On derivatives

The question of derivates has been repeatedly raised in the teaching processes of language grammar and general linguistics. This circumstance became the basis for creating this short article. It is well known that a word-form can be changeable or unchangeable, and this fact is determined by the parts of speech. Form-changing words can undergo two types of change: inflectional and derivative. During the inflectional change, the form of the word changes, but the lexical and semantic aspects of the word do not change, i.e. its semantic and content data do not change. A classic example of this type of change is flexion of nouns.Derivation is the formation of a word from another word by the addition of non-inflectional affixes. Derivation can be of two types. The first is lexical derivation, in which the derivative affix produces a word with a different lexical content. A word-form can be another part of speech or the same part of speech but with a different lexical content. The second type of derivation is, first of all, grammatical derivation, when grammatical categories are produced. The grammatical category in general (and a word-form in general as well) includes the unity of morphological and semantical aspects. There is no separate semantics without morphology. Any semantic category and/or content must be conveyed in a specific form, so only a specific form has a specific morphosemantics, which can be produced by the grammatical derivatives. The main difference between the two types of derivation mentioned above (and therefore between the two types of derivatives) is the levels of the language hierarchy. The first type of affixes works at the lexical level of the language, while the second type derivatives produce forms at the morphological and semantic levels. The second type derivatives are inter-level affixes, because they act on two hierarchical levels. Any grammatical category includes specific morphosemantic oppositional forms. Thus, unlike inflectional affixes, the rest of the morphological affixes are all other types of inter-level derivatives. It should be noted that the preverb in Kartvelian languages ​​is the only linguistic unit with all possible functions of affix. DOWNLOADS

On the Relationship between Frequency, Features, and Markedness in Inflection: Experimental Evidence from Russian Nouns

Markedness has a long tradition in linguistics as a way to describe linguistic asymmetries. In this paper, I investigate an argument about the necessity of markedness as a tool for capturing the structural distribution of inflectional affixes and predicting the behavioral consequences of that distribution. Based on evidence from German adjectives, Clahsen et al. argue that the number of specified features of inflectional affixes (which I argue represents a type of markedness) affects reaction times in lexical access. Affixes’ features, however, overlap with how frequently they occur. Clahsen et al. investigate only three affixes in German, leaving open questions about the relationship between the two factors and whether features are necessary as a predictor of lexical processing. In this paper, I use a larger set of inflectional affixes in Russian to test the relationship between affix features and affix frequency. I find that the two traits of affixes are correlated based on frequencies from a corpus and that in a lexical decision task, affix frequency is the better predictor of response times. My results suggest that we should question the necessity of featural markedness for explaining how inflectional structure is processed and, more generally, that both corpus and experimental data suggest a surprisingly close relationship between affix features and affix frequency.

Word families

The idea of a word family is important for a systematic approach to vocabulary teaching and for deciding the vocabulary load of texts. Inclusion of a related form of a word within a word family depends on criteria involving frequency, regularity, productivity and predictability. These criteria are applied to English affixes so that the inflectional affixes and the most useful derivational affixes are arranged into a graded set of seven levels. This set of levels and others like it have value in guiding teaching and learning, in standardising vocabulary load and vocabulary size research, in investigating lexical development and lexical storage, and in guiding dictionary making. © 1993 Oxford University Press.

Word families

The idea of a word family is important for a systematic approach to vocabulary teaching and for deciding the vocabulary load of texts. Inclusion of a related form of a word within a word family depends on criteria involving frequency, regularity, productivity and predictability. These criteria are applied to English affixes so that the inflectional affixes and the most useful derivational affixes are arranged into a graded set of seven levels. This set of levels and others like it have value in guiding teaching and learning, in standardising vocabulary load and vocabulary size research, in investigating lexical development and lexical storage, and in guiding dictionary making. © 1993 Oxford University Press.

Ordering towards disorder

In Athabascan languages, verbal morphological structure does not follow the cross-linguistically more common and stable ‘layered’ order: derivational and lexical affixes are not necessarily closer to the stem than inflectional affixes. While the emergence of the Athabascan order is understandable through different layers of grammaticalization (Mithun 2011), the question of why this order is relatively stable in the language family has not yet been satisfactorily answered. The distributional properties of cognate Athabascan morphemes reveal historical tendencies for fusion and reordering that suggest that affixes remain in or change their position depending on the semantic relevance to other affixes, not necessarily to the stem alone, as Bybee’s (1985) morphological theory would predict. An additional factor for the stability of non-layered structure of morphemes is the high degree of semantic generality found in affixes between the stem and other lexical and derivational affixes.

Linguistic Study on Surigaonon and Kamayo Children’s Songs

This paper looks into the linguistic characteristics of the Surigaonon and the Kamayo languages of the Surigao Provinces through the children’s songs. It aims to identify and explain the morphological and phonological features that bring about the intelligibility of the two languages. Oftentimes confused as the waya-waya or the jaun-jaun language, Surigaonon finds its speech community among the Surigao del Norte inhabitants as well as a few numbers in the municipalities of Surigao del Sur. Kamayo, on the other hand, is common among the Surigao del Sur inhabitants. Using convenience sampling, this qualitative study interviewed ten participants and recorded children’s songs common for both languages. It found out that Surigaonon and Kamayo have to compete for forms and phonological differences. Both languages’ morphological constructions differ with the use of some inflectional affixes and grammatical markers. The morphophonemic alterations between the different versions of the songs reflect the same kind of changes unique to the Cebuano Visayan language. As a result, Surigaonon and Bisliganon Kamayo are in themselves variants of the Cebuano Visayan since speakers from the languages can understand each other without really having to speak the kind of language each speaker is acquainted with: Kamayo language is intelligible with that of Surigaonon; while the latter is intelligible to the Cebuano language.

On the morphophonology of domains in Somali verbs and nouns

Morphemes involved in the formation of Somali verbs and nouns are, in most instances, clearly individuated into categories corresponding to their role in word formation. Verbs contain a base, derivational extensions, inflectional affixes, and clitics that attach in a fixed order. Nouns also contain a base and derivational affixes, but little inflectional morphology. Indeed, both parts of speech have similar morphological templates in Somali, but the relationship between the language’s morphological domains and prosodic domains has only recently become a subject of detailed inquiry. We add to this ongoing trend by illustrating in this paper that there are close correlations between these domains in the language’s verbal and nominal systems that can be elucidated by morphophonological processes; certain processes occur only in a particular prosodic domain, and these process/domain combinations are similar in both the nominal and verbal systems. By establishing diagnostic phenomena attributable to phrase-level domains, this paper fills a gap between recent works focused only on defining prosodic characteristics of Somali words (Downing & Nilsson 2017; Green & Morrison 2016) and the accentual behavior of Somali clauses (Le Gac 2002, 2003a, b).

Postfixation or inflection inside derivation

The paper discusses the widely accepted assumption concerning the postulated universal ordering of derivational and inflectional affixes, first proposed by Greenberg as Universal #28. Various theoretical and empirical predictions underlying this assumption are briefly outlined. A sample of 73 European languages and a sample of 58 ‘world’ languages are used to show the range of violations of Greenberg’s universal in order to propose a tentative typology of these violations, and to examine the relatedness of postfixation to the genetic type of a language and its areal characteristics.