Inflectional Suffixes Research Articles

Longitudinal effects of different aspects of morphological awareness skills on early spelling development

The purpose of this 3-year longitudinal study was to examine the role of three morphological awareness (MA) aspects (inflectional, derivational, and lexical compounding) in the spelling of specific morphemes. Two hundred and fifteen Greek children were followed from kindergarten (K) to grade 2 (G2). In K and grade 1 (G1) they were tested on measures of morphological awareness, letter knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and general cognitive ability. At the end of G1 and G2, they were also tested on spelling of (a) inflectional suffixes in words and pseudowords, (b) familiar stems in simple words, and (c) familiar simple stems in low frequency derived words and in pseudowords with existing derived morphemes. The results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that the derivational aspect of MA in K and the lexical compounding aspect of MA in G1 predicted uniquely the spelling of inflectional suffixes in both words and pseudowords in G1 and G2 respectively. In addition, the lexical compounding aspect of MA in K and G1 predicted the spelling of familiar stems in simple words and the spelling of familiar simple stems in low frequency derived words in G1 and G2 respectively. Inflectional aspect of MA did not predict later performance in any spelling measure. These findings speak to the importance of early MA skills in spelling of specific morphemes and provide supportive evidence to those who suggest that morphological knowledge is part of children’s repertoire of strategies employed in spelling, even at the first stages of learning to spell.

Eye movement control in Turkish sentence reading.

Reading requires the assembly of cognitive processes across a wide spectrum from low-level visual perception to high-level discourse comprehension. One approach of unravelling the dynamics associated with these processes is to determine how eye movements are influenced by the characteristics of the text, in particular which features of the words within the perceptual span maximise the information intake due to foveal, spillover, parafoveal, and predictive processing. One way to test the generalisability of current proposals of such distributed processing is to examine them across different languages. For Turkish, an agglutinative language with a shallow orthography-phonology mapping, we replicate the well-known canonical main effects of frequency and predictability of the fixated word as well as effects of incoming saccade amplitude and fixation location within the word on single-fixation durations with data from 35 adults reading 120 nine-word sentences. Evidence for previously reported effects of the characteristics of neighbouring words and interactions was mixed. There was no evidence for the expected Turkish-specific morphological effect of the number of inflectional suffixes on single-fixation durations. To control for word-selection bias associated with single-fixation durations, we also tested effects on word skipping, single-fixation, and multiple-fixation cases with a base-line category logit model, assuming an increase of difficulty for an increase in the number of fixations. With this model, significant effects of word characteristics and number of inflectional suffixes of foveal word on probabilities of the number of fixations were observed, while the effects of the characteristics of neighbouring words and interactions were mixed.

Morphological Spelling

This study aims at contributing to the discussion on the role of the early printers in the regularisation and standardisation of the English spelling. It assesses the degree of early printers’ (in)consistency concerning morphological spelling, in particular the spelling of third person singular present tense (indicative) inflectional endings of verbs in six editions of The book of good maners (1487–1526), printed by William Caxton, Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde. The analysis suggests that early printers could have been interested in regularising spelling already before normative guidance from scholars became available in the form of grammars and spelling books, that is before the middle of the sixteenth century. However, the levels of the printers’ spelling consistency varied, depending on the particular printing house and edition.

Grammatical Gender in Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from Determiner-Noun Contexts in Greek

Τhe present study investigates whether Greek-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) face difficulties in the acquisition of gender in determiner-noun contexts, as expressed via agreement οn the determiner. The results of an elicitation task with real and novel nouns showed that children with SLI (a) show difficulties primarily with masculine and feminine gender marking, and do not use prototypicality of the noun suffix, as typically developing children do, to mark the gender on the determiner in conditions with real nouns, and (b) do not use, with the same consistency as typically developing children do, the noun ending as a cue to mark the gender value on the determiner in conditions with novel nouns. It is argued that although grammatical gender is considered an intrinsic lexical property of the noun, it is not learned by children with SLI along with other lexical features of the noun. Moreover, when lexical information is not provided in the nouns, children with SLI cannot process morphology cues, such as the inflectional suffixes on the nouns, as consistently as typically developing children do.

