Inflectional Information Research Articles

KannadaLex: A lexical database with psycholinguistic information

Databases containing lexical properties are of primary importance to psycholinguistic research and speech-language therapy. Several lexical databases for different languages have been developed in the recent past, but Kannada, a language spoken by 50.8 million people, has no comprehensive lexical database yet. To address this, KannadaLex , a Kannada lexical database is built as a language resource that contains orthographic, phonological, and syllabic information about words that are sourced from newspaper articles from the last decade. Along with these vital statistics like the phonological neighbourhood, syllable complexity summed syllable and bigram syllable frequencies, and lemma and inflectional family information are stored. The database is validated by correlating frequency, a well-established psycholinguistic feature, with other numerical features. The developed lexical database contains 170K words from varied disciplines, complete with psycholinguistic features. This KannadaLex is a comprehensive resource for psycholinguists, speech therapists, and linguistic researchers for analyzing Kannada and other similar languages. Psycholinguists require lexical data for choosing stimuli to conduct experiments that study the factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language. Speech and language therapists query these databases for developing the most efficient stimuli for evaluating, diagnosing, and treating communication disorders, and rehabilitation of speech after brain injuries.

La conceptualización del núcleo en las construcciones (pseudo)partitivas: la concordancia sujeto-verbo

The aim of this work is to analyze the influence of semantic-pragmatic factors in the establishment of Spanish subject-verb agreement in those cases in which the nominal that functions as a subject is manifested through a (pseudo)partitive construction, formed by a singular nucleus + plural prepositional phrase (un grupo de neurocientíficos han decidido acabar con los interrogantes del experimento / un grupo de chicos se acercó a mí y comenzaron a golpearme). The Royal Spanish Academy defines agreement as the “formal expression of various syntactic relationships” (NGLE, 2009: 13). It states that this relationship arises from the morphological agreement between two lexical units that are in specific positions. The agreement, then, is understood, from a syntactic position, as the reiteration of inflectional information in various places in the chain. However, from cognitive linguistics, the establishment of agreement is about a conceptual superposition, a common characteristic of grammatical constructions, whereby the same information is symbolized in multiple places” (Langacker, 2008, p. 347). Based on the notions of figure and ground proposed by Langacker (1991 and 2008), our hypothesis argues that the agreement between the subject and the verb is defined, in the cases analyzed, according to the conceptualization of the nominal and which is the element that the speaker brings into focus during the construction of his speech.

Factors of the sentence comprehension in serbo-croatian

The article investigates the influence of the factors: Animacy, Case inflection, and Noun-verb agreement on sentence comprehension 54 simple transitive sentences were presented to the each subject and their task was to pick out the actor in the sentence. Six psychology students participated in the experiment. The results indicate that the strategy of decodeing case inflectional information is used more often than the strategy of decodeing agreement or animacy information. In the situation where the inflectional information is not present or is ambiguous, then the strategies of decodeing the other kind of information are dominant.

The influence of word order and case inflection on sentence comprehension at preschool children

In 3x3 experimental design researh the influence of word order and case inflection was investigated. The experimental materials were 36 three-word simple transitive sentences, which were presented to each subject. Each sentence was in one of the possible forms of word order (NVN, NNV, VNN), and case inflection (Nom.-Acc.; Acc.-Nom.; Without-Without). There were nine different forms of presented sentences. The subjects were 16 (6 years old) preschool children (8 boys and 8 girls) from kindergarden. The results were analyzed with the analysis of variance and they showed that there is no significant influence of word order on sentence interpretation, except in the situation when we have a sentence without inflectional information. In that situation word order is an important information for the decision who/whait is the actor in the sentence. The results concerninig case inflection gave us the information that there is a dominant influence of case inflection in sentence processing. Our subjects made their decision about the actor in the sentence governed by case inflectional information whenever that kind of information was present.

