Aspectual pairing and aspectual classes in Abui

Abstract This paper describes the aspectual classes in Abui, a Papuan language of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family. Abui innovated a system of aspectual stem pairing, realized by consonant mutation, vowel grading, and rime mutation. Although stem pairing is widespread (about 61% of the verbs alternate), about 38% of our 1,330 verb sample are unpaired and immutable. Abui verbal stems combine with aspectual affixes, adverbs and auxiliary verbs, whose distribution is used here together with the stem types to describe aspectual classes, which are understood as lexicalizations of transitional possibilities of lexical items (e.g. inchoative-stative vs. inchoative-gradual.inchoative-stative). The paper takes the bidimensional approach to aspect distinguishing between properties associated with the perfective-imperfective system and other aspectual marking (cf. Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 2002. Recent activity in the theory of aspect: accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state? Linguistic Typology 6(2). 199–271). Combining the features of both types of aspectual marking, we construct in a bottom-up fashion the aspectual classes in Abui and also show that these may be further refined if contextual features such as valency or degree of change (affectedness) were included. A characteristic feature of the Abui system is the elaborate system of stative-inchoative verbs sensitive to scalar and change properties (e.g. instant vs. gradual). Abui telic verbs show sensitivity to the properties of the resulting state and are formally associated with stem alternation.

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Authenticity on the Fringe: A Bottom-Up Approach to the Study of the True Self

10.31234/osf.io/8mh7x ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Matthew Baldwin ◽

Francesca Gino ◽

Wilhelm Hofmann

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Load ◽

Meta Analysis ◽

Phenomenological Approach ◽

Subjective Feeling ◽

True Self ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Relevant Variables ◽

Recent Activity ◽

Immediate Experience ◽

Main Effects

The quest for authenticity is a potent existential striving. Authenticity is commonly defined as the extent to which a person knows, and lives in accordance with their "true self." We propose that people can also infer whether they are being authentic from ambient feelings of fluency, or the subjective feeling of ease that corresponds to one's immediate experience, mental processing, or physical action. We report findings from four studies and a meta-analysis that support this view. Study 1 shows that experienced fluency during one’s most recent activity predicts authentic feelings independently of other relevant variables. In Study 2, participants’ recalled experiences of authenticity were also those that felt fluent. Study 3 was a pre-registered compliment to Study 2, and shows that participants' recalled experiences of fluency were also those that felt authentic. In a pre-registered Study 4, participants who generated self-defining attributes under cognitive load reported greater difficulty doing so and subsequently lower authenticity. Other attempts to manipulate fluency, reported in the Supplement, were successful in doing so, but did not produce reliable main effects on authenticity. Nevertheless, a robust correlation between self-reported fluency and authenticity was found in these studies. In Study 5, we meta-analyze this fluency-authenticity link using all relevant data collected during this project. We discuss how our phenomenological approach to authenticity can integrate, but also update, recent theorizing about the nature of authenticity and how this model can be used to further speculate about who and what can be authentic.

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Actionality across (sub)paradigms

Language Typology and Universals ◽

10.1515/stuf-2021-1045 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 74 (3-4) ◽

pp. 561-620

Author(s):

Sergei Tatevosov

Keyword(s):

Missing Information ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Verbal System ◽

Lexical Items

Abstract This paper explores the verbal system of Tundra Nenets and offers a partition of the entire set of derivationally minimal verbs into actional classes, which include stative, process, inceptive-stative, ingressive-atelic, durative and punctual telic, durative and punctual ingressive, and bi-telic verbs. This classification is established in a bottom-up manner, starting from the lowest level of actional interpretations of individual subparadigms of a verb. As a result, 18 subparadigmatic classes are established. At the next stage, an actional characteristic is assigned to the entire paradigm and the 18 subparadigmatic classes are reduced to seven actional macroclasses. However, at the paradigmatic level, one discovers that for certain types of verbs actional information available paradigm-internally does not suffice. To recover the missing information, one needs to examine derivationally related lexical items that realize semantic configurations unavailable paradigm-internally. This paradigm-external perspective leads to the recognition of cross-paradigmatic actional characteristics assigned to groups of derivationally related verbs.

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A neural network approach to compositionality and co-compositionality

The Mental Lexicon ◽

10.1075/ml.5.2.03for ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 5 (2) ◽

pp. 180-204 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Michael Fortescue

Keyword(s):

Neural Network ◽

Neural Networks ◽

Mental Lexicon ◽

Network Approach ◽

Top Down ◽

Neural Network Approach ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Lexical Items

The issue of compositionality is applied to the modelling of the mental lexicon in terms of neural networks as described in Fortescue (2009). The approach is illustrated by applying it to the analysis of a semantically complex verb, conquer, illustrating the need to draw upon top-down (social, stylistic) as well as bottom-up (sensory) affordances in modelling such lexical items. Thereafter, a collocation that requires the mutual adjustment of the semantics of its individual components is analysed. Finally, adjectives of temperature crucially involving “limbic” affordances are treated. In all instances, the relevance of universal conceptual “primitives” to the processes of paraphrase and (co)composition will be seen to be highly restricted.

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Morphology in Kra-Dai Languages

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.529 ◽

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.

