scholarly journals Morphologically Complex Adjectives with a Negative Prefix: Translation Problems

2020 ◽  
pp. 58-69
Author(s):  
Artūras Ratkus

The article addresses problems of understanding and translation of morphologically complex words. It is not unusual for English adjectives with a negative prefix to have unexpected meanings that cannot be predicted based on examining the adjectives’ morphological structure. One such complex example is the adjective incapable. It is argued that this adjective has a peculiar set of meanings and uses that are independent of the positive form capable and unrelated to the adjective able. The article adduces evidence of specific uses of incapable, in which it showcases the meaning of ‘unfit for, unsuitable’ – not documented in most dictionaries.

Author(s):  
Erin K. Washburn ◽  
Candace A. Mulcahy

Skilled reading is a complex process in which many subskills are involved, including an awareness of the morphological structure of language. Morphological awareness is the ability to understand how words are broken into meaningful units (e.g., affixes, root words). Explicit and systematic teaching of morphological concepts are reported to help striving readers, particularly those in upper elementary, middle, and secondary grades, with reading. To teach morphological concepts and their relation to reading, teachers need to have both awareness and knowledge of morphology. In the present study, general and special education teachers’ knowledge of morphological concepts are examined. Results indicate that teachers, regardless of type of certification (general vs. special education) or grade level (elementary vs. secondary), have difficulty identifying morphemes in both simple and complex words. Suggestions for what and how teacher educators can integrate the teaching of morphological concepts into teacher preparation contexts are provided.


1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
John J. Kim ◽  
Gary F. Marcus ◽  
Steven Pinker ◽  
Michelle Hollander ◽  
Marie Coppola

ABSTRACTWhat is the input to the mental System that computes inflected forms likewalked, came, dogs, andmen? Recent connectionist models feed a word's phonological features into a single network, allowing it to generalize both regular and irregular phonological patterns, likestop-stopped, step-steppedandfling-flung, cling-clung. But for adults, phonological input is insufficient: verbs derived from nouns likering the cityalways have regular past tense forms (ringed), even if they are phonologically identical to irregular verbs (ring the bell). Similarly, nouns based on names, liketwo Mickey Mouses, and compounds based on possessing rather than being their root morpheme, such astwo sabertooths, take regular plurals, even when they are homophonous with irregular nouns likemiceandteeth. In four experiments, testing 70 three- to ten-year-old children, we found that children are sensitive to such nonphonological information: they were more likely to produce regular inflected forms for forms liketo ring(‘to put a ring on’) andsnaggletooth(a kind of animal doll with big teeth) than for their homophonous irregular counterparts, even when these counterparts were also extended in meaning. Children's inflectional Systems thus seem to be like adults': irregular forms are tied to the lexicon but regular forms are computed by a default rule, and words are represented as morphological tree structures reflecting their derivation from basic word roots. Such structures, which determine how novel complex words are derived and interpreted, also govern whether words with irregular sound patterns will be regularized: a word can be irregular only if its structure contains an irregular root in ‘head’ position, allowing the lexically stored irregular information to percolate up to apply to the word as a whole. In all other cases, the inflected form is computed by a default regular rule. This proposal fits the facts better than alternatives appealing to ambiguity reduction or semantic similarity to a word's central sense. The results, together with an analysis of adult speech to children, suggest that morphological structure and a distinction between mechanisms for regular and irregular inflection may be inherent to the design of children's language Systems.


Author(s):  
Dominiek Sandra

Speakers can transfer meanings to each other because they represent them in a perceptible form. Phonology and syntactic structure are two levels of linguistic form. Morphemes are situated in-between them. Like phonemes they have a phonological component, and like syntactic structures they carry relational information. A distinction can be made between inflectional and lexical morphology. Both are devices in the service of communicative efficiency, by highlighting grammatical and semantic relations, respectively. Morphological structure has also been studied in psycholinguistics, especially by researchers who are interested in the process of visual word recognition. They found that a word is recognized more easily when it belongs to a large morphological family, which suggests that the mental lexicon is structured along morphological lines. The semantic transparency of a word’s morphological structure plays an important role. Several findings also suggest that morphology plays an important role at a pre-lexical processing level as well. It seems that morphologically complex words are subjected to a process of blind morphological decomposition before lexical access is attempted.


