New Word Forms Research Articles

The rippling of Verschiedenheit: Wilhelm von Humboldt on philology, usage and intra‐linguistic diversity

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of desynonymization, although it has been said to justify the philological record of usage amassed in dictionaries such as the OED, can only partially explain the late‐stage processes that result in diversity within a language. A stronger conceptual alternative to desynonymization can be found in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reflections on linguistic diversity (Verschiedenheit) in his great essay of 1836. He supposed a criss‐crossing of conformity and freedom to be the key principle at play in divergences not only among languages and peoples but also among individual speakers. The striving of individuals to join thought and utterance results in the modifications of usage and the varying fates of those instances of usage (namely their perpetuation or vanishing through time). The re‐generation of language happens not primarily in the formation of new words or the recovery of old ones, but in daily use, in actions always subject to variation. It is exemplary use that extends the range of a language, not the imposition of a rationally improved vocabulary. The successes or failures of divergent utterance depend upon an ongoing wooing and winning and breaking of agreement about which words to use and understand and do things with.

Submorphemic elements in the formation of acronyms, blends and clippings

Mainstream word-formation is concerned with the formation of new words from morphemes. As morphemes are full linguistic signs, the resulting neologisms are transparent: speakers can deduce the meanings of the new formations from the meanings of their constituents. Thus, morphematic word-formation processes can be analysed in terms of their modifier/head relationship, with A + B > AB, and AB = (a kind of) B. This pattern applies to compounding and affixation. There are, however, certain word-formation processes that are not morpheme-based and that do not have a modifier/head structure. Acronyms like NATO are formed from the initial letters of word groups; blends like motel ‘mix’ or conflate submorphemic elements; clippings like prof shorten existing words. In order to analyse these word-formation processes, we need concepts below the morpheme level. This paper will analyse the role played by elements below the morpheme level in the production of these non-morphematic word-formation processes which have been particularly productive in the English language since the second half of the 20th century.

Limitations on Reliability: Regularity Rules in the English Plural and Past Tense

Two studies investigated 3- to 5-year-olds' trust in a reliable informant when judging novel labels and novel plural and past tense forms. In Study 1, children (N = 24) endorsed the names of new objects given by an informant who had earlier labeled familiar objects correctly over the names given by an informant who had labeled the same objects incorrectly. In Study 2, children (N = 24) endorsed novel names given by an informant who had earlier expressed the plural of familiar nouns correctly over one who had expressed the plural incorrectly. But children overwhelmingly endorsed the regular plural and past tense forms of new words provided by the formerly unreliable labeler (Study 1) or morphologist (Study 2) rather than irregular forms of those words provided by the formerly reliable informant.

Nonword repetition and word learning: The nature of the relationship

This article presents a theoretical framework designed to accommodate core evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn the phonological forms of new words are closely linked. Basic findings relating nonword repetition and word learning both in typical samples of children and adults and in individuals with disorders of language learning are described. The theoretical analysis of this evidence is organized around the following claims: first, that nonword repetition and word learning both rely on phonological storage; second, that they are both multiply determined, constrained also by auditory, phonological, and speech–motor output processes; third, that a phonological storage deficit alone may not be sufficient to impair language learning to a substantial degree. It is concluded that word learning mediated by temporary phonological storage is a primitive learning mechanism that is particularly important in the early stages of acquiring a language, but remains available to support word learning across the life span.

Morphological structures in visual word recognition: the case of Arabic

This research examined the function within lexical access of the main morphemic units from which most Arabic words are assembled, namely roots and word patterns. The present study focused on the derivation of nouns, in particular, whether the lexical representation of Arabic words reflects their morphological structure and whether recognition of a word involves recognition of its morphological constituents. The morphology of Arabic language constitutes two main systems: inflectional morphology and derivational morphology. Inflectional morphology is used to express grammatical relations and derivational morphology deals with the formation of new words in language; it contains two types of word patterns: verbal and nominal. In this study, it was assumed that roots are lexical entities that can facilitate lexical access to a large cluster of words that derive from them, whereas word patterns are not lexical entities and have no role in access to words assembled by them. The lexical representations of the main morphemic units were examined in four experiments using skilled readers applying masked priming technique tasks: lexical decision and naming. The results indicated that previous exposure to a word sharing the same word pattern had no marked facilitating effect on lexical decision or on naming. The main conclusion of this study on the morphology of Arabic is that roots and word patterns have no essential role in word organisation in the mental lexicon. In addition, words in nominal pattern in derivational morphology are represented in their whole shape in the mental lexicon and each word has an independent representation.

