Inflected Forms Research Articles

TRAPPED BETWEEN CASE AND NUMBER. A TYPOLOGY OF ADNUMERATIVE FORMS†

In this paper, I study the nature of adnumerative or numerative forms; i.e. morphologically dedicated inflectional forms that can only be used with numerals or quantifiers (e.g. Russian dva časá ‘two o'clock’ vs. [gen sg] čása). Adnumeratives are cross‐linguistically very rare; yet they raise some interesting theoretical discussions. This work is based on the framework of Canonical Typology, which assumes the existence of a handful of discrete and cross‐linguistically recurrent morphosyntactic features. Nevertheless, adnumerative forms present a challenge to that distribution, because, as I argue, adnumeratives lie between case and number values. This might well represent a theoretically undesirable scenario, and thus, be diachronically unstable. However, the data I have gathered prove that there are adnumerative forms that have survived in this penumbra for centuries and one can also adduce more evidence of diachronically stable cross‐linguistic phenomena between two feature values (e.g. the anterior). Therefore, I propose that this theoretical space may not be as dark previously depicted and I ask questions for further exploration.

How many inflectional forms does a Somali verb have?

Abstract The Somali verb is traditionally presented as having a quite large number of inflectional paradigms with, e.g., special negative forms and several kinds of subordinate clause forms. The complexity of traditional descriptions tends to overshadow important generalisations that would otherwise reflect a relative simplicity of the Somali verb system. The most important reasons for the abundance of paradigms are that forms, periphrastic constructions and their functions are not systematically differentiated, but also that the tonal accent and case marking are treated as parts of the inflection, instead of phrasal marking of syntactic or pragmatic functions. The aim of this article is therefore to suggest a simplified analysis and to define the minimal set of synthetic forms and analytical constructions that are necessary for the description of Somali verb inflection as well as the basic syntactic functions of these forms and constructions.

Characterization of agrammatism in Tagalog: Evidence from narrative spontaneous speech

ABSTRACT Background Agrammatism in agglutinative languages exhibits preservation of verb morphology due to their rich morphological paradigms. Tagalog, an agglutinative language mainly spoken in the Philippines, remains uncharacterized in agrammatism yet holds potential for future research that can challenge existing theories and help advance novel ones. Aims The purpose of this study is to quantify and describe the characteristics of agrammatism in Tagalog in narrative spontaneous speech, to examine whether these patterns resemble those reported in other agglutinative languages, and to compare the results obtained to those emerging in literature for non-agglutinative languages. Methods & Procedures Narrative spontaneous speech was elicited from 10 individuals with non-fluent Broca’s aphasia and 12 matched controls. A series of parameters, both conventional and language-specific measures, were selected for analyses. Outcomes & Results Tagalog-speaking individuals with agrammatism exhibited slow and fragmented speech, with a strong preference for minor and simple constructions resulting to decrease in overall grammaticality and sentence complexity. Verb deficits were also found specifically in verbal predication, lexical diversity, and finiteness. There is a prevalent use of bare verb forms, consequently resulting to the decline of verb finiteness and inflections. Code-mixing is found to be extremely variable and statistically non-prominent between groups but patterns may be attributed to personal and sociolinguistic factors. Conclusion Patterns of agrammatism in Tagalog majorly mirror the trends reported in other agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages. Where Tagalog agrammatism departs from other agglutinative languages is the increased use of bare verbs as opposed to the obligatory inflected forms. Although still many questions are unresolved, Tagalog offers an interesting testing ground for variety of topics and issues in agrammatic aphasia.

The meaning of morphomes: distributional semantics of Spanish stem alternations

Abstract Romance stem alternations have been argued to represent exclusively morphological objects (or “morphomes”) independent from semantic and syntactic categories. This conclusion has been based on feature-value analyses of the inflected forms, and definitions of natural classes that are theoretically driven and about which no consensus exists. Individual examples of morphomes are thus frequently challenged, while their autonomously morphological nature has never been tested quantitatively or experimentally. This is the purpose of the present study. We use context-based embeddings to explore the semantic profile of Spanish verb stem alternations. At the paradigmatic level, our findings suggest that Spanish morphomes’ cells are characterized by significantly above-chance distributional-semantic similarity. At the lexical level, similarly, verbs that show more similar patterns of alternation have also been found to be closer in meaning. Both of these findings suggest that these structures may have an extramorphological function. Using gradient distributional-semantic similarity offers a way to objectively assess the degree of (un)naturalness of a set of forms and meanings, something which has been lacking from most discussions on the structure of features and the architecture of paradigms.

