Inflectional Morphology Research Articles

Démonette-2, a derivational database for French with broad lexical coverage and fine-grained morphological descriptions

Morphological databases play an important role in linguistic research today. While several exist for the study of inflectional morphology in French, there is still a lack of resources for derivational morphology. This article presents Démonette-2, a new release of the French derivational morphology database Démonette. Developed in the context of the Démonext project, this database provides a framework in which it is possible to integrate various existing derivational resources. Démonette is characterized by its relational nature, which makes it possible to describe an extensive set of word formation patterns, including suffixation, prefixation, and a variety of non-canonical derivational processes such as conversion and parasynthetic formations. It reconciles broad coverage and fine-grained descriptions and is suitable for different audiences: morphologists working in different theoretical frameworks, teachers, speech therapists, NLP specialists, etc. The article presents in detail the structure and content of Démonette, its evolution since the first version, and its query interface.

Working memory and proficiency:

This study aimed to delve into the role of working memory and proficiency concerning functional morphology in second language processing. We performed two tasks, an acceptability judgment with memory load and a 2-back, with higher and lower proficiency Brazilian Portuguese-English learners. We measured their proficiency level and investigated their performance in working memory capacity and inflectional morphology processing. The morphemes under investigation were the third-person singular (-s) and the regular past tense (-ed) in grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. Our results indicate that neither working memory nor proficiency influenced their performance. These findings seem related to the allocation of attentional resources since they could not focus on the missing morphemes in the acceptability judgment task.

Alyawarr English

Abstract This paper explores Alyawarr English, a new contact language spoken in Ipmangker, a remote Alyawarr community of Central Australia. Focusing on language use by children and drawing on a corpus of 50+ hrs of naturalistic video recordings, several aspects of Alyawarr English are examined in detail. The analysis centres on the origins of nominal and verbal morphology, with comparison to the patterns of replication evidenced in other new Australian contact languages. This reveals that children’s Alyawarr English has several points of symmetry with these languages. Nominal inflectional morphology is primarily derived from Alyawarr sources. Verb morphology is primarily derived from Kriol/English sources. The lexicon is derived from both Kriol/English and Alyawarr sources. Variation between morphology of Alyawarr and Kriol/English sources is also considered in each domain, to further elucidate what gets replicated and why in the ongoing development of new Australian contact languages.

Central Siberian Yupik Influence on Sirenikski Verbal Inflection

AbstractLanguage contact is pervasive in the history of all Eskaleut languages of the Pacific Rim, and the languages show contact effect regardless of typological similarity or degree of relatedness. Moreover, the degree of contact has allowed for the borrowing of features that are generally thought of as relatively impervious to borrowing, including verb inflection. In particular, Sirenikski has been in close contact with the closely related language Central Siberian Yupik, and contact effects on the phonology, prosodic system and lexicon have been well described, however, the verbal inflectional morphology has largely been assumed to be cognate. In this article, I present evidence that some elements of the inflectional paradigm have been borrowed from Central Siberian Yupik.

The Birth and Death of Affixes and Other Morphological Processes in English Derivation

Linguistic change in morphology is usually discussed mainly in relation to change in inflectional morphology. In this paper, the focus is shifted to derivational morphology, where the issues are not entirely the same. In particular, the origins (or birth) of affixes and the loss (death) of affixes are central to the present discussion, with formal, semantic and pragmatic factors all having a role to play. The question is also raised as to whether it is, in principle, possible to tell that any affix is completely dead.

Analogy in Inflection

Analogy has returned to prominence in the field of inflectional morphology as a basis for new explanations of inflectional productivity. Here we review the rising profile of analogy, identifying key theoretical and methodological developments, areas of success, and priorities for future work. In morphological theory, work within so-called abstractive approaches places analogy at the center of productive processes, though significant conceptual and technical details remain to be settled. The computational modeling of inflectional analogy has a rich and diverse history, and attention is now increasingly directed to understanding inflectional systems through their internal complexity and cross-linguistic diversity. A tension exists between the prima facie promise of analogy to lead to new explanations and its relative lack of theoretical articulation. We bring this to light as we examine questions regarding inflectional defectiveness and whether analogy is reducible to grammar optimization resulting from simplicity biases in learning and language use.

