Morphological Analysis of the Dravidian Language Family

Caddo is a member of the Caddoan language family, which includes also Wichita, Kitsai, Pawnee, and Arikara. Its verbs are typically polysynthetic, with a base composed of a variety of elements that include incorporated noun roots and various derivational prefixes and suffixes. This base is accompanied by pronominal prefixes expressing person and number and their role as agents, patients, or beneficiaries. Unusual is the division of these pronominal prefixes into realis and irrealis sets that have scope over an entire event or state. The base is followed by suffixes expressing tense and aspect. Caddo is not only polysynthetic but also highly fusional as a result of extensive sound changes that have obscured morpheme boundaries as well as resemblances between different parts of a paradigm. Morphological analysis requires the internal reconstruction of an earlier stage of the language when the composition of a verb was more transparent.

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Verb + verb sequences in Dravidian

Verb-Verb Complexes in Asian Languages ◽

10.1093/oso/9780198759508.003.0013 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 327-353

Author(s):

Sanford B. Steever

Keyword(s):

Language Family ◽

Verb Constructions ◽

Compound Verbs ◽

Verb Inflections ◽

Dravidian Language ◽

Compound Verb

This chapter analyzes compound verb constructions in the Dravidian language family. Drawing on data from all four subgroups, two broad constructions emerge: auxiliary compound verbs and lexical compound verbs. The former provide complex morphosyntactic vehicles for verbal categories or combinations of categories not found in the simple verb inflections of a language; the latter provide similar vehicles to encode lexical meanings not found in simple lexemes of the language. A third construction, reduplicated compounds, is also analyzed. A brief comparison in made between the pattern of these verb + verb sequences in Dravidian and patterns found in other language families.

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Bootstrapping a Neural Morphological Analyzer for St. Lawrence Island Yupik from a Finite-State Transducer

10.33011/computel.v1i.4277 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Lane Schwartz ◽

Emily Chen ◽

Benjamin Hunt ◽

Sylvia LR Schreiner

Keyword(s):

Morphological Analysis ◽

Training Data ◽

Language Family ◽

Enabling Technology ◽

Finite State ◽

Finite State Transducer ◽

Improve Analysis ◽

Testing Set

Morphological analysis is a critical enabling technology for polysynthetic languages. We present a neural morphological analyzer for case-inflected nouns in St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered polysythetic language in the Inuit-Yupik language family, treating morphological analysis as a recurrent neural sequence-to-sequence task. By utilizing an existing finite-state morphological analyzer to create training data, we improve analysis coverage on attested Yupik word types from approximately 75% for the existing finite-state analyzer to 100% for the neural analyzer. At the same time, we achieve a substantially higher level of accuracy on a held-out testing set, from 78.9% accuracy for the finite-state analyzer to 92.2% accuracy for our neural analyzer.

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A Bayesian phylogenetic study of the Dravidian language family

Royal Society Open Science ◽

10.1098/rsos.171504 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 171504 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

Vishnupriya Kolipakam ◽

Fiona M. Jordan ◽

Michael Dunn ◽

Simon J. Greenhill ◽

Remco Bouckaert ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Native Speakers ◽

Central India ◽

Phylogenetic Study ◽

Language Family ◽

Considerable Uncertainty ◽

Bayesian Phylogenetic Analysis ◽

Language Groups ◽

History Of ◽

Lexical Data ◽

Dravidian Language

The Dravidian language family consists of about 80 varieties (Hammarström H. 2016 Glottolog 2.7 ) spoken by 220 million people across southern and central India and surrounding countries (Steever SB. 1998 In The Dravidian languages (ed. SB Steever), pp. 1–39: 1). Neither the geographical origin of the Dravidian language homeland nor its exact dispersal through time are known. The history of these languages is crucial for understanding prehistory in Eurasia, because despite their current restricted range, these languages played a significant role in influencing other language groups including Indo-Aryan (Indo-European) and Munda (Austroasiatic) speakers. Here, we report the results of a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of cognate-coded lexical data, elicited first hand from native speakers, to investigate the subgrouping of the Dravidian language family, and provide dates for the major points of diversification. Our results indicate that the Dravidian language family is approximately 4500 years old, a finding that corresponds well with earlier linguistic and archaeological studies. The main branches of the Dravidian language family (North, Central, South I, South II) are recovered, although the placement of languages within these main branches diverges from previous classifications. We find considerable uncertainty with regard to the relationships between the main branches.

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Interpreting ‘Front’: Perception of Space in Bengali and Kannada

The GLOCAL in Asia 2019 ◽

10.47298/cala2019.2-1 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Anirban Sarkar ◽

Keyword(s):

Spatial Cognition ◽

Language Use ◽

Vantage Point ◽

Language Family ◽

Points Of View ◽

Dravidian Language

This paper is concerned with the nature of ‘front’ along the front/back axis. The languages taken up for the study are Bengali, a language belonging to Indo-Aryan language family, and Kannada, a language belonging to Dravidian language family. The terms for denoting ‘front’ for Bengali are ‘samne’ and ‘aage’ and for Kannada are ‘yeduru’ and ‘munde’. Experience and embodiment of spatial arrangements play an important role in the spatial cognition, and language use takes into account the different points of view. Many factors such as proximity, vantage point, specificity, etc. play an important role in describing a given situation. It is worth mentioning that the choice of the usages of the words for denoting ‘front’ as location or direction has been seen as different in some situations and overlapping in others. The data were collected using a questionnaire which aimed to elicit the expressions for ‘front’ for the entities, whose relationship is described in terms of Figure and Ground (Talmy, 1983; 2000), from the speakers of both the above mentioned languages, and then analysed for the factors involved.

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Structural and Chemical Studies of Pathological Fibers in Human Neurofibrillary Degeneration

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s042482010012031x ◽

1985 ◽

Vol 43 ◽

pp. 726-729

Author(s):

K.S. Kosik ◽

L.K. Duffy ◽

S. Bakalis ◽

C. Abraham ◽

D.J. Selkoe

Keyword(s):

Monoclonal Antibodies ◽

Alzheimer Disease ◽

Human Brain ◽

Neurofibrillary Tangles ◽

Morphological Analysis ◽

High Specificity ◽

Cytoskeletal Proteins ◽

Neuritic Plaque ◽

Protein Chemistry ◽

Chemical Studies

The major structural lesions of the human brain during aging and in Alzheimer disease (AD) are the neurofibrillary tangles (NFT) and the senile (neuritic) plaque. Although these fibrous alterations have been recognized by light microscopists for almost a century, detailed biochemical and morphological analysis of the lesions has been undertaken only recently. Because the intraneuronal deposits in the NFT and the plaque neurites and the extraneuronal amyloid cores of the plaques have a filamentous ultrastructure, the neuronal cytoskeleton has played a prominent role in most pathogenetic hypotheses.The approach of our laboratory toward elucidating the origin of plaques and tangles in AD has been two-fold: the use of analytical protein chemistry to purify and then characterize the pathological fibers comprising the tangles and plaques, and the use of certain monoclonal antibodies to neuronal cytoskeletal proteins that, despite high specificity, cross-react with NFT and thus implicate epitopes of these proteins as constituents of the tangles.

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