Revisiting N waiting to happen: word, construction, and corpus choices in a collostructional analysis

Abstract In undertaking any collostructional analysis, a researcher must make decisions concerning the properties of words, constructions, and corpora. Each of these crucial aspects of the analysis can be dealt with in alternative ways: words can be investigated as either lemmas or inflected forms; a construction can be characterized in alternative ways (reliance on semantics or syntax or some combination thereof, the span of the construction, etc.); the choice of corpus (or corpora) will be influenced by whether a researcher has an interest in different genres and varieties, whether the study is synchronic or diachronic, etc. I review various ways in which a researcher’s decisions about words, constructions, and corpora are relevant to a corpus-based study of N waiting to happen, referencing throughout the collostructional analysis of this construction by Stefanowitsch and Gries. The approach adopted here can be seen as supplementing Stefanowitsch and Gries’ original collostructional analysis. It illustrates how multifarious the results of a corpus-based study of constructions can be and serves as a reminder that no one corpus-based measure can possibly answer all the questions linguists might reasonably ask about a construction.

Inflectional forms in students’ writing: A point of view from morphological analysis

Inflectional forms in students’ writing: A point of view from morphological analysis

Kompetencja fleksyjna osób niemownych

The content of this paper constitutes an introduction to the issue known as inflectional competence, which refers to people affected by speech inability. Inflectional competence is based on the theory and practice of internal grammar, thanks to which it is treated as a brain function, a component of the subconscious mechanism of composing linguistic elements, a kind of competence which enables, above all, the reception of inflectional forms that signal syntactic functions and contribute semantic information. Such an approach makes it possible to relate the inflectional competence to people who are prelingually deprived of the gift of speech (in this context language), and hence, do not take up activities which a speaking person performs with the use of language. At the same time they do not recognise reality at the level of language-able people and do not convey its interpretation to other participants of social life. In the applicational part of the work, attention was paid to the very process of equipping a prelingually language-disabled person in inflectional competence, which takes place with the use of therapeutic systems and methods that belong to the sphere of activity known as Augmentative and Alternative Communication.

Kurdish Sorani Dialect Morphology Generation Using a Concatenative Strategy

In natural language processing, morphological generation refers to the creation of the appropriate inflected forms of words based on a predetermined set of morphological rules. However, it might be difficult to generate morphology in languages with intricate morphological systems, like the Kurdish Sorani dialect. The concatenative morphology-based unique technique to morphological generation in Kurdish Sorani is proposed in this research. The suggested strategy tries to get over the drawbacks of current approaches and enhance the precision and effectiveness of morphological generation in Kurdish Sorani. The suggested technique generates all conceivable subjective and objective pronouns in both positive and negative forms, together with the various verb tenses for Kurdish morphology. The study presents a detailed examination of Kurdish Sorani’s morphology and points out the difficulties in coming up with the right verbforms. The authors suggest a concatenative morphology-based morphological generating system that comprises of a morphological analyzer and a morphological generator.

Advances in the Automatic Lemmatization of Old English: Class IV Strong Verbs (L-Y)

The morphological features of an inflectional language like Old English (OE), which also presents generalized spelling inconsistencies, limit the use of lemmatizing and tagging tools that can be applied to natural languages. Consequently, the development of Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, which crucially depend on lemmatized corpora, is slowed down. Against this background, this article develops a lemmatizer within the framework of Morphological Generation that allows for the type-based automatic lemmatization of OE class IV strong verbs (L–Y). The lemmatizer incorporates a set of algorithms to account for features of inflectional, derivational, morphophonological and diatopic variation. The generated forms are automatically compared with Taylor et al. (2003) and Healey et al. (2004) to confirm their attestation and are assigned a lemma. Overall, the research proves successful in setting up form-lemma associations, while highlighting areas of ambiguity and mismatches. The main conclusion of the article is that taking the route of automatic lemmatization with this methodological framework will contribute to the field of OE lexicography by both lemmatizing attested inflectional forms and by identifying areas for manual revision.