The grammaticality judgement of inflectional morphology in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder

ABSTRACT To explore the clinical potential of grammaticality judgement tasks, this study investigated whether a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) of inflectional morphology could differentiate between a clinically selected sample of children with DLD and children in mainstream (i.e. regular education) schools. We also explored the relationship between grammaticality judgement and measures of receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, and nonword repetition. Children with DLD (n = 30; age range = 69–80 months) and mainstream children in Pre-primary, Year 1, and Year 2 (n = 89, age range = 61–96 months) were assessed on a GJT of regular past tense, third person singular, and possessive ‘s. The GJT was sensitive to developmental differences in mainstream children and differentiated children with DLD from Year 1 and 2 mainstream children, with DLD results consistent with a one-year delay in performance compared to controls. The GJT was the strongest discriminator of membership to a clinically selected sample of children with DLD (ROC curve analysis, area under the curve = 88%). Receptive grammar, receptive vocabulary, and nonword repetition were related to performance on the GJT. The grammaticality judgement of inflectional morphology shows promise as a reliable indicator of DLD and a measure sensitive to developmental differences in mainstream children. GJTs should continue to be explored for clinical application as a potential tool for both assessment and intervention.

High accurate detection method for aortic valve opening of seismocardiography signals

Accurately detecting the aortic valve opening (AO) peaks of seismocardiography (SCG) is a challenging problem due to interference of other morphological inflection points. In this paper, a high accurate method is proposed to extract AO peaks based solely upon the SCG data. The raw SCG signal is purified by a simple first order interference cancellation method, resulting in a reduced number of modes to be decomposed. The purified SCG signal is then decomposed into a series of quasi-orthogonal modes by successive variational mode decomposition (SVMD) without any prior about the number of modes. Considering the pulsatile nature of the AO signal, a waveform factor criterion is proposed to reconstruct the AO signal based on the pulsatile level of each mode. A seventh power law detector is designed to amplify the AO peak and suppress spurious peaks. The publicly available combined measurement of electrocardiogram (ECG), breathing and seismocardiograms (CEBS) database is exploited to verify the performance of the proposed method. We show that the average sensitivity of our technique is 99.02%, the prediction rate is 99.06%, and the detection accuracy is 98.10%, which is superior to several state-of-the-art methods. In addition, compared with the ECG reference value, the instantaneous heart rate extracted by the proposed method is in good agreement with that of the ECG, e.g., the maximum average absolute error percentage is as low as 2.11 and the maximum average value relative error is about 0.03, further demonstrating that the proposed method can achieve accurate estimates of heart rate with an accelerometer alone.

Neural machine translation systems for English to Khasi: A case study of an Austroasiatic language

Neural machine translation has predominantly outperformed previous machine translation models primarily for resourceful languages. However, very little work has been reported for resource-constrained languages such as Khasi. The Khasi language belongs to the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family and is spoken primarily in the state of Meghalaya in India. Although performing neural machine translation for the under-resourced Khasi language is difficult, we build a substantial parallel corpus of English–Khasi. We apply three segmentation methods in the datasets for our experiments: untokenized, tokenized and a subword BPE (Byte Pair Encoding). Experiments are carried out on this dataset with different aspects of neural machine translation systems using cutting-edge architectures such as LSTM (Long Short Term Memory), GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) and a transformer based model for the English–Khasi language pair. We also carry out experiments by adapting the transfer learning approach using English-Vietnamese as the parent language pair and English-Khasi as the child language pair. This work reports a quantitative and qualitative analysis of several models based on architectural and data segmentation methodologies. The experimental findings show that the model adapted using the transfer learning approach achieved a reasonable improvement in BLEU scores with the highest being 58.1 BLEU on similar domains and 17.7 BLEU for the general domain outscoring the other models for the same language pair. Qualitative analysis is carried out focusing on the morphological inflections of gender identification in the translated output.

Functional priority of syntax over semantics in Chinese ‘ba’ construction: evidence from eye-tracking during natural reading

AbstractStudies on sentence processing in inflectional languages support that syntactic structure building functionally precedes semantic processing. Conversely, most EEG studies of Chinese sentence processing do not support the priority of syntax. One possible explanation is that the Chinese language lacks morphological inflections. Another explanation may be that the presentation of separate sentence components on individual screens in EEG studies disrupts syntactic framework construction during sentence reading. The present study investigated this explanation using a self-paced reading experiment mimicking rapid serial visual presentation in EEG studies and an eye-tracking experiment reflecting natural reading. In both experiments, Chinese ‘ba’ sentences were presented to Chinese young adults in four conditions that differed across the dimensions of syntactic and semantic congruency. Evidence supporting the functional priority of syntax over semantics was limited to only the natural reading context, in which syntactic violations blocked the processing of semantics. Additionally, we observed a later stage of integrating plausible semantics with a failed syntax. Together, our findings extend the functional priority of syntax to the Chinese language and highlight the importance of adopting more ecologically valid methods when investigating sentence reading.