Lexical access in non-fluent aphasia: a bit more on reduced processing

ABSTRACTBackground: Lexical access problems of inflected verbs are common in aphasia. Previous research addressed these problems either in purely linguistic terms (e.g., verb movement) or in terms of lexical characteristics (e.g., frequency). We propose a new measure of verb complexity, which combines linguistic and lexical characteristics and is formulated in terms of Shannon’s information theory.Aims: We aim to explore the complexity of individual verbs and verb paradigms and its effect on lexical access, both in unimpaired people and people with aphasia (PWA). We apply information theory to investigate the impact of verb complexity on reaction time (RT) for lexical decision.Methods & Procedures: 20 non-fluent aphasic subjects and 11 age-matched and education-matched peers performed an auditory lexical decision task containing 286 real and 286 phonotactically legal non-word past tense forms (regulars and irregulars). RTs and error rates were measured. Two information-theoretic measures were calculated: inflectional entropy (reflecting probabilistic variability of forms within a given verbal family) and information load (I) (reflecting complexity of an individual verb form). The effect for these and other more traditional measures on RT were measured.Outcomes & Results: Linear mixed model analyses to the data for each group with participant and verb as crossed random effects were performed. Results show that for all groups inflectional entropy had a facilitatory effect on RT. There was a group effect for inflectional entropy indicating that for the patients with aphasia the effect of inflectional entropy was less pronounced. At the same time, I did correlate with latencies for healthy adults but not for individuals with aphasia.Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that the decrease in lexical processing capacity characteristic for PWA has a measurable effect that can be calculated using information theoretical means. According to our model, these individuals have particular difficulties with processing lexical items of higher complexity, as measured by individual I, and benefit less from the support normally provided (in comprehension) by other members of the corresponding lexical network. Finally, the proposed information-theoretic complexity measures, which encompass both frequency effects and linguistic parameters, provide a superior measure of lexical access, and have a better explanatory power for the analyses of access problems found in non-fluent aphasia, compared to analyses based on frequency only.

Elementy informacji gramatycznej w słowniku pod red. Tadeusza Lehra-Spławińskiego jako przykład uwarunkowań socjokulturowych w leksykografii

Elements of grammatical information in the dictionary edited by T. Lehr-Spławiński, as an example of socio-cultural factors in lexicography
 The paper examines the convention of formulating the inflectional information, especially pertaining to grammatical cases, in Trzaska, Evert, and Michalski’s Dictionary of Polish that was edited in the interwar period by T. Lehr-Spławiński. The author attempts to determine what factors informed the use of a lexicographically innovative solution that nonetheless did not upset the linguistic tradition, and has proven both very functional and influential for future conventions in Polish lexicography. The analysis of nominal inflection presented in the dictionary is compared to analyses in numerous academic and popular grammars, mostly from the interwar period or widely known at the time, and in the context of the publishing layout of the editor who contracted Lehr-Spławiński. The aim of the paper is to highlight the significant role that research on the sociocultural context plays in metalexicographical studies and in a better understanding and interpretation of dictionaries, not so much as linguistic compendia, but also as texts of culture.

Rules Versus Statistics: Insights From a Highly Inflected Language

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages.