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Inference Strategies To Improve Reading Comprehension of Recount Text

Cakrawala Jurnal Pendidikan ◽

10.24905/cakrawala.v12i2.1078 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 12 (2) ◽

pp. 152-158

Author(s):

Yayah Nur Hidayah ◽

Afief Fakhruddin

Keyword(s):

Reading Comprehension ◽

Technical Information ◽

Comprehension Question ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Research Article ◽

Lexical Items ◽

Thesis Statement ◽

Main Ideas ◽

English Students

AbstractÂ This study aimed Â to explore inference strategies necessary Â read journal Â article. Forty four English students Â read set of text onÂ education text Â and Â answer Â comprehension question. Â The Â two main Â objectives Â in this study Â were to identify inference skills necessary to comprehend a research article in terms of the main ideas, the writing styl e/tone and other text-based elements such as lexical items, syntaxes well as discourse structures and to investigate inference strategies for copingÂ with text. Twenty Â five of these participants also volunteered for an in depth Â interview. Â The findings Â revealed that studentsÂ usually relied on their bottom up processing. They skipped difficult parts, especially technical information graphic Â illustration. TheyÂ sought Â help from Â friends to enhance Â their understanding. Overall, Â they were successful at interpreting Â the thesis statement, the gist of section, Â the meaning Â of the tested words and Â clause. However, Â they were less able to infer the underlying Â argument, the tone of article, and the attitudes Â of other toward Â the research findingÂ Â Â Â Â

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‘Suggesting rather special facts’: a corpus-based study of distinctive lexical distributions in translated texts

Corpora ◽

10.3366/e1749503208000154 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 195-211 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Ana Frankenberg-Garcia

Keyword(s):

Literary Texts ◽

Top Down ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Starting Point ◽

Lexical Items ◽

Language Corpus

It is well-known that translated texts read differently from texts that have been written without the constraints imposed by source texts from another language. One of the features that can confer a distinctive feel to translations is the frequency with which certain lexical items are represented in them. Previous research has compared the frequency of specific words in translations and in texts that are not translations, and unveiled substantial differences in their distributions. Most of these studies adopt a bottom-up approach. Their starting point is a given word whose frequency in translated and non-translated texts is then compared. In this study, I adopt an explorative, top-down approach instead. I begin with a Portuguese language corpus of translated and non-translated literary texts, and attempt to identify lemmas which are markedly over- and under-represented in the translations. Our results not only appear to support existing bottom-up intuitions regarding distinctive lexical distributions, but also disclose a number of unexpected contrasts that would not have been discernible without recourse to corpora.

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Cyclic Selection: Auxiliaries Are Merged, Not Inserted

Linguistic Inquiry ◽

10.1162/ling_a_00439 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-43

Author(s):

Asia Pietraszko

Keyword(s):

Head Movement ◽

Lexical Item ◽

Alternative View ◽

Functional Head ◽

Auxiliary Verbs ◽

Lexical Items ◽

Auxiliary Verb ◽

Traditional Approaches ◽

Syntactic Derivation

Abstract Traditional approaches to verbal periphrasis (compound tenses) treat auxiliary verbs as lexical items that enter syntactic derivation like any other lexical item, i.e. via Selection/Merge. An alternative view that has received much attention in recent years is that auxiliary verbs are not base-generated but rather inserted in a previously built structure (i.a. Bach 1967; Embick 2000; Arregi 2000; Cowper 2010; Bjorkman 2011; Arregi and Klecha 2015). Arguments for the insertion approach to auxiliaries include their last-resort distribution and the fact that, in many languages, auxiliaries are not systematically associated with a given inflectional category (the "overflow" distribution discussed in Bjorkman 2011). In this paper, I argue against the insertion approach. First, I demonstrate that the overflow pattern and last-resort distribution follow from Cyclic Selection (Pietraszko 2017)—a Merge-counterpart of Cyclic Agree (Béjar and Rezac 2009). And second, I show that the insertion approach makes wrong predictions about compound tenses in Swahili, a language with overflow periphrasis. Under the approach advocated here, an auxiliary verb is a verbal head externally merged as a specifier of a functional head, such as T. It then undergoes m-merger with that head, instantiating an external-merge version of Matushansky’s (2006) conception of head movement.

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Lexical Comprehension in Young Children With Developmental Delays

American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology ◽

10.1044/1058-0360.0301.79 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

pp. 79-88 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Theresa A. Kouri

Keyword(s):

Young Children ◽

Developmental Delays ◽

Normal Development ◽

Clinical Applications ◽

Group Status ◽

Novel Object ◽

Related Information ◽

Comprehension Skills ◽

Lexical Items ◽

Lexical Concepts

Lexical comprehension skills were examined in 20 young children (aged 28–45 months) with developmental delays (DD) and 20 children (aged 19–34 months) with normal development (ND). Each was assigned to either a story-like script condition or a simple ostensive labeling condition in which the names of three novel object and action items were presented over two experimental sessions. During the experimental sessions, receptive knowledge of the lexical items was assessed through a series of target and generalization probes. Results indicated that all children, irrespective of group status, acquired more lexical concepts in the ostensive labeling condition than in the story narrative condition. Overall, both groups acquired more object than action words, although subjects with ND comprehended more action words than subjects with DD. More target than generalization items were also comprehended by both groups. It is concluded that young children’s comprehension of new lexical concepts is facilitated more by a context in which simple ostensive labels accompany the presentation of specific objects and actions than one in which objects and actions are surrounded by thematic and event-related information. Various clinical applications focusing on the lexical training of young children with DD are discussed.

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