Children's Command of Four Inflectional Constructions in Arabic: Differences and Development With Age.

This study examines whether differences in acquisition exist among the inflectional constructions of number, gender, possessive pronouns, and tense. Moreover, the study investigates whether these inflectional patterns develop with age. The participants were 1,020 Arabic-speaking kindergartners from K2 and K3. Children were assessed in morphological tasks, which targeted four different morphological inflectional constructions both in real words and pseudowords: gender, number-plural, possessive pronouns, and tense. Findings reveal the differences between all inflectional constructions. In other words, children demonstrated higher performance in gender construction, followed by construction of numbers and possessive pronouns, while the lowest performance is shown among tense construction. In addition, the results indicate that all inflectional constructions develop with age, that is, there was higher performance in K3 than in K2 in all inflection constructions. This study contributes to our knowledge about early language development by showing that the acquisition of gender and number-plurals is faster and more advanced than the acquisition of possessive pronouns or tense. The implications of these results are discussed, especially the need to develop children's inflectional forms such as possessive pronouns and tense, which may eventually also impact narrative understanding and production.

Uncertainty in the production of Czech noun and verb forms

We examine the reactions of Czech native speakers to cues asking them to supply inflectional forms of nouns and verbs that are either canonical (non-variant), overabundant, or supposedly defective, to see what distinguishing characteristics these three conditions have for production. We find that respondents handle defective material differently from other conditions, producing different sorts of forms at different frequencies, and taking significantly longer to do so. Overabundant cells pattern at the individual level like canonical inflectional cells, but collectively display a significantly more varied and less focused spread of forms produced than our canonical cells. The individual dimension of uncertainty in production is thus limited to defective cells, but the collective dimension of uncertainty is evident between all three conditions.

Can Japanese learners of English comprehend inflectional and derivational forms in listening? Testing the validity of the word family counting unit

AbstractIn second language (L2) research, the lexical unit is often defined as a base word plus inflectional and derivational forms through Level 6 of Bauer and Nation's framework (WF6). WF6 use has been justified by the assumption that once a form is known, recognition of other WF6 members requires little extra effort. A more lenient view holds that an incomplete understanding of derivational forms is permissible if words containing the most frequent derivational affixes are known. This study assessed the validity of these views for L2 listening. Participants (N = 120) provided translations of 27 base words and 43 related affixational forms when listening. When participants knew one form (either the base word or an affixed form) they also knew the other just 25.1% of the time. For target words containing the most frequent derivational affixes, this was just 26.5%. Logistic regression found that learners’ overall vocabulary level, several aspects of word frequency, and base word knowledge were all significant predictors of knowing affixed forms. However, when other variables were held constant, base word knowledge was a weak predictor of affixational form knowledge. These findings support neither the strict assumption nor the more lenient view of WF6 use for L2 listening among study participants.

A discriminative information-theoretical analysis of the regularity gradient in inflectional morphology

Over the last decades, several independent lines of research in morphology have questioned the hypothesis of a direct correspondence between sublexical units and their mental correlates. Word and paradigm models of morphology shifted the fundamental part-whole relation in an inflection system onto the relation between individual inflected word forms and inflectional paradigms. In turn, the use of artificial neural networks of densely interconnected parallel processing nodes for morphology learning marked a radical departure from a morpheme-based view of the mental lexicon. Lately, in computational models of Discriminative Learning, a network architecture has been combined with an uncertainty reducing mechanism that dispenses with the need for a one-to-one association between formal contrasts and meanings, leading to the dissolution of a discrete notion of the morpheme.The paper capitalises on these converging lines of development to offer a unifying information-theoretical, simulation-based analysis of the costs incurred in processing (ir)regularly inflected forms belonging to the verb systems of English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. Using Temporal Self-Organising Maps as a computational model of lexical storage and access, we show that a discriminative, recurrent neural network, based on Rescorla-Wagner’s equations, can replicate speakers’ exquisite sensitivity to widespread effects of word frequency, paradigm entropy and morphological (ir)regularity in lexical processing. The evidence suggests an explanatory hypothesis linking Word and paradigm morphology with principles of information theory and human perception of morphological structure. According to this hypothesis, the ways more or less regularly inflected words are structured in the mental lexicon are more related to a reduction in processing uncertainty and maximisation of predictive efficiency than to economy of storage.