Hindi noun inflection and Distributed Morphology

This paper primarily presents an analysis of nominal inflection in Hindi within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994 and Harley and Noyer 1999). Müller (2002, 2003, 2004) for German, Icelandic and Russian nouns respectively and Weisser (2006) for Croatian nouns have also used Distributed Morphology (henceforth DM) to analyze nominal inflectional morphology. This paper will discuss in detail the inflectional categories and inflectional classes, the morphological processes operating at syntax, the distribution of vocabulary items and the readjustment rules required to describe Hindi nominal inflection. Earlier studies on Hindi inflectional morphology (Guru 1920, Vajpeyi 1958, Upreti 1964, etc.) were greatly influenced by the Paninian tradition (classical Sanskrit model) and work with Paninian constructs such as root and stem. They only provide descriptive studies of Hindi nouns and verbs and their inflections without discussing the role or status of affixes that take part in inflection. The discussion on the mechanisms (morphological operations and rules) used to analyze or generate word forms are missing in these studies. In addition, these studies do not account for syntax-morphology or morphology-phonology mismatches that show up in word formation. One aim of this paper is to present an economical way of forming noun classes in Hindi as compared to other traditional methods, especially gender and stem ending based or paradigm based methods that give rise to a large number of inflectional paradigms. Using inflectional class information to analyse the various forms of Hindi nouns, we can reduce the number of affixes and word-generation and readjustment rules that are required to describe nominal inflection. The analysis also helps us in developing a morphological analyzer for Hindi. The small set of rules and fewer inflectional classes are of great help to lexicographers and system developers. To the best of our knowledge, the analysis of Hindi inflectional morphology based on DM and its implementation in a Hindi morphological analyzer has not been done before. The methods discussed here can be applied to other Indian languages for analysis as well as word generation.

Solving the bracketing paradox: an analysis of the morphology of German particle verbs

Inflectional affixes are sensitive to morphological properties of the stems of the verbs they attach to. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the inflectional material is combined with both the verbal stem of simplex verbs and the verbal stem of particle verbs. It has been argued that this leads to a bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional information scopes over the complete particle verb. I will discuss nominalizations and adjective derivation, which are also problematic because of various bracketing paradoxes. I will suggest a solution to these paradoxes that assumes that inflectional and derivational prefixes and suffixes always attach to a form of a stem that already contains the information about a possible particle, but without containing a phonological realization of the particle. As is motivated by syntactic properties of particle verbs, the particle is treated as a dependent of the verb. The particle is combined with its head after inflection and derivation. With such an approach no special mechanisms for the analysis of particle verbs are necessary.

Morphology of German particle verbs

The fact that inflectional affixes always attach to the verbal stem leads to the bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional information scopes over the complete particle verb. I will discuss nominalizations and adjective derivation, which are also problematic because of various bracketing paradoxes. I will suggest a solution to these paradoxes that assumes that inflectional and derivational prefixes and suffixes always attach to a form of a stem that contains the information about particles already, but without containing a phonological realization of the particle. The particle is a dependent of the verb and is combined with its head after inflection and derivation. With such an approach no rebracketing mechanisms are necessary.

Effected Objects in English and Spanish

This paper examines resulting objects in English and Spanish. Fillmore's (1968) concept of effected object, e.g. He built the table has been extended to include certain resulting objects which are not sub categorized by their verbs: He kicked a hole in the door, She smiled her thanks or They pushed their way through the crowd. These constructions, we argue, are formed by fusing two semantic predicates into one: the object expresses a result while the verb designates the means by which the intended result is achieved. An analysis of corpus examples demonstrates that they are neither totally lexicalized nor regular productive patterns. The intermediate lexicalized position in question is due to a gradual metaphoric process found in this English construction, a process not allowed in Spanish. The paper concludes that the inability of Spanish to fuse two semantic predicates in this lexically unfilled resulting construction, which works independently of the particular lexical items that instantiate it, may be a consequence of the rigidity of its lexical items, which are strongly marked by morphology. The lack of inflectional information of most English words, on the contrary, confers more grammatical power to the construction.

What underlies inflectional error patterns in genetic dysphasia?

We compare linguistic and non-linguistic explanations which attempt to account for the difficulties that individuals with genetic dysphasia experience with inflectional morphology. The non-linguistic explanations that we focus on are low performance IQ and performance deficits which are manifested at the level of auditory processing or at the mapping between representation and articulatory output. We argue that none of these hypotheses can account for the patterns observed; the impairment lies in the construction of the grammar itself. We hypothesise that the dysphasic grammar lacks sublexical (morphological) features which mark inflectional information in languages. Consequently, the grammar does not contain the morphological rules which introduce these features and, following from this, there is no structure internal to ‘inflected’ words. We summarise the experimental evidence which supports this hypothesis.