Relationship between lexicon and grammar in children and youth who use augmentative and alternative communication

The present study investigated the relationship between lexicon and grammar in individuals who use graphic symbol-based aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). Data came from 60 transcripts of generalization sessions that were part of two previous intervention studies, aimed at improving the expressive vocabulary and grammar of 12 children and youth who used graphic symbol-based AAC. The specific aims of the current study were to (a) describe vocabulary composition across different levels of expressive vocabulary and (b) analyze the relationship between global measures of expressive vocabulary and the use of grammar in individuals who use aided AAC. A series of multiple linear mixed effect regression analyses showed a positive predictive association between overall vocabulary size and the use of closed-class words, and a positive relationship between the use of verbs and the use of closed-class words. Additionally, the use of verbs had a significant positive association with the use of inflectional morphology, while the use of nouns did not. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Aspectual se and Telicity in Heritage Spanish Bilinguals: The Effects of Lexical Access, Dominance, Age of Acquisition, and Patterns of Language Use

While differences in the production and acceptability of aspectual inflectional morphology between Spanish–English heritage and monolingually raised speakers of Spanish have been argued to support incomplete acquisition approaches to heritage language acquisition, other approaches have argued that differences in access (e.g., lexical access) to representations for receptive and productive purposes are at the core of some of the unique characteristics of heritage language data. We investigate these issues by focusing on the effects of lexical access, dominance, age of acquisition and patterns of language use in heritage Spanish–English bilinguals. We study aspectual se in Spanish, which yields telic interpretations, in expressions such as María se comió la manzana ‘María ate the apple (completely)’ and Maria ate the apple (where completion may not be reached). Our results indicate that se generates telic interpretations for the heritage and monolingually raised group with no group effect. Heritage speakers showed no English effects in terms of lexical access, age of acquisition, patterns of language use or dominance. This suggests that the heritage group did not differ from their monolingually raised counterparts and showed no evidence of incomplete acquisition of telicity.

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.

Contrasting a phenomenon at the syntax-discourse interface

This paper discusses the results of a contrastive analysis of subject-verb inversion (SVI) in English and Macedonian, a South Slavic language. We look at sentences, typically encoding thetic statements, in which the subject follows the verb. Both English and Macedonian belong to SVO languages, but unlike English, Macedonian word-order is considerably more flexible due to its rich inflectional morphology. Our main goal is to determine the scope of distribution of SVI in the two languages which will enable to discover the reasons for the distributional differences in the two languages. To achieve this, we compared the semantic, syntactic and discourse-pragmatic properties of the inverted structures in the examples collected from parallel fiction and academic texts. The sharp differences in the use of SVI between the two languages indicate that lexical and grammatical constraints severely restrict SVI in English, in contrast to Macedonian where it is governed by discourse principles.

Continuous Sign Language Recognition and Its Translation into Intonation-Colored Speech.

This article is devoted to solving the problem of converting sign language into a consistent text with intonation markup for subsequent voice synthesis of sign phrases by speech with intonation. The paper proposes an improved method of continuous recognition of sign language, the results of which are transmitted to a natural language processor based on analyzers of morphology, syntax, and semantics of the Kazakh language, including morphological inflection and the construction of an intonation model of simple sentences. This approach has significant practical and social significance, as it can lead to the development of technologies that will help people with disabilities to communicate and improve their quality of life. As a result of the cross-validation of the model, we obtained an average test accuracy of 0.97 and an average val_accuracy of 0.90 for model evaluation. We also identified 20 sentence structures of the Kazakh language with their intonational model.

Interfaces between Inflectional and Derivational Morphology in Romanian

. In this paper I present a few cases from Romanian where the distinction between inflectional and derivational morphology is not clear-cut or where an affix crosses from one category to the other: a derivational suffix which becomes a plural/inflectional desinence marker in section 1., the use of a plural desinence with derivational value in section 2., the use of the definite article (inflectional suffix) as a derivational affix in section 3., and the analysis of an affix as either derivational, inflectional or both in section 4. The examples provided are from standard and regional contemporary Romanian, with a few diachronic observations.

