Suffixation and sequentiality

This paper offers some reflections on the study of morphology – broadly speaking, ‘word formation’ – as a participants’ resource in social interaction. I begin by calling attention to morphology as a comparatively underexamined component of linguistic structure by conversation analysts and interactional linguists, in that it has yet to receive the same dedicated consideration as have, e.g., phonetics and syntax. I then present an ongoing study of suffixes/suffixation in Spanish – focusing on diminutives (e.g., –ito), augmentatives (e.g., –ote), and superlatives (i.e., –ísimo) – and describe how the sequentiality of interaction can offer analysts profound insight into participants’ orientations to morphological resources. With what I refer to as ‘morphological transformations’ – exemplified here in both same-turn and next-turn positions – interactants sequentially construct and expose morphological complexity as such, locally instantiating its relevance in the service of action. It is argued that a focus on transformations therefore provides analysts with a means to ‘break into’ morphology-based collections. A range of cases are presented to illustrate this methodological approach, before a concluding discussion in which I describe how morphology-focused investigations may intersect with explorations of other interactional phenomena.

Phylogenetic Reassessment, Taxonomy, and Biogeography of Codinaea and Similar Fungi

The genus Codinaea is a phialidic, dematiaceous hyphomycete known for its intriguing morphology and turbulent taxonomic history. This polyphasic study represents a new, comprehensive view on the taxonomy, systematics, and biogeography of Codinaea and its relatives. Phylogenetic analyses of three nuclear loci confirmed that Codinaea is polyphyletic. The generic concept was emended; it includes four morphotypes that contribute to its morphological complexity. Ancestral inference showed that the evolution of some traits is correlated and that these traits previously used to delimit taxa at the generic level occur in species that were shown to be congeneric. Five lineages of Codinaea-like fungi were recognized and introduced as new genera: Codinaeella, Nimesporella, Stilbochaeta, Tainosphaeriella, and Xyladelphia. Dual DNA barcoding facilitated identification at the species level. Codinaea and its segregates thrive on decaying plants, rarely occurring as endophytes or plant pathogens. Environmental ITS sequences indicate that they are common in bulk soil. The geographic distribution found using GlobalFungi database was consistent with known data. Most species are distributed in either the Holarctic realm or tropical geographic regions. The ancestral climatic zone was temperate, followed by transitions to the tropics; these fungi evolved primarily in Eurasia and Americas, with subsequent transitions to Africa and Australasia.

Frequency, informativity and word length: Insights from typologically diverse corpora

Zipf’s law of abbreviation, which posits a negative correlation between word frequency and length, is one of the most famous and robust cross-linguistic generalizations. At the same time, it has been shown that contextual informativity (average surprisal given previous context) can be more strongly correlated with word length, although this tendency is not observed consistently, depending on several methodological choices. The present study, which examines a more diverse sample of languages than in the previous studies (Arabic, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish), reveals intriguing cross-linguistic differences, which can be explained by typological properties of the languages. I use large web-based corpora from the Leipzig Corpora Collection to estimate word lengths in UTF-8 characters, as well as word frequency, informativity given previous word and informativity given next word, applying different methods of bigrams processing. The results show consistent cross-linguistic differences in the size of correlations between word length and the corpus-based measures. I argue that these differences can be explained by the properties of noun phrases in a language, most importantly, the order of heads and modifiers and their relative morphological complexity, as well as by orthographic conventions.

Does morphological complexity affect word segmentation? Evidence from computational modeling

How can infants detect where words or morphemes start and end in the continuous stream of speech? Previous computational studies have investigated this question mainly for English, where morpheme and word boundaries are often isomorphic. Yet in many languages, words are often multimorphemic, such that word and morpheme boundaries do not align. Our study employed corpora of two languages that differ in the complexity of inflectional morphology, Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) and Japanese (in Experiment 1), as well as corpora of artificial languages ranging in morphological complexity, as measured by the ratio and distribution of morphemes per word (in Experiments 2 and 3). We used two baselines and three conceptually diverse word segmentation algorithms, two of which rely purely on sublexical information using distributional cues, and one that builds a lexicon. The algorithms’ performance was evaluated on both word- and morpheme-level representations of the corpora.Segmentation results were better for the morphologically simpler languages than for the morphologically more complex languages, in line with the hypothesis that languages with greater inflectional complexity could be more difficult to segment into words. We further show that the effect of morphological complexity is relatively small, compared to that of algorithm and evaluation level. We therefore recommend that infant researchers look for signatures of the different segmentation algorithms and strategies, before looking for differences in infant segmentation landmarks across languages varying in complexity.

On the von Neumann entropy of language networks: Applications to cross-linguistic comparisons

Words are not isolated entities within a language. In this paper, we measure the number of choices transmitted in natural language by means of the von Neumann entropy of language networks. This quantity, introduced in Quantum Information accounts, provides a detailed characterization of network complexities. The simulations are based on a large parallel corpus of 362 languages across 55 linguistic families (focusing on the sub-sample of 85 languages from the Americas). With this, we constructed language networks as a simple way to describe word connectivity patterns for each language. We studied several aspects of the von Neumann entropy of language networks. First, we discovered large groups of languages with low average degree and high von Neumann entropy. The results suggested also that large von Neumann entropy is associated with word entropy (as a proxy for morphological complexity), and is inversely related to degree regularity. This means that there are pressures at play that keep a balance between word morphological complexity and patterns of connections between words. We suggested also a strong influence of functional words on low von Neumann entropy languages. Our approach is thus a simple network-based contribution to establish cross-linguistic language comparisons from textual data.

Precursor types predict the stability of neuronal branches

Branches are critical for neuron function, generating the morphological complexity required for functional networks. They emerge from different, well-described, cytoskeletal precursor structures that elongate to branches. While branches are thought to be maintained by shared cytoskeletal regulators, our data from mouse hippocampal neurons indicate that the precursor structures trigger alternative branch maintenance mechanisms with differing stabilities. While branches originating from lamellipodia or growth cone splitting events collapse soon after formation, branches emerging from filopodia persist. Furthermore, compared to other developing neurites, axons stabilise all branches and preferentially initiate branches from filopodia. These differences explain the altered stability of branches we observe in neurons lacking the plasma membrane protein phospholipid phosphatase related protein 3 (PLPPR3/PRG2) or neurons treated with Netrin-1. Rather than altering branch stability directly, PLPPR3 and Netrin-1 boost a ‘filopodia branch program’ on axons, thereby indirectly initiating more long-lived branches. In summary, we propose that studies on branching should distinguish overall stabilising effects from effects on precursor types, ideally using multifactorial statistical models as exemplified in this study.