. de Vriendt
Keyword(s):  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Authentic Materials ◽  
Basic Point ◽  
New Words ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Basic Vocabulary ◽  
Method Of Instruction

The basic point behind the present paper is the general premise that the student, irrespective of the method of instruction followed, is suddenly confronted with a large number of new words at the point when he moves from pedagogically determined text material to "authentic" materials, such as newspaper articles, advertisement, literary texts, etc. An attempt is made to have a clear insight, both quantitatively and qualitatively, into the vocabulary gap that requires bridging, via an analysis of the type of newspaper extract used in class (for reading comprehension) and of Dutch essays produced by French-speaking pupils (for written production). These two elements are further compared with a basic vocabulary list and with essays produced by Dutch-speaking pupils in their mother tongue. The following conclusions become apparent : a) among the "outsiders", i.e. words not in the basic vocabulary, a restricted number of loanwords (+ 15 %) and non-derived or non-compound words (± 25 %) were noted; b) the majority of "outsiders" were derived or compounds and chiefly verb forms ; c) compared with their Dutch-language peers the majority of French-speakers in using the items referred to in (b) are less ready to "play" with lexical variants; d) the characteristic noted in (c) is not only attributable to a more limited competence in word formation but also due to the fact that bilingual dictionaries provide insufficient information on the nuances expressed through prefixes or particles. The above observations lead to the conclusion that it is desirable to direct more attention to non-inflectional morphology at all levels -university, teacher training in particular, textbook and grammar instruc-tion. Research and conclusions relate to the teaching of languages made up of a rich non-inflectional morphology (in this case Dutch) to native speakers of a language whose morphology is relatively poor in non-inflectional items (e.g. French), and are not necessarily applicable to other languages

scholarly journals IMPLICATION OF SYNONYM, WORD CLASSES, WORD FAMILIES, AND WORD FORMATION

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bagus Prakoso ◽  
Novia Khusnul Khotimah ◽  
karolus edmen
Keyword(s):  
Spoken Language ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
International Language ◽  
Word Families ◽  
The World ◽  
Word Classes ◽  
World English

As an international language, English has important role in the world. English is the most commonly written and spoken language in the world. In order to master English, we have to have enough vocabulary in order to arrange the words we want to utter. Vocabulary has its own sub-chapters, which we have to learn each. But in this discussion we are going to discuss only about word formation, word classes, synonym, and word families. Vocabulary is one of the important components which should be mastered by students. It means students without learning vocabulary, students do not know the meaning of the words and how to use the word.

Morphology of Trans New Guinea Languages

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Fedden
Keyword(s):  
Tracking System ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Expressive Power ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Serial Verb Constructions ◽  
Verb Constructions ◽  
Serial Verb

The aim of this article is to present the morphology and morphosyntax of Trans New Guinea (TNG) languages to a wide audience of linguists. The TNG languages are a family of several hundred languages spoken across much of the New Guinea mainland. The morphology of TNG languages shows a high degree of diversity, from mildly polysynthetic to almost isolating. Language data from virtually all subgroups of TNG can be found here, giving preference to recent descriptions and new data. TNG languages display a clear categorial divide between nouns and verbs. In terms of word formation, they typically allow N-N and V-V compounding. Category-changing derivational processes usually involve overt morphological means. TNG languages are rich in nominalization processes; verbalization processes are less common. Valency-changing derivational processes (causatives, applicatives) are widespread and involve affixation or verb serialization. Many TNG languages have a reduced inventory of verb roots, in extreme cases comprising only as few as 60 recorded roots. Serial verb constructions and light-verb constructions are used to increase the expressive power of the verb lexicon. Besides nouns and verbs, TNG languages have sizable classes of adjectives, small classes of adverbs, and pronouns, directionals, numerals, postpositions, and conjunctions. Nouns have restricted inflectional morphology, with inflection for the possessor being the most widespread. Nominal number is expressed less often and gender is very rare. Peripheral case roles are signaled by postpositions. Many TNG languages show optional ergativity where transitive subjects can be marked by a special case depending on certain semantic or pragmatic factors, such as animacy, agentivity, or focus. Verb morphology is extensive, yielding large paradigms. TNG languages use verbal affixes to express core arguments. Subjects are almost universally indexed with a suffix on the verb. The majority of TNG languages also index the object on the verb, either with a prefix or a suffix. The majority alignment pattern in the clause is accusative. Most TNG languages employ distinct constructions for bodily and mental processes, depending on whether they are controlled by an animate agent (e.g., think) or whether they are manifestations of a stimulus beyond the control of the experiencer (e.g., be angry). Tense, aspect, and mood categories can all be found in TNG languages with one of them usually being dominant. For the expression of aspect, serial verb constructions are common in which the last verb in the serialization has undergone grammaticalization into an aspect marker—for example, a progressive marker which has developed from the verb ‘stay’. In clause chains, almost all TNG languages distinguish between medial and final verbs. Medial verbs morphologically indicate co-reference or disjoint reference of key participants in the discourse, and final verbs provide morphosemantic information like tense, mood, or illocutionary force, which typically applies to the whole clause chain. Since this type of tracking system of continuity in discourse is highly characteristic of TNG in general and less common worldwide, it is treated in more detail here.

