Phrase Level Research Articles

The effect of speech training experiences on speechreading skills of Chinese children with hearing impairment

ABSTRACTSpeechreading contributes significantly to effective communication, and persons with hearing impairment (HI) may need to rely more on speechreading. However, whether they may benefit from training/practice to improve their speechreading performance remains unclear. In this study, we examine the effect of speech training on speechreading performance of children with HI in China, and how such effect, if any, may be influenced by age. Fifty-nine HI children with speech training experiences, and fifty-eight HI children without speech training experiences completed tasks measuring their ability to speechread Chinese at the linguistic levels of words, phrases, and sentences. The children ranged from 7 to 14 years old, and were divided into four age groups by two-year age intervals. Both accuracy rate and response time data were collected. Results revealed three findings: (1) HI children with speech training experiences speechread more accurately but more slowly than those without speech training experiences; (2) while speechreading performance generally improved with age, age didn’t alter the relative performance between the two groups; and (3) speechreading performance was best for phrases, and worst for sentences. These findings suggest that HI children benefit from speech training to improve their speechreading performance, and their speechreading performance is influenced by age, linguistic level, and the specific measure used.

24. ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

Language is an essential anamnestic source of information in psychiatry. More specifically, disorganized language is a core criterion for schizophrenia and analyzing this language may hold clues as to what it is that goes astray in the schizophrenic brain. However, language, in part due to its wide range of applications and nuances, is difficult to analyze and quantify. Through the advent of computational language processing, it has become possible to study a patient’s language functioning in an objective, quantifiable way. This creates the opportunity to use language as a marker for diagnosis, prognosis and perhaps treatment response of a patients with a schizophrenia spectrum disorder. Since language involves so many complex cognitive functions, a wide variety of aspects of verbal communication can be assessed by means of automated language analysis. The speakers in this symposium will use a wide range of approaches to assess different aspects of language in schizophrenia subjects, covering early detection and diagnosis (Natalia Mota), classification based on specific language markers (Guillermo Cecchi), symptom assessment and side-effects of medication (Alban Voppel) and the transformation of research into clinically useful tools (Terje Holmlund). First, Alban Voppel will present research investigating language disturbances in schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, both innate and those stemming from medication side-effects. Making use of among other measures a novel word2vec semantic and linguistic approach, disturbances were found between schizophrenia-spectrum patients and healthy controls, as well as between patients depending on dopaminergic characteristics of antipsychotics. Quantified markers derived from spontaneous language can be used both in assessing symptoms as well as side-effects that present possible confounders. Secondly, Dr. Guillermo Cecchi (IBM) will present research involving metaphor usage in ultra-high-risk as well as schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. His research shows that automated linguistic analyses of schizophrenia and its risk states can be extended from semantic coherence metrics at the phrase or sentence level to the level of single words. Since this method is also sensitive in regards to ultra-high-risk participants, it might be used as a screen to identify individuals with attenuated psychosis syndrome. Thirdly, Dr. Natalia Mota will present her research concerning early markers of thought disorganization found in speech structure. Using graph theoretical measures, disorganization was used to predict diagnosis; these measures were also used for assessing cognitive development. Subjects with psychosis were found to retain a linguistic structure more akin to that of children’s speech, failing to mature in complexity. Early identification of risk could make use of these measures of cognitive development of speech. As fourth presenter, Dr. Terje Holmlund will focus on challenges that need to be solved for successful implementation of language technologies in psychiatry, as well as some of the opportunities for translating the recent advances into clinically useful tools. Although new technological frameworks - that leverage speech technology and natural language processing methods - provide unprecedented opportunities for remotely monitoring behavior, the challenge of creating a useful analytic framework for clinical purposes remains. Finally, the discussant, Dr. Cheryl Corcoran will review the presented data in the context of her experience and ongoing leadership in the field of language analysis in psychosis, leading audience discussion and outlining suggestions for future research in this promising and fast-developing field.

