The lexico-grammatical status of the dialectal word câta ‘a little’ in banat type idioms

Freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation received direct instruction in plural formation. Instruction covered regular plural nouns, irregular plural nouns, plural formation of words ending in –f, and –o, nouns that have the same plural and singular form, and words with Latin and foreign plurals. The students did all the exercises in the textbook, then took an immediate test a week after instruction and a delayed test at the end of the semester (3 months later). Responses were scored and a corpus of 3099 errors was collected from both tests. No significant differences were found in the amount and types of errors made by the students in the immediate and delayed tests. Results revealed that freshman students tended to regularize English plural formation and overgeneralize regular English plural morphemes (63.28%), i.e., they deleted the regular plural suffix from nouns ending in an –s or –es (35.37%) or tended to add the regular plural suffix to words that do not have it (27.91%). They also confused singular and plural endings of Latin words (15.07%). They either confused the singular and plural forms of the same Latin word or added a faulty Latin suffix to a Latin word or even a non-Latin word such as criterium, *curriculon, *natia, *salma, *petrolea. In other cases, they thought the singular and plural forms of a word were the same (7%). In addition, findings showed that the most difficult plurals to master were those of words that end with an –s or –es but have no singular form such as measles, news, pajamas, means, linguistics (28.85%); words with Latin plurals (21.85%); non-count nouns such as information, electricity, petroleum, salmon with no plural form (21.4%), and words that have a plural, but they thought they have no plural form such as nation, illness, infection, African (8.55%). Interference among the English plural morphemes themselves and confusing plural formation rules caused most errors. No interference from Arabic pluralization was found. Recommendations for improving students’ English plural formation competence are given.

The aim of the present study is to explore the representation and processing of inflectional morphology in Spanish. Experiment 1 compared the access time for words from the same base morpheme contrasted by the surface frequency of the masculine and feminine form, i.e., masculine-dominant items and feminine-dominant items. The results showed a surface frequency effect in both types of items. Experiment 2 compared the access time for masculine words having the same surface frequency but differing in their summed frequency (masculine plus feminine forms), the results showing no significant effect of this parameter. Finally, experiment 3 compared the access time for words from the same stem and contrasting by the surface frequencies for the singular and plural forms, i.e., singular-dominant and plural-dominant words. A clear frequency effect was observed for the singular-dominant words but not for plural-dominant ones. These results suggest that gender information is stored in the corresponding lexical entry and accessed from the full word form whereas the information about number is accessed from the stem corresponding to the singular form.

In this chapter, I examine the defining characteristics of inflectional paradigms (Section 1.1). A central issue in morphological theory is whether inflectional paradigms have theoretical significance. According to paradigm-based theories of inflection (e.g. those of Stump 2001, Blevins 2006, Ackerman, Blevins and Malouf 2009, Brown and Hippisley 2012), the definition of a language's inflectional morphology makes essential reference to the structure of paradigms; but according to morpheme-based theories (e.g. those of Halle and Marantz 1993, Bobaljik 2002, Muller 2002), paradigms are instead merely an epiphenomenal effect of principles of morpheme combination, having no essential role in the definition of a language's inflectional morphology. I compare the morpheme-based perspective (Section 1.2) with the paradigm-based approach (Section 1.3); of these, only the latter is compatible with two central hypotheses for which I argue in this book: the irreducibility hypothesis and the interface hypothesis. What is an inflectional paradigm? In a language with inflectional morphology, morphosyntactic properties are grammatical properties to which the language's syntax and morphology are both sensitive. In French, for example, the gender properties “feminine” and “masculine” and the number properties “singular” and “plural” are morphosyntactic properties. On one hand, syntactic agreement relations are sensitive to contrasts in gender and number; thus, the noun phrase in (1) is grammatical because its constituents agree in gender and number, and the noun phrase in (2) is ungrammatical because its constituents fail to agree in this way. At the same time, rules of inflectional morphology are likewise sensitive to contrasts in gender and number; thus, the French adjective national has distinct feminine and masculine forms in the plural (feminine plural nationales /nasjɔnal/, masculine plural nationaux /nasjɔno/), while in the singular, the feminine and masculine forms of national are distinguished orthographically though not phonologically (feminine singular nationale , masculine singular national , both /nasjɔnal/). (1) les musees nationaux the. pl museum. masc.pl national. masc.pl ‘the national museums’ (2) *le musees nationales the. masc.sg museum. masc.pl national. fem.pl Some morphosyntactic properties have specific semantic correlates; thus, noun phrases with singular reference tend to be headed by nouns in their singular form. But morphosyntactic properties may also lack any obvious semantic correlate; thus, while noun phrases with female reference may tend to be headed by feminine nouns, some feminine nouns (e.g. recrue ‘recruit,’ sentinelle ‘sentinel’) ordinarily have male reference and others – in fact, the large majority – fail to refer specifically to either sex ( souris ‘mouse,’ table ‘table,’ invention ‘invention,’ and so on).