scholarly journals The Use of Word Formation, Word Classes, Word Families, and Synonyms in Teaching Vocabulary

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Ayodia Erianto ◽  
Nurul Isnaini ◽  
Kiky Muzy Alhikmah
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Word Families ◽  
Word Classes

Through this paper it was made to show that learning a vocabulary can help students learn English, because the vocabulary itself has its own parts and must be studied which aims to differentiate the types of vocabulary itself

scholarly journals ARIES: A lexical platform for engineering Spanish processing tools

1997 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSÉ M. GOÑI ◽  
JOSÉ C. GONZÁLEZ ◽  
ANTONIO MORENO
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Type Checking ◽  
Efficient Retrieval ◽  
Software Interfaces ◽  
Feature Based ◽  
Run Time ◽  
E Mail ◽  
Unification Grammar

We present a lexical platform that has been developed for the Spanish language. It achieves portability between different computer systems and efficiency, in terms of speed and lexical coverage. A model for the full treatment of Spanish inflectional morphology for verbs, nouns and adjectives is presented. This model permits word formation based solely on morpheme concatenation, driven by a feature-based unification grammar. The run-time lexicon is a collection of allomorphs for both stems and endings. Although not tested, it should be suitable also for other Romance and highly inflected languages. A formalism is also described for encoding a lemma-based lexical source, well suited for expressing linguistic generalizations: inheritance classes, lemma encoding, morpho-graphemic allomorphy rules and limited type-checking. From this source base, we can automatically generate an allomorph indexed dictionary adequate for efficient retrieval and processing. A set of software tools has been implemented around this formalism: lexical base augmenting aids, lexical compilers to build run-time dictionaries and access libraries for them, feature manipulation libraries, unification and pseudo-unification modules, morphological processors, a parsing system, etc. Software interfaces among the different modules and tools are cleanly defined to ease software integration and tool combination in a flexible way. Directions for accessing our e-mail and web demonstration prototypes are also provided. Some figures are given, showing the lexical coverage of our platform compared to some popular spelling checkers.

Regularity vs anomaly: the acquisition of Hebrew inflectional morphology

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth A. Berman
Keyword(s):  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Distinct Root ◽  
Modern Hebrew ◽  
Lexical Exceptions ◽  
Complex Forms ◽  
And Gender

ABSTRACTThe paper examines the acquisition of selected aspects of the inflectional system of Modern Hebrew, a language rich in bound morphology. By age three, children acquire the major inflectionally marked categories of the system, in the sense that they make semantically relevant distinctions of tense, person, number, and gender. Certain morphologically complex forms are simplified by neutralization or reformulation or by analytic paraphrases of bound constructions. Various anomalous forms are handled by regularization of lexical exceptions or by conflating forms belonging to different lexical patterns, while forms which are opaque due to neutralization of historically distinct root consonants or to inaccessibility of rules governing their alternations are processed by reference to certain ‘paradigms’ taken as basic.

scholarly journals Achievements of the academic grammar school

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-29
Author(s):  
Kateryna Horodensʹka ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Functional Grammar ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Word Classes ◽  
Functional Syntax ◽  
Theoretical Issues ◽  
Ukrainian Society ◽  
Formation System