2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (12) ◽  
pp. 1983-1993 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian T. Gold ◽  
Kathleen Rastle

Considerable behavioral research has demonstrated that the visual word recognition system is sensitive to morphological structure. It has typically been assumed that analysis of morphologically complex words occurs only when the meaning of these words can be derived from the meanings of their constituents (e.g., hunter = hunt + er). However, results from recent behavioral research using the masked priming technique have demonstrated that morphological analysis can occur at an earlier orthographic level, in cases in which the meanings of complex words cannot be derived from their constituents (e.g., corner = corn + er). Here, we combine the logic of behavioral masked priming with the neurophysiological phenomenon of functional magnetic resonance imaging priming suppression to look for evidence of nonsemantic morphological priming at the neural level. Both behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging results indicated priming effects associated with the mere appearance of morphological structure (corner—CORN). In addition, these effects were distinguishable from lexical-semantic effects (bucket—PAIL) and orthographic effects (brothel—BROTH). Three left-lateralized occipito-temporal regions showed sensitivity to early morphological components of visual word recognition. Two of these regions also showed orthographic priming (∼BA 37, peak: −48 −60 −17; ∼BA 19, peak: −40 −77 −1), whereas one was sensitive only to morphological similarity between primes and targets (∼BA 19, peak: ∼37 ∼67 ∼7). These findings provide a neurobiological basis for a purely structural morphemic segmentation mechanism operating at early stages of visual word recognition.


2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avital Deutsch ◽  
Hadas Velan ◽  
Tamar Michaly

Complex words in Hebrew are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: a consonantal root embedded in a nominal or verbal word-pattern morpho-phonological unit made up of vowels or vowels and consonants. Research on written-word recognition has revealed a robust effect of the roots and the verbal-patterns, but not of the nominal-patterns, on word recognition. These findings suggest that the Hebrew lexicon is organized and accessed via roots. We explored the hypothesis that the absence of a nominal-pattern effect reflects methodological limitations of the experimental paradigms used in previous studies. Specifically, the potential facilitative effect induced by a shared nominal-pattern was counteracted by an interference effect induced by the competition between the roots of two words derived from different roots but with the same nominal-pattern. In the current study, a fast-priming paradigm for sentence reading and a “delayed-letters” procedure were used to isolate the initial effect of nominal-patterns on lexical access. The results, based on eye-fixation latency, demonstrated a facilitatory effect induced by nominal-pattern primes relative to orthographic control primes when presented for 33 or 42 ms. The results are discussed in relation to the role of the word-pattern as an organizing principle of the Hebrew lexicon, together with the roots.


2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Whiting ◽  
Yury Shtyrov ◽  
William Marslen-Wilson

Despite a century of research into visual word recognition, basic questions remain unresolved about the functional architecture of the process that maps visual inputs from orthographic analysis onto lexical form and meaning and about the units of analysis in terms of which these processes are conducted. Here we use magnetoencephalography, supported by a masked priming behavioral study, to address these questions using contrasting sets of simple (walk), complex (swimmer), and pseudo-complex (corner) forms. Early analyses of orthographic structure, detectable in bilateral posterior temporal regions within a 150–230 msec time frame, are shown to segment the visual input into linguistic substrings (words and morphemes) that trigger lexical access in left middle temporal locations from 300 msec. These are primarily feedforward processes and are not initially constrained by lexical-level variables. Lexical constraints become significant from 390 msec, in both simple and complex words, with increased processing of pseudowords and pseudo-complex forms. These results, consistent with morpho-orthographic models based on masked priming data, map out the real-time functional architecture of visual word recognition, establishing basic feedforward processing relationships between orthographic form, morphological structure, and lexical meaning.


