Declension Research Articles

Verbal and Nominal Case Suffixes in Standard Arabic: A Unified Account

The Traditional Arab Grammarians (TAGs) (Sībawayhi 8th century) assigned somewhat similar terminology for the inflectional states of Standard Arabic (SA) verbs and nouns. Verbs could be either marfūʕ ‘Indicative’, manṣūb ‘Subjunctive’, majzūm ‘Jussive’, or mabnī ‘uninflected for mood’, making reference to so-called ‘mood’ endings. Likewise, nouns could be either marfūʕ ‘Nominative’, manṣūb ‘Accusative’, majrūr ‘Genitive’, or mabnī ‘uninflected for case’, making reference to case endings. Thus, TAGs named Ind-marked verbs and Nom-marked nouns marfūʕ, and Sub-marked verbs and Acc-marked nouns manṣūb, in reference to the morphological similarity between the relevant nominal and verbal suffixes. Nonetheless, this similarity is observed between 10 out of the 14 sets of verbal and nominal suffixes in the Ind-Nom paradigm, and between only 4 out of the 14 sets of verbal and nominal suffixes in the Sub-Acc paradigm. In other words, the presumed morphological similarity in terms of suffixes is not perfect. Therefore, this paper aims to show that, at some stage in word formation, the two sets of verbal suffixes, indicative and subjunctive, are identical to the two sets of nominal suffixes, Nom and Acc, respectively, for the verbs and nouns that encode the same number and gender features. After that stage, verbal forms undergo certain word formation operations (feature movement and feature deletion) that affect their structure, resulting in the known surface forms. This account is based on a novel analysis of the SA imperfective paradigm. Both accounts will be presented in purely descriptive terms, without making reference to any available morphological framework.

Noun Case Suffix Use by Children with Specific Language Impairment: An Examination of Finnish.

Finnish-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI, N = 15, M age = 5;2), a group of same-age typically developing peers (TD-A, N = 15, M age = 5;2) and a group of younger typically developing children (TD-Y, N = 15, M age = 3;8) were compared in their use of accusative, partitive, and genitive case noun suffixes. The children with SLI were less accurate than both groups of TD children in case marking, suggesting that their difficulties with agreement extend to grammatical case. However, these children were also less accurate in making the phonological changes in the stem needed for suffixation. This second type of error suggests that problems in morphophonology may constitute a separate problem in Finnish SLI.

Declension classes in Latvian and Latgalian: morphomics vs. morphophonology

This paper explores the system of noun declension in Latvian and Latgalian. It is claimed that despite superficial similarities the principles underlying the two systems are different. In Latvian, a characteristic vowel that has no other function than to distinguish classes is present in most case-endings. In Latgalian inflectional morphology, on the other hand, an important feature is the distinction between phonologically hard vs. soft stems. In the case of hybrid nouns, a conflict between inherited membership to a declension class and morphophonological principles leads to variation in case-assignment. The data support the thesis that in the case of external motivation class-membership loses its function of predicting the forms of a paradigm.

Wernicke 失語症例における格助詞と動詞の接尾辞の処理

流暢性失語症者における格助詞や動詞の接尾辞の誤用に関する研究は少なく, その出現機序は明らかになっていない。本研究では, 文の産生時に助詞の誤りを認めた Wernicke 失語症 6 例の構文能力について, 動詞の文法的特性の差異による障害特徴を検討した。自動詞・他動詞文表出検査を作成し, 対象者に文の発話をもとめた。課題文は自動詞・他動詞の対立のある動詞を含む文 (例 : コマが回る / コマを回す) と対立のない動詞を含む文 (例 : 犬が歩く / 字を書く) 各 40 文で, 各症例の両文の発話成績を比較した。その結果, 6 例中 2 例で自・他の対立のある文の成績が対立のない文より低下しており, 格助詞と動詞の接尾辞が一致しない誤りを認めた。しかし, 動詞の語幹部分の発話成績は対立の有・無による差を認めなかった。これは, 対立のある文は対立のない文より文法操作が複雑なためであり, 格助詞と接尾辞を関係付ける文法操作能力の障害が 2 症例における文の産生障害の中核であると考えられた。

