Words

2020 ◽  
pp. 157-254
Author(s):  
Raoul Zamponi ◽  
Bernard Comrie
Keyword(s):  
Definite Article ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Extensive Coverage ◽  
Word Classes

This chapter provides extensive coverage of Akabea word classes: nouns, pronouns, definite article, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, postpositions, conjunction, particles, interjections, and ideophones, as well as of the language’s inflectional morphology (possessivity in nouns, number in nouns, adjectives, and verbs, and tense, aspect, and mood in verbs).

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.

Accuracy of Four Language Analysis Procedures Performed Automatically

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 180-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven H. Long ◽  
Ron W. Channell
Keyword(s):  
Automatic Identification ◽  
Published Data ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Language Impaired ◽  
Productivity Data ◽  
Language Analysis ◽  
Word Classes ◽  
Human Coder ◽  
Impaired Children ◽  
Metalinguistic Skills

Most software for language analysis has relied on an interaction between the metalinguistic skills of a human coder and the calculating ability of the machine to produce reliable results. However, probabilistic parsing algorithms are now capable of highly accurate and completely automatic identification of grammatical word classes. The program Computerized Profiling combines a probabilistic parser with modules customized to produce four clinical grammatical analyses: MLU, LARSP, IPSyn, and DSS. The accuracy of these analyses was assessed on 69 language samples from typically developing, speech-impaired, and language-impaired children, 2 years 6 months to 7 years 10 months. Values obtained with human coding and by the software alone were compared. Results for all four analyses produced automatically were comparable to published data on the manual interrater reliability of these procedures. Clinical decisions based on cutoff scores and productivity data were little affected by the use of automatic rather than human-generated analyses. These findings bode well for future clinical and research use of automatic language analysis software.

The Effect of Phonological Realization of Inflectional Morphology in French: ERP Evidence

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Frenck-Mestre ◽  
Alice Foucart ◽  
Judith McLaughlin ◽  
Lee Osterhout
Keyword(s):  
Inflectional Morphology

Segment–zero alternations in Galician definite article allomorphy

2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-170
Author(s):  
Shanti Ulfsbjorninn
Keyword(s):  
Specific Pattern ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Theoretical Discussion

AbstractGalician presents an intriguing case of opaque phonologically-conditioned definite article allomorphy (PCA). Though Galician features in the general literature on PCA (Nevins 2011), there is a surprising lack of synchronic theoretical discussion of this specific pattern. The data appears to require allomorph selection arranged in a system of Priority (Mascaró 2005; Bonet et al. 2003; 2007). The pattern involves opaque segment ‘deletion’ and resyllabification, where segment deletion counterbleeds allomorph insertion along with morphologically-specific segmental changes. A Strict CV representational reanalysis is proposed in which there is no true allomorphy (no selection between competing underlying morphemes). All the forms are generated from a single underlying form, thereby undercutting PRIORITY.

Zum Augment neuägyptischer Verbalformen

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 139-164
Author(s):  
Carsten Peust
Keyword(s):  
Initial Position ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Verb Forms

“On the Augment of Late Egyptian Verb Forms” -- It is shown that the augment which is characteristic of certain nominal verb forms of Late Egyptian – and survives in a few traces up until Coptic – contains none of those vowels that were regularly admitted at the beginning of Egyptian words. Rather, it must continue a wordinternal vowel /ǝ/ that moved into the initial position by a misdivision of the proclitic definite article, which frequently preceded participles and relative forms in speech. The same vowel [ǝ] occurred as an epenthetic sound before the preposition ‹r› /r/ ~ [ǝr], from which only ǝ remained after its consonantal body got lost. These phonetic insights prove that the Late Egyptian augment cannot derive from the Old Egyptian augment, as has been contended, but is a genuine innovation of Late Egyptian. Finally, the rise of unetymological initial vowels in various other nouns such as ⲉϭⲱϣ (“Nubian”) and ⲉϩⲟⲟⲩ (Bohairic for “day”) is explained.

scholarly journals The Processing of Spanish Article–Noun Gender Agreement by Monolingual and Bilingual Toddlers

2020 ◽  
pp. 002383092097705
Author(s):  
Monika Molnar ◽  
José Alemán Bañón ◽  
Simona Mancini ◽  
Sendy Caffarra
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrases ◽  
Grammatical Gender ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Gender Agreement

We assessed monolingual Spanish and bilingual Spanish-Basque toddlers’ sensitivity to gender agreement in correct vs. incorrect Spanish noun phrases (definite article + noun), using a spontaneous preference listening paradigm. Monolingual Spanish-learning toddlers exhibited a tendency to listen longer to the grammatically correct phrases (e.g., la casa; “the house”), as opposed to the incorrect ones (e.g., * el casa). This listening preference toward correct phrases is in line with earlier results obtained from French monolingual 18-month-olds (van Heugten & Christophe, 2015). Bilingual toddlers in the current study, however, tended to listen longer to the incorrect phrases. Basque was not a source of interference in the bilingual toddler’s input as Basque does not instantiate grammatical gender agreement. Overall, our results suggest that both monolingual and bilingual toddlers can distinguish between the correct and incorrect phrases by 18 months of age; however, monolinguals and bilinguals allocate their attention differently when processing grammatically incorrect forms.

scholarly journals Possessives, from Franco-Provençal and Occitan Systems to Contact Dialects in Apulia and Calabria

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
Benedetta Baldi ◽  
Leonardo Maria Savoia
Keyword(s):  
Language Variation ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Test Bed ◽  
North West ◽  
12Th Century ◽  
Complex Knowledge ◽  
Italian Dialects ◽  
Transfer Mechanisms

This article investigates the contact-induced reorganization of the possessive system in the Gallo-Romance dialects spoken from around the 12th century in the villages of Celle and Faeto in North Apulia and Guardia Piemontese in North-West Calabria. Gallo-Romance possessives exclude the article in the prenominal position, whereas in the Southern Italian dialects, possessives follow the noun preceded by the definite article. This original contrast is no longer visible in the varieties of Celle, Faeto and Guardia which changed the original prenominal position to the postnominal position combining with the article, except with kinship terms, preserving the original prenominal position. At the heart of contact phenomena, there are bilingualism and transfer mechanisms between the languages included in the complex knowledge of the speaker, suggesting a test bed for the treatment of language variation and parameterization. We propose an account of morpho-syntactic and interpretive properties of possessives, making use of the insights from the comparison of contact systems with prenominal (Franco-Provençal and Occitan varieties) and postnominal (Southern Italian dialects) possessives. The final part examines the distribution of possessives, tracing it back to the definiteness properties of DP and proposes a phasal treatment based on syntactic and interpretive constraints.

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