2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (5) ◽  
pp. 1125-1133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yael Farhy ◽  
João Veríssimo ◽  
Harald Clahsen

Do properties of individual languages shape the mechanisms by which they are processed? By virtue of their non-concatenative morphological structure, the recognition of complex words in Semitic languages has been argued to rely strongly on morphological information and on decomposition into root and pattern constituents. Here, we report results from a masked priming experiment in Hebrew in which we contrasted verb forms belonging to two morphological classes, Paal and Piel, which display similar properties, but crucially differ on whether they are extended to novel verbs. Verbs from the open-class Piel elicited familiar root priming effects, but verbs from the closed-class Paal did not. Our findings indicate that, similarly to other (e.g., Indo-European) languages, down-to-the-root decomposition in Hebrew does not apply to stems of non-productive verbal classes. We conclude that the Semitic word processor is less unique than previously thought: Although it operates on morphological units that are combined in a non-linear way, it engages the same universal mechanisms of storage and computation as those seen in other languages.


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (11) ◽  
pp. 3366-3379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minna Lehtonen ◽  
Philip J. Monahan ◽  
David Poeppel

Are words stored as morphologically structured representations? If so, when during word recognition are morphological pieces accessed? Recent masked priming studies support models that assume early decomposition of (potentially) morphologically complex words. The electrophysiological evidence, however, is inconsistent. We combined masked morphological priming with magneto-encephalography (MEG), a technique particularly adept at indexing processes involved in lexical access. The latency of an MEG component peaking, on average, 220 msec post-onset of the target in left occipito-temporal brain regions was found to be sensitive to the morphological prime–target relationship under masked priming conditions in a visual lexical decision task. Shorter latencies for related than unrelated conditions were observed both for semantically transparent (cleaner–CLEAN) and opaque (corner–CORN) prime–target pairs, but not for prime–target pairs with only an orthographic relationship (brothel–BROTH). These effects are likely to reflect a prelexical level of processing where form-based representations of stems and affixes are represented and are in contrast to models positing no morphological structure in lexical representations. Moreover, we present data regarding the transitional probability from stem to affix in a post hoc comparison, which suggests that this factor may modulate early morphological decomposition, particularly for opaque words. The timing of a robust MEG component sensitive to the morphological relatedness of prime–target pairs can be used to further understand the neural substrates and the time course of lexical processing.


2019 ◽  
pp. 178-198
Author(s):  
Geert Booij

This chapter discusses how morphology and phonology interact in the morphological system of Dutch. Bound morphemes differ in their phonological make-up from lexical morphemes. Morphological structure is not isomorphic to prosodic structure, which serves to explain how morphological structure determines the pronunciation of complex words. This is also an essential insight for understanding the gapping of parts of complex words. Many bound morphemes behave as prosodic words of their own. Allomorphy, both of stems and affixes is pervasive in Dutch, and the chapter discusses how the various types of allomorphy can be accounted for. The stacking up of affixes is also constrained by phonological factors.


1988 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marijke W. Bergman ◽  
Patrick T. W. Hudson ◽  
Paul A. T. M. Eling

In four lexical decision experiments we studied the effect of morphological complexity on word recognition. Some potentially relevant linguistic aspects of derived nouns were varied: the location of the affix (prefix vs. suffix); the genuineness of the affix (real vs. pseudo); the orthographic legality of pseudo-stems; semantic compositionality; the nature of the stem (free vs. bound); the origin of the complex word (Latinate vs. Germanic); the currency of the stem (current vs. moribund). Furthermore, in the first two experiments, we systematically varied the proportion of complex and simple words to see whether strategies influence morphological effects on recognition times. Consistent with Taft's notion of affix stripping, pseudoprefixed words show longer mean decision times and higher error rates than truly prefixed words. Further, the prefixed and nonprefixed (but not pseudoprefixed) words are processed equally rapidly, indicating that a decompositional process is efficient. No differences were found, however, for suffixed, pseudosuffixed, and nonsuffixed words. There was no effect of the proportion of simple and complex words. There are some indications that the etymological origin of words may affect recognition times, but no other linguistic aspects of derivations do so. The results of the four experiments are interpreted as supporting a left-to-right process for word recognition in which morphemes are extracted automatically. During this process information encoded by morphological structure becomes available for other processes.


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