Convergence in syntax/morphology mapping strategies: Evidence from Quechua–Spanish code mixing

Convergence in case mapping strategies in the oral speech of Quechua–Spanish bilinguals is examined. In principle, Quechua case suffixes could be analyzed as postpositions or as case markers. The data show that in code mixing utterances, Spanish prepositions and Quechua case suffixes co-occur and that mapping strategies converge. The fact that, in Quechua–Spanish code switching, Spanish prepositions are combined with Quechua case suffixes is taken as evidence that the latter are case markers, not postpositions. Further support for this view is the fact that no obvious differences were found in the data between non-oblique and oblique case markers. This distribution is consistent with an analysis of Quechua case suffixes as the spell out of an agree relationship between a null prepositional head and a DP. Cases of case suffix dropping in differential object marking expressions are analyzed as a possible source of instability in case marking in code mixing utterances.

Case suffixes and postpositions in Hungarian

This paper examines the morpho-syntactic puzzle of case suffixes and postpositions that Hungarian displays. Although these two categories show distributional similarities, they are distinguishable from a morphological and a syntactic point of view. Moreover, this language has defective postpositions which are in complementary distribution with case suffixes. I argue that there is no real argument for lumping case suffixes together with postpositions into the same syntactic category, as has been suggested in recent linguistics studies (Trommer, 2008; Asbury, 2007). I rather propose to treat case suffixes and postpositions as two different objects: case suffixes are inflectional material on nominal heads and postpositions as well as defective postpositions are independent words subcategorizing an NP. This distinction straightforwardly accounts for morphological and syntactic differences. Finally, the shared distributional properties between case suffixes, postpositions and defective postpositions are captured by means of the use of the MARKING feature.

Tarification optimale et formes contractuelles dans un programme d'infrastructures en ppp

Résumé Le développement récent de diverses formes de partenariat public-privé pour le financement, la réalisation ou l’exploitation d’équipements publics n’a pas bouleversé le calcul économique. Cet article examine dans quelle mesure il convient, cependant, d’en amender l’usage en cas de ppp , qu’il s’agisse d’optimiser le choix des investissements ou leur tarification. De la cohérence entre ces deux optimisations résultent un principe de tarif optimal de programmation ainsi que la forme de contrat qui lui correspond. Ces résultats sont probablement transposables dans d’autres domaines de l’action publique, mais résultent ici de la déclinaison de ces questions dans le cas du secteur des transports pour lequel il s’agit de thèmes très actuels.

Notes on the development of Baltic declension

PASTABOS DĖL BALTŲ DEKLINACIJOS RAIDOSReziumėStraipsnyje į baltų „prokalbę“ bandoma žiūrėti kaip į centrinę ide. arealinio bendrumo dalį prieš pat ide. „prokalbės“ skilimą. Todėl visi pagrindiniai procesai, vykę joje anuo metu, laikytini bendraindoeuropietiškais. Keliama mintis, kad tai buvo pereinamasis laikotarpis tarp ergatyvinės („aktyvinės“) ir nominatyvinės epochų ir kad tuo laikotarpiu deklinacijos sistemoje egzistavo kom­binuojamieji linksniai, galėję aptarnauti tiek ergatyvinę, tiek nominatyvinę sandarą. Mėginama pa­aiškinti akuzatyvo nazalinio formanto kilmę iš archainio postpozicinio determinanto, kuris kiek ankstesnėje ide. „prokalbės“ epochoje buvo išriedėjęs į gyvųjų daiktų rodiklį. Remiantis visu tuo, pateikiamos ano meto baltų deklinacinių paradigmų rekonstrukcijos. Gale aptariama vėlesnių (nominatyvinių) laikų baltų -o-kamienio genityvo problema, spėjant, kad gen. -as egzistavęs tiek vakarų, tiek rytų baltuose, o BPT pe͡nega yra partityvinė forma. Rytų baltuose o-kamieno partityvo forma ėmė reikšti genityvą, išstumdama ankstesnę genityvinę -as.