The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach (review)

Reviewed by: The morphology of Chinese: A linguistic and cognitive approach by Jerome L. Packard Katia Chirkova The morphology of Chinese: A linguistic and cognitive approach. By Jerome L. Packard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. 335. What a word is and how to divide the lexicon into lexical categories has long been a topic of heated debate in Chinese linguistics in the West and in China. Due to its absolute lack of inflectional morphology, Chinese was long considered a language with no distinct word classes in the West (Karlgren 1949:68, Maspero 1934:35). In the Chinese philological tradition, on the other hand, the notion of lexical categories did not exist. Instead, all words were classified into full words (shící) with a concrete meaning and empty words (xūcí) with a broader grammatical meaning. The first scholar who seriously addressed the question of word definitions and lexical categories was Mǎ Jiànzhōng. In his grammar of Classical Chinese, Mǎshì wéntōng (1898), western categories of word classes were for the first time systematically applied to Chinese. After Mǎshì wéntōng, the discussion on the nature of words and word classes carried on for several decades with many prominent linguists such as Chén Chéngzé, Wáng Lì, Zhū Déxī, and Lǚ Shūxiāng contributing to the debate. It was obvious that in the absence of inflectional morphology, criteria for defining words and assigning word classes should be different from those used for most Indo-European languages. One solution was the principle of distribution, which found its most detailed analysis in the works of Zhū Déxī. A major turning point in the discussion was the methodical description of word classes in Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao in his Mandarin primer: An intensive course in spoken Chinese (1948) and Grammar of spoken Chinese (1968). Since then, however, despite the general agreement that Chinese has word classes, no concurrence of the standards for classification has been reached. Packard’s Morphology of Chinese (hereafter Morphology) comes as a welcome addition to this discussion. It serves as an important link between the Chinese linguistic tradition and late twentieth-century advances in western morphology. P proposes a new perspective on what a word is and gives a solution for the assignment of noun and verb classes to words in Chinese. Moreover, by analyzing word properties and word forming principles in Chinese, this study makes significant cross-linguistic generalizations about the structure of words and the functions of word components. Ch. 1 explains the importance of the study of Chinese words, discusses the crosslinguistic concept of word, and outlines the main issues discussed in the book. In Ch. 2, the reader is introduced to various existing criteria for defining words. Ch. 3 focuses on possible descriptions and the assignment of form classes for word components. P introduces the headedness principle which deduces the class identity of bisyllabic words from the right- or left-hand-side position of its constituents. Ch. 4 analyzes the range of complex noun and verb words viewed by component form class and morphological identity. In Ch. 5, P proposes an ‘X-bar analysis’ of Chinese words and also extends the proposed analysis to English data. Ch. 6 focuses on lexicalization as a source of new words and as a way of explaining the nature of the relationship between components and words. The same chapter also analyzes exceptions to the headedness principle as well as the relationshipbetween lexicalization and grammaticalization and between lexicalization and the formation of new words. Ch. 7 considers issues involving the relationshipbetween Chinese words, character orthography, and the lexicon. Ch. 8 concludes the book and summarizes the generalizations discovered. Morphology investigates a variety of highly interesting phenomena and raises numerous significant questions. Below I take up a number of questions which might still require further analysis. On p. 246 P states that ‘the occurrence of -zi, -tou and -r affixed nouns as constituents within complex nominals is generally disfavored in Mandarin’, for example, the word cuò ‘mistake’ can be affixed with the suffix -r while the constituent cuò ‘mistake’ of the word cuòwu ‘mistake’, that is *cuòrwu...

Acquisition of Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic: A Review of Current Research

The article concerns features of Israeli Hebrew and Palestinian Arabic, two contemporary Semitic languages spoken in the same geographic region. It reviews the complex situation of linguistic diglossia in these two languages as the sociolinguistic context in which each is acquired as a first language by children growing up in Israel. In psycholinguistic perspective, the article considers the impact of literacy on register distinctions and metalinguistic awareness in child language acquisition in general and in these two languages in particular. Empirical studies of children's developing knowledge of the consonantal root as the basis for new-word formation are reviewed as evidence for the interaction between universally shared, general processes of language acquisition and the typologically specific and language-particular tasks faced by children acquiring a Semitic language like Israeli Hebrew or Palestinian Arabic.

The phonological loop as a language learning device.

A relatively simple model of the phonological loop (A. D. Baddeley, 1986), a component of working memory, has proved capable of accommodating a great deal of experimental evidence from normal adult participants, children, and neuropsychological patients. Until recently, however, the role of this subsystem in everyday cognitive activities was unclear. In this article the authors review studies of word learning by normal adults and children, neuropsychological patients, and special developmental populations, which provide evidence that the phonological loop plays a crucial role in learning the novel phonological forms of new words. The authors propose that the primary purpose for which the phonological loop evolved is to store unfamiliar sound patterns while more permanent memory records are being constructed. Its use in retaining sequences of familiar words is, it is argued, secondary.