In Spanish, the plural form in plural dominant frequency pairs, like “diente/dientes” [tooth/teeth], occurs more frequently than the corresponding singular form. On the other hand, for the singular dominant frequency pairs such as “cometa/cometas” [kite/kites], the singular form is more common than the plural. The recognition of singular forms by adult readers is dependent on the dominance factor, while the identification of plural forms relies on the frequency of the stem. Given that age and reading experience may influence morphological processing of words, we investigate the representation of singulars and plurals in Spanish primary school children in Third Grade (8/9) and Sixth Grade (11/12) and adults through a lexical decision task. Though children’s lexical decisions were twice as slow as adults, the pattern of morphological processing was consistent across ages: dominant plural forms resulted in decision times that were comparable to those of non-dominant singular forms, while recognition of singular-dominant forms was quicker than recognition of plural non-dominant forms. It appears that singulars are accessed and stored in the lexical memory as separate entities, while plurals depend on their morphological closer relatives, in this case, the singular forms.

Gardikiotis, Martin and Hewstone (2004) investigated the representation of majority versus minority headlines in five British newspapers over a period of five years. They found majority headlines to be twice as frequent as minority headlines. However, they identified headlines with the search words ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ only in the singular form. We argue that in the public discourse the minority, but not the majority is likely to be represented in the plural. Replicating their study with the search words in both singular and plural forms, the strong difference they reported disappeared and minority headlines proved to be just as frequent as majority headlines. However, whereas majority is used almost exclusively in the singular, minority is used almost as frequently in both the singular and plural forms. These findings suggest a more complex social representation in real-life contexts on the minority pole of the minority-majority dimension compared to the majority pole. Implications of this asymmetric relationship are discussed in terms of communication theory, social representations theory, and experimental research on minority-majority groups (in particular in-group homogeneity). Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

ABSTRACTThis study examined to what extent advanced and beginning readers, including dyslexic readers of Dutch, make use of morphological access units in the reading of polymorphemic words. Therefore, experiments were carried out in which the role of singular root form frequency in reading plural word forms was investigated in a lexical decision task with both adults and children. Twenty-three adult readers, 37 8-year-old children from Grade 3, 43 11-year-old children from Grade 6, and 33 11-year-old dyslexic readers were presented with a lexical decision task in which we contrasted plural word forms with a high versus low frequency of the singular root form. For the adults, it was found that the accuracy and speed of lexical decision is determined by the surface frequency of the plural word form. The frequency of the constituent root form played a role as well, but in the low-frequency plural words only. Furthermore, a strong developmental effect regarding the accuracy and speed of reading plural word forms was found. An effect of plural word form frequency on word identification was evidenced in all groups. The singular root form frequency also had an impact of the reading of the plural word forms. In the normal reading and dyslexic children, plurals with a high-frequency singular root form were read more accurately and faster than plurals with a low singular root frequency. It can be concluded that constituent morphemes have an impact on the reading of polymorphemic words. The results can be explained in the light of a word experience model leaving room for morphological constituency to play a role in the lexical access of complex words as a function of reading skill and experience and word and morpheme frequency.