Le desinenze personali nella morfologia verbale delle carte cavensi (IX secolo)

Summary:This paper aims to examine some aspects of the verbal inflectional endings found in a corpus of 9th-century legal documents produced in the Lombard duchy of Salerno, in the South of Italy. Compared to nominal inflection, verbal inflection endings display a stronger continuity with the Latin of previous stages. Nevertheless, different types of innovations are observable. On the basis of data from present indicative and subjunctive, two of them will be analysed: 1) innovative forms explicable in terms of well-known morpho-phonological processes and showing convergence with the Romance outcomes 2) innovative variants, that can be interpreted in different ways, diverging both from previous stages of the Latin and from the Romance outcomes. To interpret both these kinds of variation, a crucial role is played by external factors such as the cultural level of the authors of the documents and their capability to conform to the traditional linguistic models.

Affixations and Allomorphs in Verbs and Nouns in a Research Abstract: A Morphemic and Morphophonemic Analysis

This study aims to analyze and describe the morphemic and phonemic structures of verbs and nouns in a research abstract as source of data. The morphemic structure analysis focuses on the free-bound morphemic affixations of English verbs and nouns while the morphophonemic analysis focuses on the allomorph variations of the inflectional morphemes in English verbs and nouns. Findings of the study reveal that majority of the verbs used in the research abstract have inflectional type of affixations where a bound morpheme is added to the stem as suffix. These morphemes mark tense and number of verbs. The nouns, on the other hand, generally have derivational affixation that involves appending of suffixes to the verb form to derive the noun form. This study affirms that English verbs and nouns generally have inflectional suffixes to mark grammatical categories such as tense and number. In another note, both of the verbs and nouns with inflectional morphemes undergo phonological modifications in terms of their allomorphic variants. The allomorphs [s], [z] and [iz] of the morpheme{s} are used to mark number in nouns and tense in verbs while the allomorphs [d], [ǝd] and [t] of the morpheme {d} mark the tense in regular verbs with inflectional morphemes. The allomorphs in both verbs and nouns involve voicing assimilation and dissimilation as phonological processes. The implications of the findings of the study would be that second language learners of English need to familiarize the morphemic structure of words as they can be very helpful in understanding the meanings of words. Moreover, they have to familiarize the environments where the allomorphic variants of inflectional morphemes are realized so that they would be able to pronounce the words correctly. Such interaction of morphology and phonology can cause learning difficulty for second language learners of English whose first language, like the Cebuano Visayan, is sounded as spelled and is contrary to English which has allophonic and allomorphic variants occurring in words. The analysis can therefore be helpful to teachers in identifying areas of difficulty in learning a second language.

A usage-based approach to productive use of inflectional patterns and level of lemma sophistication in adult heritage speakers’ performance

AbstractAdopting a usage-based perspective, the present study assesses the mental lexicon of Turkish heritage speakers in the UK (HSs,n = 31) regarding the productive use of formulaic inflectional suffix templates and the level of sophistication of the lemmas produced in free speech. We additionally explore input-related predictors of this performance by comparing HS performance to that of a group of previous generation immigrant bilinguals (IBs,n = 61), who are representative input providers, and of a group of monolinguals (n = 44). The results show that overall, both the HSs and IBs diverge from the monolinguals in that they use nominal suffix sequences less productively and rely on less sophisticated nominal lemmas. Their verbal productivity performance, however, remains intact. We argue that altered input results in a performance which diverges from that of the monolinguals but converges on the immigrant variety. The individual variability is partly explained by the amount of L1 passive exposure, indicating that the HSs are not sensitive only to the changes in the input available to them but also to the amount of it. These findings provide new insights into the line of research that describes HSs as incomplete due to their L1-divergent skills in comparison to a monolingual baseline.

The processing of pseudoword form and meaning in production and comprehension: A computational modeling approach using linear discriminative learning

Pseudowords have long served as key tools in psycholinguistic investigations of the lexicon. A common assumption underlying the use of pseudowords is that they are devoid of meaning: Comparing words and pseudowords may then shed light on how meaningful linguistic elements are processed differently from meaningless sound strings. However, pseudowords may in fact carry meaning. On the basis of a computational model of lexical processing, linear discriminative learning (LDL Baayen et al., Complexity, 2019, 1–39, 2019), we compute numeric vectors representing the semantics of pseudowords. We demonstrate that quantitative measures gauging the semantic neighborhoods of pseudowords predict reaction times in the Massive Auditory Lexical Decision (MALD) database (Tucker et al., 2018). We also show that the model successfully predicts the acoustic durations of pseudowords. Importantly, model predictions hinge on the hypothesis that the mechanisms underlying speech production and comprehension interact. Thus, pseudowords emerge as an outstanding tool for gauging the resonance between production and comprehension. Many pseudowords in the MALD database contain inflectional suffixes. Unlike many contemporary models, LDL captures the semantic commonalities of forms sharing inflectional exponents without using the linguistic construct of morphemes. We discuss methodological and theoretical implications for models of lexical processing and morphological theory. The results of this study, complementing those on real words reported in Baayen et al., (Complexity, 2019, 1–39, 2019), thus provide further evidence for the usefulness of LDL both as a cognitive model of the mental lexicon, and as a tool for generating new quantitative measures that are predictive for human lexical processing.