The inflection of Latin masculine proper names inThe Old English Martyrology

AbstractThis paper focuses on the inflectional morphology of Latin masculine proper names in Old English. Most common Latin loans are perfectly integrated into the Old English system. Latin proper names, however, like late scholarly loans, show both Latin and Old English inflectional endings in an apparently chaotic distribution. By analysing a selection of 833 tokens fromThe Old English Martyrology, this paper shows that despite variation, a clear pattern resulting from a combination of the Latin and Old English systems can be detected. While the inflectional endings of one language dominate in some cases, e.g. Latin in the nominative and Old English in the dative, other inflections, e.g. the genitive thematic vowel + ‑s,result from a combination of both languages based on phonetic or spelling similarities. The result is a mixed paradigm predominantly modelled after Old Englisha-stem nouns.

The blurring of the boundaries: changes in verb/noun heterosemy in Recent English

Abstract Conversion is a common feature of present-day English, leading to many ‘heterosemous’ words that express related meanings across multiple word classes. Especially common is verb/noun heterosemy, as in flow or hand, both of which can be used as verbs or as nouns. The prevalence of verb/noun heterosemy sets English apart from closely related Germanic languages and is one respect in which English behaves as a language with high boundary permeability. This paper investigates how verb/noun heterosemy has been evolving in Recent English (1920s–2010s). Using quantitative analysis within a large sample of 877 heterosemous words, it is shown that associations between specific words and word classes have been weakening over the last century. More precisely, within our sample, heterosemous words on average tend to develop towards more balanced heterosemy, whereby their association to either one word class or another becomes less pronounced. The findings suggest that English is in the process of a long-term drift towards greater boundary permeability. As high boundary permeability has been associated with low reliance on inflectional morphology in a language, this could be a long-term consequence of the overall loss of inflections earlier in the history of the language.

The use of verbal inflections in Inuktitut child and child-directed speech

Inuktitut is a polysynthetic agglutinative language of the Inuit-Yupik-Unangan language family, with nearly 900 verbal inflections. Despite the complexity of its inflectional system, children acquiring Inuktitut as their native language start using inflections relatively early (Crago & Allen, 2001; Swift & Allen, 2002). One hypothesis is that caregivers simplify their child-directed speech (CDS) in a way that helps the children to break into the system. To date, relatively little research has focused on the use of inflections in CDS. The current study uses the data from eight Inuktitut-speaking children aged 1-4 years and their mothers to investigate whether and how the use of verbal inflections (VIs) in CDS changes as the children advance linguistically, and whether the children’s use of VI corresponds with the input they receive. We found a significant increase in the number of different VIs and the total number of VIs in the mothers’ CDS as their children went from Stage 1 to Stage 6 of linguistic development. Children’s use of VIs follows the general patterns of VI acquisition cross-linguistically. Further, as children progressed linguistically, they seemed to rely less on the input from their mothers, since they increasingly used VIs not previously found in their mothers’ CDS (from 16% in Stage 2 to 75% in Stage 6). These results correspond with other studies’ findings of CDS simplification and extend our understanding of how inflectional morphology is adapted in CDS.

Morphological Effects on Orthographic Learning in Monolingual English-Speaking and Bilingual Chinese-English-Speaking Children

ABSTRACT Morphological knowledge is known to be positively associated with reading ability. However, whether morphological knowledge affects children’s learning of new orthographic representations is less clear. Purpose This study aimed to investigate morphological effects on orthographic learning in English, and whether this effect, if any, is different for monolingual compared to Chinese-English-speaking bilingual children, who often have difficulty acquiring English inflectional morphology. Method 59 Year 2 children, including 29 English-speaking monolinguals and 30 Chinese-English-speaking bilinguals participated. We assessed children’s preexisting English inflectional morphological knowledge. The children learned twelve novel words that were either presented with morphological variation (e.g., vack, vacks, vacking, vacked) or pure repetition (e.g., vack x 4). Orthographic learning was measured by orthographic choice and spelling tasks. Results 1) orthographic learning from the spelling task showed better performance in the repetition condition, 2) there were no differences in orthographic learning between the monolinguals and bilinguals, despite the fact that the monolinguals had better inflectional morphological knowledge than the bilinguals. Conclusion Children learned novel written words better when they are presented without morphological variation, supporting the item-based feature of the self-teaching hypothesis. Chinese-English-speaking bilinguals’ weaker English morphological knowledge does not seem to hinder their orthographic learning ability.