Structural Analysis of Persian-English Reverse Code-Switching and Code-Mixing

Code-switching and code-mixing are considered dynamic conversational phenomena in interpersonal interactions, that is an alteration between two or more languages, dialectal variants, language registers, and it is an effective communicative strategy which Persian-English bilinguals consider a genuine thing in their ordinary speech practice. The focus of the present study is on the structural analysis of reverse code-switching between Persian and English that are known to be referred to two typologically different languages. Participants of the present research, all late bilinguals, reported on frequent use of code-switching (CS) and code-mixing (CM) in everyday language practice. CS/CM is quite normal and frequent among Iranian bilinguals, especially in informal settings where bilingual speakers can freely switch between their languages. Furthermore, the results revealed that Iranian bilinguals switch from English to Persian and in verso mostly at the lexical and the phrasal levels (intrasentential switching mode), but less frequently at the clausal or the sentence level (intersentential switching mode). The research states that there are some restrictions on inserting English verbs into the Persian syntactic frame: the Persian language is thought to be the matrix language and the preverbal part comes from English as the embedded language, such incongruity between the morphosyntactic structure and the verbal system of the Persian and English languages impose some constraints on the occurrence of switching codes between the pair of the languages under study.

LINGUISTIC MEANS OF ECONOMY IN THE ENGLISH DRAMATIC DISCOURSE

Some universal tends and trends in the sphere of linguistic economy at the lexical level are considered in the present article based on everyday communication contexts within the stylized colloquial fragments from modern English drama discourse. Moreover discursive markers providing the adequate interpretation of linguistic economy means and ways are discussed in view of the vital necessity to communicate effectively with minimum of speech efforts in the epoch of globalization. The purpose of this work was to identify the language characteristics and composition of the economical linguistic means of the English language in everyday communication, as well as to describe their role in the analyzed type of English discourse. Detailed study of the principle oflinguisticeconomy was made on the material of contemporary English and American playwrights of the end of ХХ the beginning of XXI centuries. The methods of linguistic description, structural-syntactic and semantic-syntactic analysis are used in the article.During the research the following overall findings are revealed: the compression in the modern English language is a highly efficient mean of linguistic economy. At the syntactical level of the linguistic system the concept of economy is implemented in ellipsis, as well as secondary predicative constructions. At the phonetic level, the principle of linguistic economy is reflected in such factors as assimilation, adaptation, qualitative and quantitative reduction. At the morphological level-in the survey. At the syntactical level (the phrase level) the linguistic economy is expressed in abbreviation. The research materials provide a wide field for further investigation on the linguistic economy in constantly changing everyday communication.

Domain modelling in Optimality Theory: Morphophonological cyclicity vs. stepwise prosodic parsing

This paper examines opaque examples of phrase-level phonology taken from Chilean Spanish under the framework of Stratal Optimality Theory (OT) (Rubach 1997; Bermúdez-Otero 2003, 2019) and Harmonic Serialism (HS) (McCarthy 2008a, b, 2016). The data show an interesting double repair of the coda /s/ taking place at word edges. It is argued that Stratal OT is superior in modelling phonological processes that take place at the interface between morphology and phonology because it embraces cyclicity. Under this model, prosodic structure is built serially, level by level, and in accordance with the morphological structure of the input string. In this way, opacity at constituent edges can be solved. Stratal OT also provides insight into word-internal morphological structure and the domain-specificity of phonological processes. It is demonstrated that a distinction in this model is necessary between the word and the phrase levels, and between the stem and the word levels. As illustrated by the behaviour of Spanish nouns, affixation and the resultant alternations inform us about the domains to which both morphological and phonological processes should be assigned. Against this background, Harmonic Serialism embraces an apparently simpler recursive mechanism in which stepwise prosodic parsing can be incorporated. What is more, it offers insight into the nature of operations in OT, as well as into such problematic issues as structure building and directionality. Nevertheless, despite the model’s ability to solve various cases of opacity, the need to distinguish between two competing repairs makes HS fail when confronted with the Chilean data under examination.