Morphological operations in French verbal inflection: Automatic, atomic, and obligatory

In this article, we examined how complex words are recognized as being mediated by their morphological operations and structure. French verbal inflection is a system where the stems provide the lexical meaning and the inflectional suffixes activate the functional information by the morphosyntactic features. We investigated the morphological decomposition and inflectional suffixes processing through visual lexical decision tasks. Experiment 1 accessed general differences in the number of morphological operations regarding low and high frequencies, and regular and irregular verbal forms (e.g., jou-ent/jou-ai-ent ‘they play/played’, prend-s/pren-ai-s ‘yousg take/took’). Experiment 2 tested specific differences in the tense and agreement inflectional suffixes (e.g., jou-ons/jou-i-ons/jou-ez/jou-i-ez ‘we/youpl play/played’). Our hypothesis is that words are automatically decomposed early for morphological processing and that morphemes are later hierarchically recombined for word recognition. We found significant differences between the number of morphological operations in regular and irregular verbs in low and high frequencies; we also found significant differences in tense and agreement suffix processing with longer responses for the past tense and first plural agreement verbal forms, suggesting additive effects. Our results are supported by single-mechanism pre-lexical decompositional models; we propose a model where stems and inflectional suffixes are processed differently for lexical access and word recognition.

Об относительной хронологии второй регрессивной и прогрессивной палатализаций общеславянского языка

This article examines one of the oldest conundra of Slavic historical linguistics, namely the relative chronology of the II regressive and the progressive palatalizations of velar obstruents. To do so, it is first of all shown that these palatalizations constitute two discrete innovations and not a single bidirectional change. On the basis of a thorough analysis of the competing hypotheses it is then argued that the assumption of a relative chronology which dates the progressive before the II regressive palatalization (Pedersen’s chronology), allows the attested forms to be accounted for best. The main complication relating to this chronology concerns certain inflectional endings of the Old Church Slavonic pronouns vьsь and sicь. In the instrumental singular masculine and neuter and the genitive, dative, instrumental and locative plural these pronouns show endings of the hard inflectional type instead of the expected soft-stem endings. Contrary to what may be considered the communis opinio, this peculiarity can, however, be explained by means of a morphological innovation. This assumption is supported by evidence from the medieval Novgorod and Pskov dialects. Three morphological mechanisms, which may have been involved in the rise of the unexpected endings, are discussed: proportional analogy, product-oriented innovation and syntagmatic assimilation. Examples of typologically parallel developments from Slavic and other languages are provided in order to substantiate the claim of a morphological innovation.

ɸ-agreement within Construct State in Jordanian Arabic

AbstractThis paper shows that the head noun of the Construct Statemayɸ-agree (in Number and Gender) with the accompanying DP associate in Jordanian Arabic. When it occurs, this agreement is, however, only invoked when the DP associate is referential (e.g.,galam ʔil-walad‘the boy’s pen’>galamuhiʔil-waladi, butbarbiiʃ ʔil-ʁaaz‘the gas pipe’>*barbiiʃ-uhiʔil-ʁaazi). The paper provides a syntactic account of this observation which clearly demonstrates that Construct States do not constitute a homogenous group. We specifically argue that the head D° of the Construct State is endowed with a bundle of uninterpretable, unvalued ɸ-features which are valued via Agree by the DP associate of the Construct State. The outcome of this valuation, when it occurs, may surface as an inflectional suffix that appears on the head noun occupying this position, i.e. D°, in PF. For why D°-related uninterpretable ɸ-features are only valued by referential DPs, we propose that this follows from the assumption that such DPs carry a [person] feature, hence ɸ-complete, unlike nonreferential DPs which lack a [person] feature, and hence ɸ-incomplete. ɸ-incompleteness makes non-referential DPs incapable of valuing uninterpretable ɸ-features carried by c-commanding heads in Jordanian Arabic.