This study aims at investigating the development of grammatical theory at the Institute of the Ukrainian Language for the last 30 years. The paper summarizes achievements in grammar theory from applying the functional, i.e., semantic and grammatical, approach developed by I.R. Vykhovanetsʹ to differentiating units into word and nonword classes and distinguishing morphological categories of major word classes. This facilitated the establishment of the theoretical basis of functional and categorical morphology. The author analyses studies in formal grammatical, semantic, functional, categorical, deri vational, and anthropocentric syntax that attest to the multidimensional growth of a syntactic theory and main aspects of the Ukrainian word formation on the basis of semantic and categorical syntax and a formant- and stem-based derivatology. Some of the latest multi-pronged processes in word formation reflect dynamics of word formation rules, the replenishment of word formation resources, and the development of the word-formation system of Standard Ukrainian. The solving of a complex set of theoretical issues in the modern Ukrainian word-formation introduced the methodological foundations for the recent normative description of the word formation system of Standard Ukrainian. The article addresses issues in studies on applied grammar determined by the process of glo balization and democratization of the Ukrainian society and the needs of Modern Ukrainian language practice to be met. Particular importance is attached to the grammatical prescriptive norms in the professional use, the actualization of case forms appearing in the passive vocabulary, and the dynamics of morphological and syntactic norms in various functional and stylistic dimensions of Standard Ukrainian. Keywords: functional grammar, functional morphology, functional syntax, categorical grammar, categorical syntax, categorical word formation, classification of parts of speech, morphological categories.

scholarly journals Implementation of word-formative potential of the lexemes in social and economic activities

2020 ◽  
pp. 60-65
Author(s):  
Maryna Navalna ◽  
Olha Spys
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Economic Sector ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Descriptive Research ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Observation Method ◽  
Political Vocabulary

The subject of the research is word-formative and semantic processes in the vocabulary of socio-economic sector. The aim of the study. To analyze the socio-political vocabulary and to determine the word-formative and semantic potential of these linguistic items. Research methods. The material of the research is a body of lexical items, selected from the language of all-Ukrainian and regional mass media. The descriptive research method and observation method were used as main in this scientific research. At different stages of the research the method of functional analysis was used to determine the stylistic load of lexical items. The comparative analysis of individual lexical positions, which are in different styles of Ukrainian literary language, was done by using a comparative method. Results of work. The article analyzes the word-formative potential of socio-political vocabulary, it distinguishes derivative and non-derivative verbs and presents formations. Application of the results. The results of the research can be used in teaching activities in the course “Scientific and Technical Terminology”, “Business Ukrainian” and others. Conclusions. Ukrainian and foreign-language verbs of the socio-economic sector have formed a great word-formative potential in the internal verbal word-formation, above all, the prefixal and postfixal. Ukrainian verbs are combined with most of the prefixes of the Ukrainian language, foreign-languages verbs – primarily with genetically homogeneous word-formative formats and some Ukrainian ones, in particular.

scholarly journals Nominalization in TIV

2021 ◽  
pp. 16-26
Author(s):  
Stephen Shiaondo Ajim ◽  
Iorember Margaret N
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
Structural Theory ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Intuitive Knowledge ◽  
The World ◽  
Word Classes ◽  
Lexical Items ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
Linguistic Process

Nominalization is a linguistic process of deriving nouns from other word classes or linguistic units. Nominalization is evident in many languages of the world. The Tiv language also exhibits nominalization. This paper critically analyses nominalization in Tiv. The objectives of the paper are: to determine the processes through which nominalization takes place in the Tiv language, the extent to which the processes of nominalization are productive in the Tiv language, and the classes of words and linguistic units that are nominalized in Tiv. Data were sourced from the native speakers of Tiv using the researcher – participant technique. The researchers documented the lexical items used during the interaction, determine the basic components of the lexical items and the word classes such lexical items belonged to. The intuitive knowledge of the researchers as the native speakers of the language was harnessed. The secondary data were sourced from the already existing literatures such as textbooks, journals and the internet. The theory adopted in the paper is Hokett’s (1954) structural theory whose models are the Item-and-Process (I.P) and Item-and-Arrangement (I.P). It has been found out that the processes through which nominalization takes in the Tiv language are prefixation, prefixation plus some modifications, tonality and desententialization (sentence deconstruction). These processes are discovered to be very productive in nominalization in Tiv. It has also been found out that verbs roots and adjectives are the classes of words that are nominalized (lexical nominalization) in the Tiv language together with sentences (syntactic nominalization).

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