THE ROLE OF CASE SYNCRETISM AND ANALOGY IN THE EVOLUTION OF SOME CASE FORMSSummaryThe article presents an analysis of the role of case syncretism and analogy in the evolution of some case forms. The data drawn from the old manuscripts and dialects attest to the following: 1. In Žemaitian subdialects, the oxytonic i-stem nominal nominative singular form (aus)-iẽ evolved under the influ¬ence of oxytonic ē-stem nominal nominative and inessive singular syncretic forms according to the pro¬portional analogy formula: ines. sing. (žuol)-iẽ : nom. sing. (žuol)-iẽ = ines. sing, (aus)-iẽ : nom. sing, x, where x = (aus)-iẽ. 2. Both the Žemaitian i-stem resp. (i)io-stem and C-stem inessive singular ending -ie and the Aukštaitian ending –ėj(e) as well as the Latvian -ē, (-e) were introduced from the ē-stem inessive singular as a result of the merger of ē-stem and i-stem nouns brought about by word-final phonological changes. 3. The said ending first occurred in the barytonic i-stem nominal paradigm, and later it was introduced into both the masculine and the feminine oxytonic nominal paradigm. 4. As the old (i)io-stem accusative singular form was replaced by the i-stem form in the whole Baltic area, in Žemaitian (and their nearer neighbours’) subdialects, the inessive ending, as a superstable and maximally iconic inflection, was introduced into the (i)io-stem paradigm, too, on the model of the i-stem (and C-stem) accusative and inessive singular. 5. In most Žemaitian subdialects, the old i-stem inessive plural form in -isu was modified to -ies(e) on the ē-stem model. 6. The o-stem inessive singular form (lauk)-é evolved from the syntactic construction *laukei + en -> *laukē + en -> *laukén by eliminating the first compo¬nent -ē under the regulating influence of the structural model of (i)o-stem adjectival and pronominal dative and inessive singular forms. 7. In the Latvian language, the (i)o-stem locative singular form ending -ā was introduced from the (i)ā-stem not because of the phonetically determined syncretism of the old ending of the locative *(darb)-i (<*-en) and the ending of the nominative singular, but because of the neutralization of (i)o-stem and (i)a-stem illative singular forms. After the development of *kalnanā and rankānā into kalnan and rokan according to the ratio (i)ā-stem ill. sing, rokan : ines. sing. rokā = (i)o-stem ill. sing, kalnan : x, there must have appeared a possibility to replace the old form *kalni by a newer form, kalnā, which was structurally more compatible with the accusative, instrumental and illative singular forms of both stems.

The present study investigated the role of overt phonological realisation of morphological marking on the implementation of subject–predicate agreement in language production. This study was conducted in Hebrew, and focused on subject–predicate gender agreement for inanimate nouns. In Hebrew, singular masculine forms are usually morphologically unmarked, whereas singular feminine forms are morphologically marked. Although the system is generally consistent, it includes examples of feminine forms which are not marked with feminine suffixes, i.e., unmarked feminine forms. Likewise, there are particular suffixes that usually denote masculine or feminine plurals. However, there are examples of masculine plurals which are inflected irregularly, with a feminine suffix. We took advantage of these characteristics of Hebrew to manipulate morphological factors in the process of agreement production. Using a sentence-completion task for complex noun phrases, we tested the effect of the absence of overt gender marking (Exp. 1) and misleading gender marking (Exp. 2) of the local noun on the frequency of agreement errors. The results revealed that whereas the absence of overt gender marking did not affect the frequency of agreement errors, overt misleading gender marking did affect it. The results are discussed in relation to the distinction between inflectional and derivational structures and their relevance to the process of computing agreement in the Marking and Morphing model (Eberhard, Cutting, & Bock, 2005).

This research aims to reveal the inconsistencies of machine translation from the perspective of students who use web-based Google Translate in their Arabic thesis. This research has an impact on translation machine users from Arabic teachers and researchers to be more careful in using Google Translate when translating from Bahasa to Arabic, especially in inconsistent aspects. The researcher used a mixed method with an Explanatory Sequential Design‎ because after distributing questionnaires in collecting quantitative data to collect patterns of inconsistencies that occurred, it was important to explain the initial findings from the quantitative data qualitatively through interviews. ‎Quantitative data is analyzed using simple percentage statistics, then qualitative data is analyzed through four steps, namely data collection, reduction, presentation, and conclusion. The results of this research found that inconsistencies in web-based Google Translate translation results were found in four patterns. First, Google Translate is very inconsistent in translating terms that have the same meaning (mutarodifat), but the terms that appear in the translation results are often different, even within the same paragraph. Second, inconsistencies very often also occur in the aspects of mufrad, mutsanna and jamak, the Google translation machine cannot differentiate between the singularity and plurality aspects of the object being translated, so translation errors often occur where a singular word that should be translated as mufrad will instead become plural or on the contrary. Third, the translation machine does not recognize the gender of the subject in the translated sentence, so translation inconsistencies in the mudzakkar and mu'annats aspects occur very often. Inconsistencies in the gender aspect, as well as the mufrad, mutsanna, and jamak aspects, have an impact on the fourth error pattern, namely grammatical inconsistencies, namely errors in using the verb (fi'il) in a sentence. Of the four patterns of inconsistency, the term inconsistency is a new thing that has not been revealed much. The grammatical aspect is closely related to aspects of the singular or plural form as well as the masculine or feminine form which is the subject of the translated sentence and needs to be discussed further by other researchers.