Finite-state abstractions on Arabic morphology

There has been much interest recently in two-level and associative models for handling morphologically rich inflectional languages. Such models are claimed to have advantages over generative, rule-based approaches in terms of not just conceptual appropriateness but also computational efficiency. The claim with regard to the former is that, whilst generative approaches to morphology may well be useful for inflectionally simple natural languages such as English (where most of the processing is carried out at the sentence level, with dictionaries and lexicons being accessed to identify secondary inflectional information once primitive words are found), this approach is not at all suitable for inflectionally rich languages where grammatical information is carried not by the combination or pattern of distinct and separate words which make up the sentence but by the combination or pattern of inflections within a ‘word’ where, for instance, there are no clear boundaries between morphological constituents. The claim with regard to the latter is that many generative approaches to natural language are inefficient and, in some cases, computationally intractable, because of the heavy memory and processing demand placed on implementing actual models based on these approaches for anything more than a constrained fragment of a language. This paper describes an application of finite-state automata for Arabic noun inflections which leads to abstractions based on network topology as well as the form and content of network arcs. The idea of specific automata for specific inflection types inheriting some or all of the nodes, arc form and arc content of abstract automata representing more abstract classes of inflection is also introduced. This can lead to novel linguistic generalities and applications, as well as advantages in terms of procedural efficiency and representation.

Young children's use of phrase structure and inflectional information in form-class assignments of novel nouns and verbs

The ability of 3.5- to 5-year-old children to use phrase structure and inflectional information in form-class assignments of novel nouns and verbs was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1 perfor mance was assessed on singular and plural nouns and on verbs with -s and -ing inflections. Accurate form-class assignments were made for all but the -ing inflection. This is attributed to a conflict between phrase structure and inflectional cues. In Experiment 2 a new sentence frame was used with verb -ing, which did not present conflicting cues. Performance was significantly better than in Experiment 1. The results are interpreted in terms of a model that proposes that phrase structure and inflectional cues to form-class are learnt independently but serve as interacting sources of information. The cues may interact in a complementary or competitive fashion. For English, the competition is resolved, in developmental terms, in favour of phrase structure cues as the more reliable source of information about form-class. This is adaptive for the grammar of English.

Grammatical information effects in auditory word recognition

Three lexical decision experiments were concerned with the separability of syntactic and semantic processing in spoken word perception. An additional experiment examined the problem of measuring reaction times to a spoken stimulus. Words in the Serbo-Croatian language were used; each stimulus consisted of a noun stem (which was either a meaningful root or a pseudoword stem) plus an inflectional suffix which conveyed information about the noun's grammatical case. Speed of identifying the inflectionally related forms of a noun was a function of differences in their syntactic meanings rather than differences in their physical forms or their actual frequencies of occurrence. In addition, identification of a noun was facilitated when it was preceded by a stimulus carrying predictive inflectional information whether that stimulus was a real adjective or pseudoadjective. The results echo previous findings for word perception in print and provide evidence of essential structural uniformity in the processing of inflection for both spoken and printed words. For both, there is evidence that inflectional processing is modular, at least to the extent that it is independent from semantic processing for the initial portion of its time course.

The word order myth.

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this research was to investigate the function of word order, inflections and discourse context in the sentence comprehension process. Ten 2; 6 and ten 3; 6 Polish children acted out sentences with toys. The target sentences were either inflected or uninflected, and given inflectional information sentences were ordered SVO or OVS. Context sentences established given information which was in initial or final position in the target sentences. When inflectional information was available, all the children used it effectively with very little interference from OVS and new–given arrangements. In spite of the fact that word order distributes given and new information in adult Polish, children could utilize word order to recover semantic functions with uninflected sentence problems.