Assamese and BODO next Word Detection using LSTM

The official language of the Indian state of Assam is Assamese, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language. Assamese, the sole native Indo-Aryan language in the Assam Valley, has been heavily impacted by the nearby Tibeto-Burman languages in terms of lexicon, phonetics, and grammar. Its grammar is renowned for its highly inflected forms, and both honorific and non-honorific formulations can include a variety of pronouns and plural nouns. Additionally closely linked to Bengali, Assamese lacks grammatical gender distinctions like Oriya and Bengali. On the other hand, The Bodo language is a variety of dialects of the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages. Assam, Meghalaya, and Bangladesh are all home to speakers of the Bodo language, which is spoken in northeastern India. It shares linguistic kinship with the Dimasa, Tripura, and Lalunga languages and is written in Bengali, Latin, and Devanagari scripts. Another name for Next Word Prediction is Language Modeling. Predicting what word will be spoken right away requires commitment. It is one of the primary functions of NLP and has a wide range of uses. Our objective is to create this model as quickly and efficiently as possible. RNNs can interpret prior material and forecast words since they have a lengthy short-term memory, which might be useful for users when building sentences. This method creates words by using letter-by-letter prediction, or letter-by-letter prediction. Users can benefit from next word prediction, which makes typing faster and more accurate. The Assamese and Bodo languages rely on next word prediction since multiple characters can be created by pressing the same consonants combined with different vowels, vowel combinations, and special keys. As a result, we present a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network model for Assamese and Bodo next word prediction. With 63,300 point sentences, we test the suggested network model, and it achieves 96 per cent accuracy. In addition, we contrasted the suggested model with cutting-edge models like the LSTM. The proposed network model offers a promising outcome, according to experimental findings.

Individual differences in the auditory processing of morpho-phonological and semantic cues

ABSTRACT Morpho-phonological patterns and semantic density influence the processing of spoken complex words and contribute to the dissociation between regularly and irregularly inflected forms. However, it is unclear whether all listeners rely on morpho-phonological and semantic cues to the same degree. The present paper examines whether a listener’s cognitive profile, indicated by processing efficiency, affects the processing strategy employed when listening to morphologically complex words. Two auditory judgement experiments demonstrate that slower responders rely more strongly on semantic processing than faster responders, but all listeners show morpho-phonological effects regardless of processing speed and form effects. This demonstrates that morpho-phonological processing is automatic for all listeners, but processing efficiency determines whether additional semantic cues are engaged. The results highlight the importance of integrating cognitive variability into current models of complex word processing.

Children steer the inflectional diversity of their parents: The role of word births and growing vocabulary

The inflectional diversity of parents’ speech directed to children acquiring Dutch was investigated. Inflectional diversity is defined as the number of inflected forms of a particular lemma (e.g. singular, plural of a noun) and measured by means of Mean Size of Paradigm (MSP). Changes in the inflectional diversity of infant directed speech (IDS) were analyzed as a function of children’s developing linguistic abilities. Two types of changes in the inflectional diversity of nouns and verbs were analyzed: (1) coarse tuning: changes relative to children’s growing vocabulary and (2) fine lexical tuning: changes relative to children’s use of specific lexical items. In addition, it was investigated if those changes were similar depending on particular characteristics of the children, namely, differences in their hearing abilities. Longitudinal recordings of spontaneous speech of 30 children (0;6-2;0) with normal hearing (NH) and 10 hearing-impaired children with a cochlear implant (CI) (0;6-2;6), and their parents were analyzed. As to coarse tuning, it was found that the inflectional diversity of IDS decreased at the beginning of the child’s lexical development but increased again parallel to infants’ growing cumulative vocabulary. As to fine lexical tuning, IDS showed less inflectional diversity before each child’s first use of a word and gradually more inflectional diversity afterward. In addition, parents of children with CI used less inflectionally diverse speech than parents of children with NH, which suggests an adaptation to specific characteristics of the children. In conclusion, inflectional morphology in IDS appears to be tuned to children’s hearing status and linguistic knowledge.

ACCENTUAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MULTI-PURPOSE SUFFIX -ETS

The aim of the study is to analyze the prosodic realization of the different uses of the suffix -ets in order to verify the hypothesis that the prosodic profiles of the multi-purpose suffixes depend on the word-forming type (mutational or modificational). The suffix serves to form nomina agentis (boѐts ‘fighter’), nomina instrumenti (pisèts ‘nib’), nomina attributivа (hubavèts ‘handsome man’), national names - nomina habitatorium (japònets ‘Japanese’), nomina pertinentia (karteziànets ‘Cartesian’) and nomina diminutiva (hlèbets ‘bread’). The analysis shows that added to non-derivative bases, the suffix is marked as stressed when it forms nomina agentis, instrumenti, and nomina attributiva, composed of adjectives. It is pre-accented when it indicates belonging to nationality and is accentually not marked when added to nouns as a diminutive suffix. The suffix receives the word stress when it is associated with unaccented bases, but it is not stressed when it is attached to accented bases by virtue of the so-called inflection dependence (Steriade, Yanovic 2015). Inflectional forms are considered as a "collective basis" when choosing a stress option. Another important factor is the structure of the base (one-syllable or multi-syllable, derived or not). When added to another derivational suffix in a derived stem, -ets cannot affect the accentuation of the first phase of derivation in the logic of the distributive morphology.

Undergraduate Students’ Morphological Awareness and Difficulties in EFL Class

Students' vocabulary knowledge is related to their morphological awareness, which plays an essential role in word comprehension and vocabulary development. This case study is aimed at describing undergraduate students’ morphological awareness and difficulties in morpheme identification and word relationship. This study employed the MAT test in two analytical tests. The Morpheme Identification Test is used to measure how well first-year college students can analyze and break down complicated words into their smaller meanings. Meanwhile, the Word Relation Test is administered to measure undergraduate students’ awareness of relations among base or root words and their inflected or derived forms. An interview was used to support the results of the tests. The result showed that the students performed better in breaking down inflected forms than those in derived forms. As in the Word Relation Test, it was discovered that the students had done better in identifying morphologically related word pairs. There were three types of difficulties in the morpheme identification test. The first was in breaking down complex words into smaller morphemes; the second was in stating the meaning of each smaller morpheme, especially affixes; and the third was in categorizing the complex words into inflected or derived forms.

Nouns more similar to the nominative form are more frequent: a case study in Slovak

Abstract Grammatical cases of nouns are expressed by inflectional endings in Slovak. Therefore, nouns have several word forms, with the nominative considered the basic form. In addition to the endings, in some word forms there are morphophonological changes also in stems. The differences between the basic form and inflected forms are evaluated using the Levenshtein distance. We show that word forms more similar to the basic form occur more often. The category of animacy plays a very important role in the frequency behaviour of masculine nouns. The overall idea of the present paper is to give some insights into phenomena of noun inflection and to test various factors influencing and regulating the overall complexity of expressing certain required morphological information. It seems that word frequency, but also word length plays an important role. Moreover, it is shown that also gender and animacy has to be considered to understand noun declension in Slovak properly.

한국어 학습자의 속담 사용에 나타난 형태적 양상 분석

This study examines morphological aspects of the use of proverbs by Korean language learners through a corpus analysis of language learners’ sentences containing proverbs. The sentences showed a high proportion of basic forms and inflectional forms, indicating that Korean language learners use proverbs without variation. Moreover, it was found that grammatical errors made up an overwhelming proportion of all errors, showing that learners often make mistakes in the appropriate grammatical forms when using proverbs, such as the quotative verb suffixes or metaphorical signs, rather than having difficulty understanding the meaning or vocabulary of the proverb. While previous proverb education has focused on meaning, this study highlights the need for education based on the usage patterns of learners regarding the expression of quotations, grammatical forms, and variability when using proverbs.