Acquisition of Turkish grammatical morphology by children with developmental disorders

Many children with specific language impairment, Down syndrome or autism spectrum disorder have difficulty learning grammatical morphology, especially forms associated with the verb phrase. However, except for Hebrew, the evidence thus far has come from Indo-European languages. This study investigates the acquisition of grammatical morphology by Turkish-speaking children with developmental disorders. Syntactic, perceptual and usage features of this non-Indo-European language were predicted to lead to patterns of atypical learning that would challenge and broaden current views. Language samples were collected from 30 preschoolers learning Turkish: ten with developmental disorders, ten matched by age and ten by length of utterance. T-SALT then generated mean length of utterance, the total number of noun errors, the total number of verb errors and the per cent use in obligatory contexts for noun suffixes. Analyses also looked at the potential effects of input frequency on order of acquisition. Turkish children in the MLU-W control group, aged 3;4, used noun and verb suffixes with virtually no errors. Children in the group with atypical language showed more, and more persistent, morphological errors than either age or language peers, especially on noun suffixes. Children in the ALD and MLU-W groups were acquiring noun case suffixes in an order that is strongly related to input frequencies. These findings seem to reflect the influence of salience, regularity and frequency on language learning. Typical child-adult discourse patterns as well as the canonical SOV Turkish word order make verb suffixes perceptually salient, available in working memory and frequently repeated. The findings support the view that the language patterns seen in children with atypical development will differ from one language type to the next. They also suggest that regardless of language or syntactic class, children will have greater difficulty with those features of grammar that have higher cognitive processing costs.

Architectural quality: innovation, technological research and design

Architectural redevelopment and the revival of the construction sector are conditional on the incentivisation and bolstering of innovation processes. Thus the partial declensions that have been attached to these processes over the last few years have seen research and experimentation being tailored to the spectacularisation of shapes or the hidden performance optimisation of materials and components. Genuine improvement in the quality of architecture and its construction in this day and age depends on the abilities of designers to adopt the entire life cycle of buildings as a reference framework and on the willingness of all those working in the construction supply chain to activate virtuous cooperation.

Phraseology of disk herniation: an inevitable revision

0009-9260/$ e see front matter 2010 The Royal Co doi:10.1016/j.crad.2010.07.004 Disk herniation, the common term for the most important clinical features of degenerative disk disease, is composed by elements of both classic languages, that are disk [from diskos (Greek)1⁄4 disc, plate, slice] and herniation [from hernia (Latin)1⁄4 hernia, rupture]. The component herniation can be replaced by prolapse, which also goes back to Latin and which is only marginally modified in each of the many languages putting it to use (such as prolapso in Spanish, prolapsus in French, prolasso in Italian, and prolaps in German). In the appropriate clinical context, the term is unambiguous both for neurologists and neurosurgeons as well as for orthopaedists, radiologists, and general practitioners. The underlying Latin term is prolapsus, us, a masculine of the fourth declension. There exists also the feminine variant prolapsio in the Roman literature.1 The corresponding verb is prolabi.2 The Latin word prolapsus is a compound of two elements, the preposition pro (that is “at the front,” “up to the front”) and the noun lapsus (that is “gliding,” “falling”). Thus, prolapsus denotes a foreword motion. The term is hardly ever found in the ancient Roman literature. The Late Latin poet Rufius Festus Avienus (second half of the fourth century A.D.) used it in his Description of the Earth (Chapter 84) for telling of running water (prolapsus aquae). In the Medieval Latin literature, the phrase is neither documented in its original meaning nor as a scientific term. In order to refer to the fall out of deciduous teeth in children, the Romans made do with the simple word lapsus.3