ERRORS FOUND ON THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION SENTENCES OF THE THIRD-YEAR STUDENTS OF ENGLISH AT IKIP BUDI UTOMO

This study aimed to describe and classify the grammatical errors found on English translation sentences in terms of syntax and morphology. The analysis procedure applied was based on the surface strategy taxonomy proposed by Dulay et al. in which errors were categorized into errors of: omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. The result of this study indicated that the highest frequency is errors of misformation which covers 58 errors (46%), followed by omission which covers 47 errors (27%), addition with 12 errors (10%), and the lowest is misordering, 9 errors (7%). In terms of syntax and morphology, the researcher found 17 errors (18%) in articles, 7 errors (7%) in pronouns, 21 errors (22%) in prepositions, 15 errors (16%) in inflectional endings, 26 errors (28%) in tenses, and 8 errors (9%) in derivational endings. Thus, errors in tenses are the highest frequency of errors, and, errors in derivational morphemes are the lowest.

용언에서 기원한 관형사의 검토 - -관형사와 관형사형의 구분을 위하여 -

The purpose of this research is to examine the criteria of how to distinguish Korean adnominals originated from predicates from inflected predicates. In order to achieve this goal, I first examined the criteria of how to define adnominals as a part of speech. The result shows that only morphological and syntactic characteristics of the word at hand have should be considered, except the semantic characteristics. That is, any words that have subcategorization frames, theta-roles and cases associated with its arguments should be classified as inflected predicates. Any words that can have any other inflectional endings other than its already existing ending should also be classified as inflected predicate. Adnominals have neither of these abilities. Some methods applying the two criteria are re-examined in this study, and I argue that many words considered as adnominals originated from predicates until now should be classified into inflected predicates. This research also discusses some peculiar syntactic behaviors of the adnominals.

Affixations and Allomorphs in Verbs and Nouns in a Research Abstract: A Morphemic and Morphophonemic Analysis

This study aims to analyze and describe the morphemic and phonemic structures of verbs and nouns in a research abstract as source of data. The morphemic structure analysis focuses on the free-bound morphemic affixations of English verbs and nouns while the morphophonemic analysis focuses on the allomorph variations of the inflectional morphemes in English verbs and nouns. Findings of the study reveal that majority of the verbs used in the research abstract have inflectional type of affixations where a bound morpheme is added to the stem as suffix. These morphemes mark tense and number of verbs. The nouns, on the other hand, generally have derivational affixation that involves appending of suffixes to the verb form to derive the noun form. This study affirms that English verbs and nouns generally have inflectional suffixes to mark grammatical categories such as tense and number. In another note, both of the verbs and nouns with inflectional morphemes undergo phonological modifications in terms of their allomorphic variants. The allomorphs [s], [z] and [iz] of the morpheme{s} are used to mark number in nouns and tense in verbs while the allomorphs [d], [ǝd] and [t] of the morpheme {d} mark the tense in regular verbs with inflectional morphemes. The allomorphs in both verbs and nouns involve voicing assimilation and dissimilation as phonological processes. The implications of the findings of the study would be that second language learners of English need to familiarize the morphemic structure of words as they can be very helpful in understanding the meanings of words. Moreover, they have to familiarize the environments where the allomorphic variants of inflectional morphemes are realized so that they would be able to pronounce the words correctly. Such interaction of morphology and phonology can cause learning difficulty for second language learners of English whose first language, like the Cebuano Visayan, is sounded as spelled and is contrary to English which has allophonic and allomorphic variants occurring in words. The analysis can therefore be helpful to teachers in identifying areas of difficulty in learning a second language.

Pashto-English Contact: The Role of Suffixation in Hybridizing Lexical Items

The study investigates the role of suffixation in Pashto-English hybridization at the word level and the sociolinguistic significance of such hybridization. Data from electronic media, including programmes from Khyber News, representing both formal and informal domains of language use, is used for the study. The programmes selected include Top Stories, News Hour, Mohim Repotuna, Naway Sahar and Sports Mag. Employing content analysis as a research method, a quantitative approach for the investigation of hybridized English lexical category and a qualitative approach for its sociolinguistic significance have been used. The present study employs the framework presented by Kachru (1978), as adapted by Rasul (2006). The findings of the research show that noun is frequently hybridized both in formal and informal domains of language used mostly by the addition of Pashto inflectional suffixes. It is concluded that suffixation got an important role in Pashto-English hybridization that leads to the creation of hybrid forms predicting language shift and the emergence of a new variety of Pashto.

A MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF DERIVATIONAL AND INFLECTIONAL MORPHEMES

Morphological analysis is the main areas in studying vocabulary. Morphological analysis itself is analysis that is breaking a word into its elements (root, prefix and suffix). This study was conducted to analyze the use of derivational and inflectional morphemes in the song lyric “A thousand years” by Christina Perri. This study applied descriptive qualitative research which researchers found out the derivational and inflectional suffixes from the words in “A thousand years” lyric. The results of analyzing data were found in this study are derivational morphemes –ly consist of 2 words and inflectional morphemes –s plural, -s third singular person present tense, -ed past tense, -ing progressive and –er comparative consist of 57 words.

