The Morphology of Adjectives in the Neo-Aramaic Dialects of ʿAqra

The present article presents a synchronic description of the morphology of adjectives in the highly endangered Neo-Aramaic dialects of ʿAqra in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. It discusses the morphology of adjectives in these dialects as used in the sixties of the last century. In particular, the article highlights adjectival patterns, inflectional features, and the adaptation of loanwords from Kurdish, Arabic, and Turkish. The article contributes to the description of the grammar of some 150 North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) dialects in the Kurdistan region that are gradually falling into disuse, due to internal disputes, wars, economic crises, and globalisation.

Transpositional features of the word ala «potty, spotted, piebald» (about the color of animals); «motley, multi-colored; spotted»; «light» in the Turkic languages (based on Bashkir and Karachay-Balkarian languages)

The article is devoted to a comprehensive study of the lexico-semantic, derivational, word-composition, inflectional features of the attributive component of descriptive phrases, the indicator of variegated color designation, the term-forming unit of the word ala «potty, spotted, piebald» (about the color of animals) (Bashkir); «motley, multicolored, spotted; light» (Karachay-Balkarian) in Bashkir and Karachay-Balkarian languages, participating in the categorization of mixed segments of the lingua-color space. It examines the features of free and lexicalized phrases, idioms of a phraseological type, paired-repeated constructions formed as a result of combining the word «ala» with denotative and abstract nouns, with asemantic analogues that repeat the second syllable of the reference word and are its phonetically modified version without lexical meaning. It examines the distinctive and integrating features of the noted syntactic structures from the point of view of functioning in various language levels and lexicographic interpretation. The article analyzes the features of a selective combination of «double names» with inventory units of morphology in the process of further morphologization of two-syllable attributive-nominal bases, which, depending on the contextual environment, express an adverbial feature and belong to the category of «rolling» words.

Formalizing inflection

This chapter addresses the differences between derivational and inflectional morphology and how they are to be reflected in the Relational Morphology formalism. The formalization of inflectional features is illustrated in turn by English regular verbs, English irregular verbs, German weak verbs, and German strong verbs and past participles. Each case makes essential use of relational links among sister (or second-order) schemas. The analysis also offers a flexible description of inflectional classes. The chapter then discusses what verbal forms in a paradigm have to be stored in memory and how these are used to construct non-stored forms. The formalism for inflectional classes is applied to the “Same Verb Problem”: homophones with the same inflectional paradigm, for instance go/went away, go/went crazy, go/went for broke. This treatment is then extended to the polysemy of morphosyntactic tense.

The support copula in the left periphery

This chapter presents novel evidence for the morphological support approach to the copula, based on data from non-standard amalgam specificational copular constructions in English, like We need coffee is what we need. In these constructions, the copula linking the two clauses shows unusual syntactic and semantic properties. Evidence from an interpretation experiment shows that, although it is inflected for tense, the copula of an amalgam construction fails to associate with semantic tense. Furthermore, the amalgam copula cannot associate with the syntactic hallmarks of the T-domain or the V-domain; however, it can combine with material from the C-domain, suggesting that in these constructions, only the C-domain is present. To account for the amalgam specificational copular construction, a late-insertion analysis of the copula is adopted, under which the inflected forms of the copula are inserted as morphological support wherever inflectional features, combinations of [fin], [tense], and [φ‎], are stranded on a functional head. Since these features can be spelled out on a copula in C in the absence of T and V, it must be the case that higher functional projections can be independent from lower ones.

Features of noun quantifiers in old Romanian

This study is part of a collective research on the historical morphology of Romanian, conducted at the Institute of Linguistics of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. This analysis approaches in detail a specific issue in the diachrony of noun quantifiers, more precisely, the tendency towards internal fusion which compound ordinal numerals showed in old Romanian (the 16th to 18th centuries). The tendency towards formal unity determined certain changes in the morphology and syntax of numerals. Thus, the aim of this analysis is to highlight and explain the morphosyntactic manifestations of this process. Therefore, the forms of the numeral are discussed in relation to the syntactic structure of the quantified nominal phrase. The framework adopted here is the theory of grammaticalization, and contemporary diachronic syntax. The analysis of the old structures containing ordinal numerals allows us to formulate observations related to: the inflectional features of the ordinal numerals and their combination with articles, the grammaticalization degree of the formative al, the origin of the enclitic formatives –l(u)/–le/–lea, –a, and the ordering of these formatives.