Word accents and morphology—ERPs of Swedish word processing

Results indicating that high stem tones realizing word accents activate a certain class of suffixes in online processing of Central Swedish are presented. This supports the view that high Swedish word accent tones are induced onto word stems by particular suffixes rather than being associated with words in the mental lexicon. Using event-related potentials, effects of mismatch between word accents and inflectional suffixes were compared with mismatches between stem and suffix in terms of declension class. Declensionally incorrect suffixes yielded an increase in the N400, indicating problems in lexical retrieval, as well as a P600 effect, showing reanalysis. Both declensionally correct and incorrect high tone-inducing (Accent 2) suffixes combined with a mismatching low tone (Accent 1) on the stems produced P600 effects, but did not increase the N400. Suffixes usually co-occurring with Accent 1 did not yield any effects in words realized with the nonmatching Accent 2, suggesting that Accent 1 is a default accent, lacking association with any particular suffix. High tones on Accent 2 words also produced an early anterior positivity, interpreted as a P200 effect reflecting preattentive processing of the tone.

Use of noun morphology by children with language impairment: the case of Hungarian

Children with language impairment often exhibit significant difficulty in the use of grammatical morphology. Although English-speaking children with language impairment have special difficulties with verb morphology, noun morphology can also be problematic in languages of a different typology. Hungarian is an agglutinating language with multiple suffixation, in which both regular-class and irregular-class nouns contain the same recognizable grammatical markers, but the two classes differ in their morphophonology and productivity. Such typological characteristics provide a good basis for evaluating processing accounts of language impairment such as the morphological richness account. We examined the production of Hungarian irregular and regular noun morphology through elicited production of nouns with plural, accusative case and plural plus accusative case suffixes in an older (8-10 years) and a younger (4-7 years) group of children with language impairment and two verbal control groups matched on vocabulary size. The children's accuracy was scored both in terms of grammatical function (whether plural and/or accusative case was appropriately marked) and morphophonology (whether the production reflected the phonotactic form required for the stem plus suffix). The younger children with language impairment were less accurate than the younger verbal control children when two suffixes (marking plural and accusative case) were required, at least when noun stem classes were regular. All groups showed significant overgeneralization of stem forms with correct selection of suffixes. However, there were strong word frequency effects in the language impairment, but not in the verbal control groups. Much of the data were consistent with predictions of the morphological richness account. However, there was also evidence suggestive of differences between the language impairment and verbal control groups in their representations. In particular, the children with language impairment seemed to rely more (though not exclusively) on memorized items in the lexicon.

Aspectos morfosintácticos del ocaina: entre rasgos genéticos (familia Witoto) e influencias areales

This paper presents some morphosyntactic features of Ocaina, a seriously endangered, underdescribed language of the Colombian-Peruvian Amazon region. Ocaina has an extensive nominal classification system and number markers—dual and plural—suffixed to both nouns and person markers on verbs. Grammatical relations follow a nominative-accusative pattern and are coded by a relatively rigid constituent order SOV (Subject-Object-Verb); by verbal prefixes (o-s-V) and enclitics (o-V=s), with just one prefix for objects of monotransitive and ditransitive verbs; and by the marking of oblique objects of certain verbs by case suffixes and postpositions. Most of the Ocaina features described are shared with Uitoto of the Witotoan family; many are also shared with Bora (Boran family), whose genetic link to the Witotoan family is still hypothetical. All these languages share certain features with neighboring languages, such as those of the Vaupes region, e.g. nominal classification and nominative-accusative alignment. We suggest that some aspects of Ocaina morphosyntax are probably inherited from the Witotoan family while others are better explained by areal diffusion.

Lexicalizing number and gender in Lunigiana

<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">In this article, I present an analysis of gender and number marking on nouns in a group of Italian dialects. These dialects share the property that the plural morpheme is <em>-i-</em> in both the feminine and the masculine gender in both declension classes. But there is an asymmetry: in contexts where plurality is marked on a determiner, the plural marking <em>-i-</em> does not appear on nouns or adjectives in the feminine gender, but does appear on masculine nouns and adjectives. I argue that this asymmetry can be understood once it is recognized that a vocabulary item can lexicalize more than a single terminal, and that lexicalization is governed by the Superset Principle, i.e. if the lexicon associates a vocabulary item with a feature set <em>F</em>, it can lexicalize any constituent with the feature set <em>F'</em> provided <em>F</em> is a superset of <em>F'</em>.</span></p>