Despite the theoretical importance of the processes of generalization to the development of morphological rules, not much is known about the basic developmental trend or the relevant processes. The present study seeks to answer the question: at what age are children able to generalize the plural to new nouns. In a six-week longitudinal study, children aged 17.5 to 28 months participated in a spontaneous production task in which they were either provided with the singular form of common and novel nouns and asked to generate the plural form, or given the plural form of those nouns and asked to generate the singular form. The results suggest that very young children do generalize the plural to novel forms. The data also strongly suggest that, long before a truly productive regular plural is evident, very young learners of English know that there is a singular and plural form, and they know how they are related.

The first-person pronouns in Bahasa Indonesia have two forms: singular and plural. The singular pronoun forms are saya and aku for the singular pronoun forms, while the plural pronoun forms for the first-person are kita and kami. This paper aims to figure out the highest number of both singular and plural forms in Bahasa Indonesia, the number of the first-person singular pronouns form aku and saya, and the number of the plural pronouns for first-person forms kami and kita. The corpus linguistic method is applied in this research. Using corpus software, vis. AntConc 3.5.8 tool, the pronouns aku, saya, kita, and kami were identified. The 8,432,978 tokens were obtained from four different sources: newspapers, magazines, short stories, and novels. From the number of collected tokens, 224,796 corpora were classified as singular and plural pronouns. The result of the research shows that 1) the amount of the singular pronoun for the first-person is higher than the plural form; 2) the quantity of the singular pronoun form for the first-person aku is higher than saya; and 3) the usage of the plural pronoun of the first-person forms kami is higher than kita established in the four sources of the corpus. AbstrakPronomina orang pertama di dalam bahasa Indonesia memiliki dua bentuk: tunggal dan jamak. Bentuk pronomina tunggal adalah saya dan aku, sedangkan bentuk jamaknya adalah kita dan kami. Tujuan penelitian ini mendeskripsikan pronomina yang memiliki jumlah terbanyak yang berbentuk tunggal dan jamak dalam bahasa Indonesia, baik pronomina orang pertama berbentuk tunggal saya dan aku serta pronomina orang pertama yang berbentuk jamak kami dan kita. Penelitian ini menggunakan metode linguistik korpus. Dengan menggunakan perangkat lunak korpus, vis. aplikasi AntConc 3.5.8, kata ganti aku, saya, kita, dan kami diidentifikasi. Sebanyak 8.432.978 token yang berasal dari koran, majalah, cerita pendek, dan novel digunakan sebagai data penelitian ini. Dari sejumlah token tersebut, 224.796 korpus diklasifikasikan. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa 1) jumlah pronomina orang pertama tunggal lebih banyak dari pronomina orang pertama jamak; 2) penggunaan pronomina aku lebih banyak dari saya; dan 3) dari empat sumber korpus yang digunakan dilaporkan bahwa penggunaan pronomina orang pertama jamak kami lebih banyak dari kita.