Północnokresowe cechy fleksyjne w polszczyźnie „Kuriera Wileńskiego” w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym

Northern borderland inflectional features in the Polish language of Kurier Wileński in the interwar period This article presents Northern Borderland inflectional features functioning in the Polish language of a daily newspaper released in Vilnius county in the period of Interwar.Specific language facts concerning the scope of inflection, not corresponding with common Polish standards, in the Interwar period were excerpted from Kurier Wileński between 1924 and 1939.In this newspaper, 21 peculiar phenomena occurred which are classified by linguists examining earlier periods as characteristic features of the Northern Borderland inflection.The textual frequency of distinctive forms varied. Only six phenomena were signifi­cantly outstanding with their high frequency of occurrence: change of number (oklask), special inflectional endings of genitive case in nominal form (krzaku, gabineta), ending -a in nominative case of plural form (fakta), enclitic form mię, omission of the reflexive pronoun się in reflexive verbs (wymknąć), reflexive verbs functioning as passive verbs (wydają się obiady). These innovative changes are only changes of number and verbs without common się. The rest of features in the researched period were recessive in the general Polish language. All phenomena mentioned here occurred often (usually more often than in the analysed newspaper) in post-war Vilnius press.The analysis proved that inflection reflected in Kurier Wileński bears traits of regional variety of language. The situation observed in the examined newspaper is similar to the situation appearing in almost all post-war Vilnius press, however there are a few significant differences. Later Vilnius press was more saturated with inflectional originalities than the post-war Kurier Wileński and contained more variety of peculiar forms. Północnokresowe cechy fleksyjne w polszczyźnie „Kuriera Wileńskiego” w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym Artykuł przedstawia północnokresowe cechy fleksyjne, funkcjonujące w języku polskim gazety codziennej wydawanej na Wileńszczyźnie w okresie międzywojennym. Specyficzne fakty językowe z zakresu fleksji, niezgodne z normą ogólnopolską, obowiązującą w dwudziestoleciu międzywojennym, wyekscerpowano z „Kuriera Wileńskiego” (dalej KW) z lat 1924–1939.W analizowanym czasopiśmie wystąpiło 21 swoistych zjawisk, zaliczanych przez badaczy wcześniejszych okresów do charakterystycznych właściwości fleksji kresowej.Frekwencja tekstowa form osobliwych była zróżnicowana. Dużą częstością wystąpień odznaczało się zaledwie 6 zjawisk: zmiany liczby (np. oklask), osobliwe końcówki dopełniacza lp. (np. krzaku, gabineta), końcówka -a w mianowniku lm. (np. fakta), postać enklityczna mię, pomijanie zwrotnego się (np. wymknąć), formy czasowników z zaimkiem zwrotnym „się” w funkcji strony biernej (np. Wydają się obiady). Innowacyjne są tu tylko zmiany liczby oraz czasowniki bez ogólnopolskiego się. Pozostałe cechy w badanym okresie były w ogólnej polszczyźnie recesywne. Wszystkie wymienione tu zjawiska występowały często (zazwyczaj częściej niż w analizowanym czasopiśmie) w powojennej prasie wileńskiej.Analiza wykazała, że fleksja odzwierciedlona w KW nosi pewne piętno regionalności. Stan zaobserwowany w badanej gazecie jest zbliżony do sytuacji stwierdzonej w wydawanej tuż po II wojnie światowej „Prawdzie Wileńskiej”, zarysowują się jednak znamienne różnice. Późniejsza prasa wileńska była znacznie bardziej nasycona osobliwościami fleksyjnymi niż międzywojenny KW. Odzwierciedliła się w niej znacznie większa rozmaitość form osobliwych.

Report and Taxis in Herodotus’s Histories A functional approach to the description of Ancient Ionic Greek

This article aims at describing how report and taxis were realised in Herodotus’ Histories. For this purpose, I have organised the most frequent grammatical features of clauses in a small corpus in contrastive sets (systems). With this procedure, I have gathered evidence that both temporal nexuses and report status were realised in Ionic Greek by grammatical features of the clause, which preselected inflectional features of the Finite word and grammatical features of the Subject constituent. These grammatical features could be organised in a systemic network that included systems for determining whether clauses initiate or continue temporal sequences; whether the actor of the initiating clause is the same as the one of the continuant; in case of distinct actors, whether the first is more or less topical than the second; and, finally, whether clauses represent reported locutions or not.

Inflectional Exponence

Inflectional exponence may be understood declaratively as a systematic phonological relation between inflected word forms sharing a set of inflectional features and their bases, or derivationally as operations on base forms exposing these features. In this chapter, we discuss the types of exponence and approaches to the phenomenon which have played a prominent role in linguistic literature of the last decades, giving an overview of the range of empirical phenomena involved, and its current theoretical understanding, with a focus on approaches to non-affixational morphology in theoretical phonology. Crucially we show that there is no significant categorial difference between inflectional exponence and other types of exponence, and develop a taxonomy of exponence types that departs from the traditional dichotomy between concatenative and non-concatenative morphology by applying finer-grained classification criteria and by fully integrating templatic exponence.

Inflection in Pulaar

This chapter provides an overview of the inflectional morphology of Pulaar, a western dialect of Fula (Atlantic, Niger-Congo) spoken in Senegal. The language is characterized by one of the largest gender or noun class systems found in natural language and is distinctive for the way in which it expresses much of its inflectional morphology through consonant mutation. The chapter assumes an autosegmental approach in presenting the morphophonology of consonant mutation, and covers the main inflectional features of Pulaar, including noun class and noun class resolution, pronominal case, number, voice, aspect, polarity, and salience insofar as it relates to information structure. A number of representative paradigms are provided, as well as a brief comparison with inflection in Seereer-Siin and Wolof.