The Languages of Siberia

AbstractAlthough Russian today is the dominant language in virtually every corner of North Asia, Siberia and the Northern Pacific Rim of Asia remain home to over three dozen mutually unintelligible indigenous language varieties. Except for Tuvan, Buryat, and Yakut, most are rapidly losing ground to Russian if not already critically endangered. Several more have already become extinct in the four centuries since the area's incorporation into the Russian state. From an ethnographic perspective, Siberian languages merit attention for their interplay of pastoral and hunter–gatherer influences and also for the fact that Siberia represents the staging ground for prehistoric migrations into the Americas. North Asia contains several autochthonous microfamilies and isolates not found outside this region – the so‐called ‘Paleo‐Asiatic’ (or ‘Paleosiberian’) languages Ket, Yukaghir, Nivkh, and the Chukotko‐Kamchatkan microfamily, which includes Chukchi, Koryak, and Itelmen. Ainu, formerly spoken on Sakhalin and the Kuriles as well as in Hokkaido, and the three varieties of Eskimoan spoken in historic times on the Russian side of Bering Strait, likewise belong to the earlier, non‐food producing layers of ethnolinguistic diversity in North Asia. All of these languages, aside from Eskimoan, are entirely autochthonous to the northern half of Asia. Siberian languages spoken by pastoral groups, on the other hand, belong to families represented more prominently elsewhere. Families, such as Uralic, Turkic, Mongolic, and especially Tungusic (the northern branch of the Tungus‐Manchu family), became dominant in Siberia long before the coming of the Russians. As an extension of pastoral Inner Eurasia, Siberia displays many traits characteristic of a linguistic area: suffixal agglutination, widespread dependent marking typology, a fairly elaborate system of spatial case markers, and the use of case suffixes or postpositions to signal syntactic subordination. There are also notable idiosyncratic features, particularly among the so‐called Paleo‐Siberian languages. These include the areally atypical feature of possessive prefixes and verb‐internal subject/object prefixes in Ket, the unique verb‐internal focus markers of Yukaghir, the extensive numeral allomorphs that serve as nominal classifiers in Nivkh, and the reduplicative stem augmentation used by Chukchi nouns to express the absolutive singular (in contrast to plurals and oblique case forms, where the stem is simple). While North Asia has long been the preserve of linguists writing in Russian or German (including many Finns and Hungarians), since the collapse of the Soviet Union the number of English‐language treatments of Siberian languages is increasing.

The comparison and analysis of 'case suffixes' in Russianand ‘case particles’ in Korean

The comparison and analysis of 'case suffixes' in Russianand ‘case particles’ in Korean

“Case suffixes”, postpositions, and the phonological word in Hungarian

In this article I propose a new construction algorithm for the phonological word in Hungarian. Based on a detailed discussion of the differences between so-called ‘postpositions’ and ‘case suffixes’, I show that both types of adpositional elements are of the same morphosyntactic category, and that phonological word status depends not on an arbitrary division between affixes and syntactically free items, but on phonological properties of the respective adpositions: Bisyllabic adpositions form phonological words on their own, while monosyllabic adpositions are integrated into the phonological word of their lexical head. Generalizing this result, I argue that all functional elements of Hungarian traditionally called ‘inflectional affixes’ are syntactically independent functional heads integrated into the phonological word of a preceding lexical head because they are prosodically too small. I show that apparently bisyllabic inflectional affixes must either be decomposed into different markers or are underlyingly monosyllabic, and develop a ranking of optimality-theoretic alignment constraints implementing the construction algorithm for the phonological word in formal detail.

Declension Classes in Estonian

Declension Classes in Estonian

Hungarian spatial PPs

Hungarian spatial adpositional phrases exhibit very similar properties to those in other languages in that they can denote places and paths, and their structural ordering is such that path-denoting postpositions are outside place-denoting ones. One type of postpositional elements (the ‘dressed’ Ps) share various syntactic propertiesmwith oblique case suffixes, while members of the other group of post positions (‘naked’ Ps) are more like particles. All of these, however, are generated in an extended PP-structure with designated positions for place, path and direction.