A debate on a Universal Morphology

This debate stems from Michal Starke’s keynote lecture at NELS 51, entitled “UM. Universal Morphology”. The video can be found at this link: https://michal.starke.ch/talks/2020-11_nels/nels_starke.mp4. In his talk, Starke sketches a nanosyntactic analysis of French irregular verbs, with the aim of showing that irregularities in French verbal paradigms (and in general) are only apparent. We asked some prominent morphologists and morpho-syntacticians to comment on and provide replies to Starke’s proposal and arguments. Subsequently, the author wrote a reply to these comments. You can find them all here. We wish to thank the NELS 51 organizing committee for allowing us to use the talk as a starting point for the debate, Michal Starke for his availability, and the linguists who agreed to engage in this interesting and fruitful exchange. This keynote debate celebrates the first year of the new Isogloss, in the hope of having more occasions to host discussions like this one.

Towards a New Mobile Educational Model

The development of mobile technologies and wireless networks encourages more research on Mobile Learning. Reviewing irregular verbs on a bus or organizing a training schedule on a Smartphone is becoming more common today. Mobile learning complements and enhances existing learning systems. Its development has been slowed in the early 2000s by both technical limitations and lack of dedicated teaching models. This article focuses on educational issues and proposes a solution by adopting the Method for Engineering Learning Systems MISA. Our work aims to identify basic elements, key characteristics and dimensions for developing the appropriate content for mobility. These elements are the basis for customization of the MISA method. Indeed, the different steps of MISA are governed by operating principles which ensure greater consistency and flexibility. Taking into account the specifications of Mobile learning in the development of these principles, we can adapt MISA to design a mobile learning system.

Grade 10 English First Additional Language Learners’ Strategies For Past Tense Irregular Verb Inflection Mastery

<p class="Default"><strong>Abstract.</strong><strong> </strong>The mastery of the irregular form of verbs in the past simple tense poses challenges to non-native learners of English all over the world. The objectives of this study were to identify the types of learners’ strategies useful for mastering the irregular verb inflection, to describe and evaluate them, and to establish why the English First Additional Language learners face difficulties in mastering those strategies. The study followed a quantitative research design. A questionnaire was used as an instrument for data collection from the respondents. Data were analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 22 to ensure valid interpretations. Subsequent themes were placed in a table and a graph dealing with the inflection of irregular verbs. The target group of this study comprised 21 Grade 10 learners who were attending Dimani Secondary School in Limpopo Province, South Africa during the academic year 2021. From the data analysis, the initial study findings established that the respondents were incompetent in mastering the inflection of irregular verbs in the past simple tense when using the suppletion principle and the terminal consonants phoneme changes. The researchers used the grouping of common irregular verbs and the learning of irregular verbs in sentences strategies because learners were different and learned irregular verb inflection differently. Although it was previously found that learners could not understand the inflection of irregular verbs in the past simple tense, after having utilised these two strategies, the inflection of irregular verbs in the past simple tense improved with tremendous results.</p><p class="Default"> </p><p>Keywords: Inflection; irregular verbs; past simple tense; strategies<em></em></p>

Examining the roles of regularity and lexical class in 18--26-month-olds' representations of how words sound

By around 12 months, infants have well-specified phonetic representations for the nouns they understand, for instance looking less at a car upon hearing ‘cur’ than ‘car’ (Swingley &amp; Aslin, 2002). Here we test whether such high-fidelity representations extend to irregular nouns, and regular and irregular verbs. A corpus analysis confirms the intuition that irregular verbs are far more common than irregular nouns in speech to young children. Two eyetracking experiments then test whether toddlers are sensitive to mispronunciation inregular and irregular nouns (Experiment 1) and verbs (Experiment 2). For nouns, we find both a mispronunciation and regularity effect in 18-month-olds. For verbs, in Experiment 2a, we find only a regularity effect and no mispronunciation effect in 18-month-olds, though toddlers’ poor comprehension overall limits interpretation. Finally, in Experiment 2b we find a mispronunciation effect and no regularity effect in 26-month-olds. Implications for wordform representations, lexical class, and learning are discussed.

Highly Irregular

This book presents an illustrated history of English as told through all the things that are weird about it. Maybe you have been speaking English all your life, or maybe you learned it later on. But whether you use it just well enough to get your daily business done, or you are an expert who never omits a comma or misplaces a modifier, you must have noticed that there are some things about this language that are just weird. Why are there so many silent letters? Why do we have irregular verbs? The book answers these questions and many more. Along the way, it tells the story of the many influences—from invading French armies to stubborn Flemish printers—that made the English language the way it is today. Both an entertaining send-up of linguistic oddities and a deeply researched history of English, the book is essential reading for anyone who has paused to wonder about this marvelous mess of a language.

Origins of Dissociations in the English Past Tense: A Synthetic Brain Imaging Model

Brain imaging studies of English past tense inflection have found dissociations between regular and irregular verbs, but no coherent picture has emerged to explain how these dissociations arise. Here we use synthetic brain imaging on a neural network model to provide a mechanistic account of the origins of such dissociations. The model suggests that dissociations between regional activation patterns in verb inflection emerge in an adult processing system that has been shaped through experience-dependent structural brain development. Although these dissociations appear to be between regular and irregular verbs, they arise in the model from a combination of statistical properties including frequency, relationships to other verbs, and phonological complexity, without a causal role for regularity or semantics. These results are consistent with the notion that all inflections are produced in a single associative mechanism. The model generates predictions about the patterning of active brain regions for different verbs that can be tested in future imaging studies.

