Paradigm structure influences syntactic behaviour

In this chapter, Belyaev analyses several challenging facts of Ossetic nominal inflection that seem to challenge the traditional understanding of Lexical Sharing in LFG. In particular, case markers in Ossetic may attach to the final adjunct of coordinate phrases, even though the structure of the paradigm precludes their analyses as clitics. Moreover, the syntactic behaviour of Ossetic case forms seems to be influenced by paradigm structure: words where the genitive is suppletive and acts as an oblique stem use the genitive instead of the nominative in non-final conjuncts. Belyaev argues that these difficulties can be resolved if the architecture of LFG is extended by Lexical Sharing, which allows one word to occupy two or more syntactic heads. He proposes a formal mechanism of integrating Lexical Sharing with the morphology2013syntax interface of LFG, with Paradigm Function Morphology as the basis for the morphological component.

Coding efficiency in nominal inflection: expectedness and type frequency effects

Since (Zipf, George Kingsley. 1935. The psychobiology of language: An introduction to dynamic philology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Zipf, George Kingsley. 1949. Human behavior and the principle of least effort. Journal of Consulting Psychology 13(3)), it has been known that more frequent lexical items tend to be shorter than less frequent ones, and this association between the length of an expression and its frequency has been applied to various grammatical patterns (syntactic, morphological, and phonological) and related to predictability or expectedness in the typological literature. However, the exact interactions of frequency and expectedness, their effect on shortening, and the mechanisms involved, are still not well understood. This paper proposes the Form-Expectedness Correspondence Hypothesis (fech), taking into account not only the frequency of expressions but their overall structure and distribution, and explores the fech in the domain of nominal inflection from a quantitative perspective.

The Principal Parts of Finnish Nominals

We design an FST-driven computational method to calculate the minimal number of nominal forms—the principal parts—one must know to be able to fully inflect a lexeme in standard Finnish. To do this, we model the nominal inflection pattern as an FST according to the KOTUS inflectional classes. Our results show that knowing five forms always suffices to uniquely determine a nominal’s inflectional class, and to subsequently correctly inflect all the remaining forms. This contrasts with most sources in the literature that tend to assume seven forms are needed.

Nominal Inflection of the Tutsa Language

North-East is a hub of many ethnic languages. This region constitutes with eight major districts; like-Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Meghalaya and Sikkim. Tutsa is a minor tribe of Arunachal Pradesh. The Tutsa was migrated from the place ‘RangkhanSanchik’ of the South-East Asia through ‘Hakmen-Haksan’ way to Arunachal Pradesh. The Tutsa community is mainly inhabited in Tirap district and southern part of Changlang district and a few people are co-exists in Tinsukia district of Assam. The Tutsa language belongs to the Naga group of Sino-Tibetan language family. According to the Report of UNESCO, the Tutsa language is in endangered level and it included in the EGIDS Level 6B. The language has no written literature; songs, folk tales, stories are found in a colloquial form. They use Roman Script. Due to the influence of other languages it causes lack of sincerity for the use of their languages in a united form. Now-a-days the new generation is attracted for using English, Hindi and Assamese language. No study is found till now in a scientific way about the language. So, in this prospect the topic Nominal Inflection of the Tutsa Language has been selected for study. It will help to preserve the language and also help in making of dictionary, Grammar and language guide book.

Augusta Treverorum Vulgaris: Linguistic Change and Cultural Integration in the Vulgar Latin Inscriptions of Trier (germany)

SummaryThe copious corpus of deviations from standard Latin from Trier spans more than 800 years (50 BC–800 AD) and comprises both pagan and Christian inscriptions, the latter exclusively on tombstones. This paper points out the most salient non-standard features in the categories of phonetics, morphology, syntax and vocabulary. Most of them conform to standard Vulgar Latin, but some yield features of the inscriptions’ area, such as Western Romance (preservation of final -s, voicing intervocalic stops), Gallo-Romance (qui instead of quae, nasalisation), and the extinct Moselle Romance. A few features might reflect Gaulish substrate influence ([u] > [y], e before nasals > i, ē > ī, ō > ū, -m > -n). Clues for palatalisation and the raisings ē > ī, ō > ū are the most prominent phonetic features, the latter supporting, combined with the preservation of final -s, a renewed paradigm of nominal inflection. Morphosyntactic changes are driven by analogy and regularisations. Starting at the fringes, the erosion of case syntax ended up in a complete breakdown. Christianity fostered the recording of previously undocumented substandard features, completed the assimilation of Celtic (which pagan polytheism and the upwards mobility of Roman society had initiated) and supported the cultural integration of Germanic immigrants.Piae memoriae Henrici Heinen, viri doctissimi

le desinenze personali nella morfologia verbale delle carte cavensi (IX secolo)

Summary:This paper aims to examine some aspects of the verbal inflectional endings found in a corpus of 9th-century legal documents produced in the Lombard duchy of Salerno, in the South of Italy. Compared to nominal inflection, verbal inflection endings display a stronger continuity with the Latin of previous stages. Nevertheless, different types of innovations are observable. On the basis of data from present indicative and subjunctive, two of them will be analysed: 1) innovative forms explicable in terms of well-known morpho-phonological processes and showing convergence with the Romance outcomes 2) innovative variants, that can be interpreted in different ways, diverging both from previous stages of the Latin and from the Romance outcomes. To interpret both these kinds of variation, a crucial role is played by external factors such as the cultural level of the authors of the documents and their capability to conform to the traditional linguistic models.

The Morphology of Yam Languages

The Yam languages are a primary language family spoken in southern New Guinea across an area spanning around 180km west to east across both the Indonesian province of Papua and Papua New Guinea. The Yam languages are morphologically remarkable for their complex verbal inflection characterized by a tendency to distribute inflectional exponence across multiple sites on the verb. Under this pattern of distributed exponence, segmental formatives, that is, affixes, are identifiable but assigning any coherent semantics to these elements is often difficult and instead the inflectional meanings can only be determined once multiple formatives have been combined. Despite their complex inflectional morphology, Yam languages display comparatively impoverished word formation or derivational morphology. Nominal inflection is characterized by moderately large case inventories, the largest displaying 16 cases. Nouns are occasionally marked for number although this is typically restricted to certain case values. Verbal paradigms are much larger than nominal paradigms. Verbs mark agreement with up to two arguments in person, number, and natural gender. Verbs also mark complex tense, aspect, and mood values; in all languages this involves at least two aspect values, multiple past tense values, and some level of grammatical mood marking. Verbs may also be marked for diathesis, direction, and/or pluractionality. The overall morphological pattern is that of fusional or inflectional languages. Nominal inflection is rather straightforward with nominals taking case suffixes or clitics with little to no inflectional classes. The true complexity lies in the organization of the verbal inflectional system, about which, despite individual variation across the family, a number of architectural generalizations can be made. The family displays a fairly uniform verbal inflectional template and all languages make a distinction between prefixing and ambifixing verbs. Prefixing verbs show agreement via a prefix only while ambifixing verbs via agreement with a suffix, for monovalent clauses, or with both a prefix and a suffix for bivalent verbs. These agreement affixes are also involved in the distributed exponence of tense, aspect, and mood.