Acquisition of New Words and Phonological Working Memory in Williams Syndrome: A Case Study

Abstract We report the case of a 20-year-old woman, CS, with Williams syndrome, who showed particularly well developed language abilities (especially lexical abilities) in spite of severe visuospatial and visuoconstructive deficits. In addition, CS demonstrated a (quasi-)normal functioning of phonological short-term memory. Finally, she performed normally on a paired-associate word-non-word learning task, while being dramatically impaired in the memorization of word-word pairs. These findings corroborate the existence of a link between the phonological working memory and long-term phonological learning of new words. They also confirm that the acquisition of the phonological form of new words may occur even in the presence of a defective verbal episodic memory.

Acquisition of new words and phonological working memory in Williams syndrome: A case study

Abstract We report the case of a 20-year-old woman, CS, with Williams syndrome, who showed particularly well developed language abilities (especially lexical abilities) in spite of severe visuospatial and visuoconstructive deficits. In addition, CS demonstrated a (quasi-)normal functioning of phonological short-term memory. Finally, she performed normally on a paired-associate word-non-word learning task, while being dramatically impaired in the memorization of word-word pairs. These findings corroborate the existence of a link between the phonological working memory and long-term phonological learning of new words. They also confirm that the acquisition of the phonological form of new words may occur even in the presence of a defective verbal episodic memory.

Episodic -ee in English: Thematic Relations and New Word Formation

No abstract.

Word learning in language-impaired children

The nature of the word-learning deficits of children with developmental language disorders are analysed in this article. Experimental studies of word learning with language-disordered groups demonstrating a clear phonological long-term learning locus to the word-learning problems of this population are reviewed. It is argued that the severe phonological working-memory impairments of such children play an important role in the difficulties they encounter in learning the phonological forms of new words. Finally, possible techniques for remediating phonological memory deficits are discussed.

The combined effect of context and case alternation on migration

Previous studies have demonstrated the occurrence of perceptual interactions when words are presented simultaneously in a visual display. The interactions, or migrations, consist of the formation of new words from letters in the display. Contextual information can increase the probability of migration. A difference in visual form between the words does not affect the occurrence of migrations.

Word Schemas: Expectations About the Form and Meaning of New Words

This study explores students' word schemas, that is, their knowledge not just of specific words, but also about words in general that can be applied when they encounter new words. Students in 7th and 10th grade and college undergraduates were asked to rate the plausibility of made-up definitions for nonsense words. Some of the definitions, although nonexistent or extremely rare, represented plausible meanings. Other definitions, however, were constructed to violate hypothesized expectations about possible meanings of English words. Students at all grade levels were found to distinguish plausible from less plausible meanings. College undergraduates also displayed sensitivity to part of speech distinctions in a subset of the items for which the range of possible meanings was hypothesized to be different for nouns and verbs. Results show that word schemas are applied in evaluating hypotheses about possible meanings of new words and that skilled adult readers are sensitive to subtle regularities in the Englis...

Sprachliche Normalisierung und lexikalische Modernisierung des Katalanischen

Based on a corpus of neologisms extracted from Catalan newspapers (published between 1979 and 1983), the author aims to show two fundamental trends in the lexical modernization of Catalan: a) the innovation of socio-political vocabulary reinforces the international character of the lexicon and the models that serve for the formation of new words, while the discourse on the norm gives a clearly purist orientation; b) in the sense of neologisms, there is also a slight tendency towards the elimination of castillianisms, that is, towards a differentiation from Spanish, while the integration of anglicisms and gallicisms is much easier. Despite this, the first trend is predominant, especially in the reduction of internal models of word formation in favor of those that are used, preferably, also in other languages. Finally, reflections are made on the methodological-theoretical value of analyzes for the establishment of a theory of language policy.

Productivity and memory for newly formed words.

ABSTRACTThe first word-formation devices children should learn, we proposed, are the most productive ones, that is, those that have the fewest structural constraints on their use and that appear most frequently in the formation of new words. Four- and five-year-old children who were asked to recall novel words with English agentive suffixes recalled the most productive suffix (-er) well and its less productive companions (-ist and -ian) very poorly. Other children who were asked to recall as agentive suffixes the non-agentive -ly (about equal in frequency to -er) together with -ist and -ian, did poorly on all three. They also substituted agentive suffixes (including -er) for the non-agentive -ly, with greater reliance on more productive forms. These data, together with previous observations, support the hypothesis that productivity affects the order in which children master word-formation devices.