Input Issues in the Development of L2 French Morphosyntax

The aim of this article is to discuss the role of input characteristics in the development of French verb morphology. From a usage-based perspective, several cognitive and linguistic factors contribute to the ease or difficulty of processing input in L2 acquisition. This article concentrates on frequency, salience, and form–function association, factors that might influence what aspects of input are available to the learners’ attention. A presentation of French verb morphology from this perspective shows how these factors can contribute to the use of the regular -er verb paradigm as a default. A review of empirical studies confirms the influence of input characteristics. The results suggest that the dominant pattern of regular verbs and the scarcity of salient clues from irregular verbs contribute to the specificity of L2 French development. The conclusion addresses the question of enriching L2 classroom input with irregular verbs. Such an input could facilitate the perception of form–function association, and thus, contribute to a more efficient development of French verb morphology. The article concludes by suggesting other ways of studying the influence of input as well as avenues for future research.

Die Modalverben im Deutschen und Arabischen

ان مقارنة قواعد اللغة الألمانية مع لغة سامية كاللغة العربية تفضي الى حجم الهوة والاختلافات الكبيرة بين قواعد وأنظمة اللغة العربية مقارنة باللغة الألمانية. فموضوع البحث يتناول مقارنة افعال الكيفية في اللغة الألمانية وما يقابها باللغة العربية. أفعال الكيفية هي عبارة عن ستة الفعال لها قواعد تركيبية خاصة تختلف عن الأفعال الأخرى من حيث البناء والتركيب، وهي أفعال شاذة ولها تصاريف معينة مع الضمائر الشخصية سواء في الزمن الماضي او المضارع، فهي تستلزم غالبا ما فعل مصدري يكتب في نهاية الجملة لاتمام المعنى، ويعد هذا الفعل فعلا رئيسيا، وتأخذ هذه الأفعال الموضع الثاني في الجملة وتكون مصرفة حسب الفاعل بينما يأتي الفعل الرئيسي في نهاية الجملة دون أي تصريف، وهذه الأفعال هي: يَسمَح، يَستطيع، يَوَد أو يَرغَب، يَجب، يَنبغي، يُريد. الفعل في قواعد اللغة العربية يدل على معنى في نفسه فمنه المعرب ومنه المبني وله اوزان محددة، والفعل الثلاثي الماضي على وزن فَعَلَ تعد أساسا للميزان الصرفي، فعند ترجمة أفعال الكيفية حسب الميزان الصرفي تكون أرادَ وانبغى واستطاع .. الخ. أفعال الكيفية في اللغة الألمانية تقابلها في اللغة العربية أنْ المصدرية الناصبة والتي تدخل على الجمل الفعلية وتفيد الحال والاستقبال اذا دخلت على الفعل المضارع. وقد تترجم الجمل والنصوص الى اللغة العربية بالصدر المؤول من (أنْ والفعل) او بالمصدر الصريح، وبعضها يرتبط بحرف جر مثل سُمِحَ( لَه)ُ و وَجَبَ (على)، وهناك الكثير من المفردات والاستخدامات اللغوية تم ذكرها بالبحث. Comparing the grammar of the German language with a Semitic language such as the Arabic language leads to the size of the gap and the big differences between the rules and systems of the Arabic language compared to the German language. The topic of this research deals with comparing the qualitative verbs in the German language and the equivalent in the Arabic language. Modal verbs are six active verbs that have special syntactic rules that differ from other verbs in terms of construction and composition. They are irregular verbs and have specific conjugations with personal pronouns, whether in the past or present tense, they often require an infinitive verb written at the end of the sentence to complete the meaning. This verb is a main verb, and these verbs take the second position in the sentence and are inflected according to the subject, while the main verb comes at the end of the sentence without any conjugation, and these verbs are: allow, can, wish or desire, should, should, want. The verb in the grammar of the Arabic language denotes a meaning in itself, from which it is expressed, and from it that is based and has specific weights, and the past triple verb on the weight of فَعَلَ is the basis for the morphological balance, so when translating modal verbs according to the morphological scale, they are أراد ، انبغى and أستطاعَ ... etc. Verbs of modal in the German language correspond to it in the Arabic language that the أنْ accusative infinitive, which is entered into the verbal sentences, and benefits the adverb and the reception if entered into the present tense. Sentences and texts may be translated into Arabic with the source of (أنْ and verb) or with the explicit source, and some of them are related to a preposition such as allowed (for him) and obligatory (on), and there are many vocabulary and linguistic uses mentioned in the research.

Simulating phonological and semantic impairment of English tense inflection with linear discriminative learning

This study applies the computational theory of the ‘discriminative lexicon’ (Baayen, Chuang, Blevins, 2019) to the modeling of the production of English verbs in aphasic speech. Under semantic impairment, speakers have been reported to have greater difficulties with irregular verbs, whereas speakers with phonological impairment are described as having greater problems with regulars. Joanisse and Seidenberg (1999) were able to model this dissociation, but only by adding noise to the semantic units of their model. We report two simulation studies in which topographically coherent regions of phonological and semantic networks were selectively damaged. Our model replicated the main findings, including the high variability in the consequences of brain lesions for speech production. Importantly, our model generated these results without having to lesion the semantic system more than the phonological system. The model’s success hinges on the use of a corpus-based distributional vector space for representing verbs’ meanings. Irregular verbs have denser semantic neighborhoods than do regular verbs (Baayen and Moscoso del Prado Martín, 2005). In our model this renders irregular verbs more fragile under semantic impairment. These results provide further support for the central idea underlying the discriminative lexicon: that behavioral patterns can, to a considerable extent, be understood as emerging from the distributional properties of a language and basic principles of human learning.