Ex-neuter-gender nouns in Canadian Doukhobor Russian

This paper addresses the morpho-syntactic forms of ex-neuter-gender of Canadian Doukhobor Russian nouns. Doukhobor Russian is a near-extinct variety of Russian spoken by a small group of elderly Doukhobors (a religious and ethnic minority of Russian origins) residing mostly in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta. While Standard Russian has three noun genders (feminine, masculine and neuter), this paper demonstrates that in Doukhobor Russian, a neuter gender erosion has been taking place, whereby ex-neuter-gender nouns have been shifting their declension paradigms mostly to feminine F1 declension forms. Ex-neuter-gender words in Doukhobor Russian also mostly agree with pronouns, attributives, and numerals in feminine gender. They also predominantly agree in feminine gender with preterite verb forms. Two major subclasses of ex-neuter-gender nouns are identified: those in which the stem is stressed and those in which the stress is on the inflectional vowel. A stressed vowel in an inflectional suffix of the nominative and the accusative blocks the paradigm shift of ex-neuter-gender nouns, but does not prevent female gender agreement with attributives and preterite verb forms. The discussion identifies parallels of neuter-gender erosion in Doukhobor Russian with similar processes found in 19th and 20th century Russian dialects.

Phonological constraints on morphology: Evidence from Old English nominal inflection

AbstractStudying the complex interaction between phonological and morphological developments involved in the extensive reorganisation of nominal inflection in early English, we focus, primarily, on new inflectional endings that emerged by analogy in etymologically suffix-less paradigm forms ofr-stems and root nouns. We argue that the analogical changes were essentially reactive to phonological developments, and to a large extent predictable in statistical terms. Investigating correlations in corpus data, we identify the factors that affected the probability that new analogical endings were adopted. The predictors of the directions of analogical change that we show to be robust include the syllable structure of the root, the salience of inherited and analogical inflectional markers, as well as their absolute and relative frequencies.

A Corpus-based Linguistic Analysis of Latin Frequentative Verbs

Considering that Latin frequentative verbs have transparent morphological structure (the supine stem of the base verb concatenated with the frequentative -itare suffix and regular first conjugation inflectional endings), one would assume that the meaning of each such verb is related in a predictable way to that of its corresponding base verb, and that all members of the frequentative class share semantic entailments. However, frequentative verbs resist a uniform semantic analysis and can mean something entirely unpredictable from the sum of their parts, and traditional and contemporary definitions of frequentatives ignore the degree of idiomaticity between frequentative form and function and are based on limited corpus data. This paper provides a synchronic, corpus-based linguistic analysis of frequentative verbs in comparison to their base forms from both derivational (source-oriented) and usage-based (product-oriented) perspectives in order to explore the nature of the Latin frequentative. The paper concludes that a usage-based, product-oriented treatment of the data provides a more straightforward characterization of Latin frequentative verbs, highlighting the interconnectedness of morphology, syntax, and semantics.

Connecting the Different Lexical Category Domains: Cognition in the Zero Derivation of Adjectives from Nouns in Macedonian

Cognition is a basis of cognitive linguistics and a driving force in the noun to adjective zero-derivation. By expanding the meaning of the first lexeme, cognition enables the speaker to derive a new lexeme, and empowers the hearer to understand the semantics of the newly zero-derived element. The paper studies the process of noun to adjective zero-derivation through cognition. It studies the semantic similarity between the same-form lexemes – the source and the target lexeme, which belong to different lexical categories, one is a noun and the other is an adjective, in the case when cognition and association links enable the process of zero-derivation to take place. The research method applied here is that Macedonian nouns are taken, compared to Macedonian adjectives with the same form, but similar meaning, when it is exactly the similarity in meaning that is studied, actually, the speaker’s and hearer’s motivation to zero-derive an adjective from a noun. The conclusion of the paper notes that the morphological identity (derivationally) and the semantic similarity (through cognition), between the two lexemes in Macedonian, can be accompanied by inflectional suffixes for number, definiteness and gender - modifications that can be made to both lexemes. Consequently, the natural-class noun from the left is zero-derived into an adjective on the right, when, in most cases of this kind of zero-derivation, it appears in, what is originally, a two-noun phrase, in which the second remains to be a noun, while the first becomes a zero-derived adjective.