This paper investigates the usage of singular and plural forms of address in contemporary Lithuanian. The object of the research is the pronouns tu and jūs, and second-person verbs. The aim of the present study is to analyze how and why singular and plural forms of address are used and which social and psychological factors determine this usage. The research data consists of 111 discourse completion tests filled by university students. For a deeper insight, 6 semi-structured in-depth interviews with students and young people who have just finished their studies were also conducted. Quantitative and qualitative research methods were combined for both data collection and analysis.Based on the results, it can be concluded that the distribution of forms of address in situations where the sociolinguistic and pragmatic choice was not obvious was approximately equal. Statistically significant variables were found to be sex and age. However, as the qualitative aspect of the study reveals, the usage of these forms depends on diverse and subtle variables, including social distance, relative power, and age, as well as their interaction within specific communicational situations. The study confirms that plural forms of address generally convey respect, formality, and polite distance, while singular forms indicate friendliness, intimacy, and familiarity. Nevertheless, both formal and informal forms of address can also be employed as impoliteness strategies. In some cases, the switch between the forms of address is caused by mutual agreement, while in others, it occurs on its own and indicates changes in social or psychological circumstances. The choice between singular and plural forms of address is often complex and not always fluent; therefore, interlocutors may seek to avoid them altogether and navigate a delicate balance between formal and informal ways of addressing people.

The morphological features of Old Lithuanian texts have been explored by numerous linguists, however, the archaic dative forms have received much less attention. The aim of this article is to discuss the ratio of the use of short and long forms of dative in the Catechism by Merkelis Petkevičiaus (PC) and the Jokūbas Morkūnas Postilla (MP). The data comes from the PC as well as from the first 100 pages of the MP's Part I and Part III. The paper uses descriptive and comparative methods. The results show that short dative singular and plural forms dominate in the PC. Most of the long (archaic) dative forms were found in the MP's Part III. The ratio of the use of the short and long forms of dative is similar in the MP's Part I. The plural form of long dative is mostly used in the PC and the MP's Part I. The ratio of the use of singular and plural dative forms is similar in the MP's Part III. Dative singular short forms were more frequent than the long ones in the PC and the MP's Part I. The latter long dative forms were similarly used in the MP's Part III. Dative singular short forms with the ending -u are much more frequently used in the MP's Part III than in the MP's Part I and the PC. The results of the study confirm that the PC, the MP's Part I and Part III were translated by different translators.

Teachers of Arabic as a foreign language (AFL) in Russia mainly focus on reading and grammar, not oral skills. Russian students learning AFL have limited opportunities to practice oral skills (listening &amp; speaking) outside the classroom, meet native speakers of Arabic and practice oral skills with them. This study aims to propose a model for online collaboration among Russian AFL teachers and students and Arabic-speaking teachers and students in African Arab countries through video-conferencing platforms to help Russian students practice oral skills. First, the host teacher contacts the collaborating teacher. The host and guest teachers select the platform, set the practice schedule together, prepare the material and online resources for oral practice. They try the platform and its different tools, how to share the screen, call on students, breakout rooms…etc, how to upload/share material. The practice material may consist of Arabic language functions, things around the students, daily activities, experiences and students’ environment, describing pictures, talking about cultural topics and so on. Only Standard Arabic should be used. No explanation in L1 (Russian), no translation, no explanation of grammatical rules, no use of Arabic grammatical terms, and no writing of the question and answer on the board. The students should depend on their ears. They use short sentences and concrete objects, nouns, verbs … etc. Vocabulary and sentence structure are taught together. Pictures, gestures, and short videos are used while the students are answering the questions. Some students ask questions, others answer. The same question pattern ما هذا؟ ماذا يفعل is used when the teacher asks about names of objects and actions (verbs). They ask questions to help students discriminate singular, dual, plural, masculine and feminine forms and verb conjugations. Mistakes are corrected instantly. The students repeat the correct form, new word or question several times. Correct answers are reinforced. Positive feedback is given for every answer. Benefits and shortcomings of online international collaboration between students and teachers from different countries are given.

The aim of this article is to analyze traditional approaches to the lemmatization of nouns on the macrostructural level in African languages against the background of the user- perspective, the physical limitations on volume, the consideration of currently available dictionaries and the utilization of a corpus. Five basic lemmatization strategies are given due attention, namely lemmatizing nouns under stems, according to morpho-lexical fields, under both singular and plural forms, solely under singular forms, or finally on first or third letters. It is shown that any modern strategy that aims at avoiding the shortcomings and pitfalls of these five basic types whilst at the same time exploiting their virtues, will have to give full weight to target users' desires. A means to incorporate those desires is illustrated through a small dictionary project to which the concept of ‘simultaneous feedback’ is applied. In conclusion four rules of thumb and ten general guidelines are presented.