Acoustic correlates of word stress in Papuan Malay

The current study investigates acoustic correlates of word stress in Papuan Malay. This language is claimed to exhibit word stress, although empirical evidence is lacking. Moreover, related languages have been shown not to have stress, counter to earlier claims. Studies on stress in Austronesian languages have furthermore struggled to separate phrase level intonation phenomena from word level stress. The current study investigates a set of twelve potential acoustic correlates of stress, covering spectral, temporal and amplitudinal aspects of the speech signal. The measurements are taken from spontaneous Papuan Malay narratives. A subsequent comprehensive acoustic analysis was carried out and designed to avoid common pitfalls in the study of word stress. Results indicate that measures of duration, formant displacement and spectral tilt provide consistent evidence for the production of word stress in Papuan Malay.

A Cognitive Grammatical Study of Possessive Constructions in Orwell’s ‘A Clergyman’s Daughter’

This paper focuses on investigating the syntax and semantics of possessive constructions in A Clergyman’s Daughter at the phrasal level, within the framework of cognitive grammar using Heine’s (1997) model of possessives. The study aims at analyzing the various semantic relations in possessive constructions from a cognitive grammar perspective, and showing that possession does have a privileged status in the semantics of other concepts. This, however, proves the fallacy of the traditional view. It also shows that there is a natural and systematic relationship between possessive constructions and cognitive constructional schemas that give rise to them through conceptual transfer, and are motivated by experiential gestalt. No model alone can account for all semantic relations expressed through prototypical possessive. After analyzing possessive structures using Heine’s (1997) classification of possessives, there remains a group of other semantic relations that Heine (1997) could not have given a label; they are uncategorized. For underlying grammatical structures of these possessives, Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) model is used, which propose that aspects of the experiential gestalt motivate the wider use of too complex possessive constructions.

Campur Kode Penggunaan Bahasa dalam Acara Ini Talkshow di Net Tv: Kajian Sosiolinguistik

The study entitled "Mixed Language Usage Code In This Show Talkshow on Net Tv". There are three problems analyzed in this study, namely the types of code mix, mix language code language and the syntactic categories, and the factors that cause mixed code. The purpose of this study is to describe the types and mixed-code factors contained in the It Talkshow show on Net Tv. To achieve that goal used several methods and techniques. First, the process of collecting data using the method refer, which is assisted with techniques libat libat ably and technique record. Second, the process of data analysis used qualitative descriptive method and the method of agih, which is assisted by techniques of lesap. Third, the presentation of data analysis result is used informal method. The population in this study was 120 videos that aired from January to June 2016 downloaded from the youtube site. Sampling was done by quota sampling with 30 video samples. This research uses the theory developed by Fishman (1971), Jendra (2007), Chaer and Agustin (2010), and Chaer (2014). Based on the analysis that has been done in this show Talkshow on Net Tv, obtained results (1) types of mixed codes found, ie mixed into the code comes from Sundanese, Java, Batak, Betawi, and Bali. The mixed code comes from English and Arabic, and mixed mixed code comes from Sundanese and English; (2) mixed code based on the linguistic level found in the form of clause level, the phrase level is divided into the endocentric phrase and the exocentric phrase, the word level is divided into two, ie the word and the word back, and the syntactic categories found in the form of noun category, verb category, category adjectives, and pronoun categories; and (3) the factors behind the code mix are influenced by participants' speech factor, language factor, and factor of purpose of conversation.

P-CNN: Enhancing text matching with positional convolutional neural network

In recent years, positional information has shown good performance in deep neural networks for text matching. Most positional deep neural networks focus on modeling positional information based on the word-level matching signals, whereas the positional influence and interaction among texts have not been well studied during the generation of matching scores. In this paper, we propose a novel positional convolution neural matching model that holds positional influence and interaction in multiple perspectives for text matching. To be specific, we first encode the perspectives of positional information at the word level, the phrase level, and the sentence level. Then, a position-similarity mapping layer is defined to project word-level positional information to local matching signals, which bridges the gap between the word embedding input layer and the hidden convolutional layer. After that, a position-sensible convolution filter is proposed to capture and extract positional information at the phrase level and the sentence level. In particular, we assume that a phrase or sentence has an influence on its neighboring phrase or sentence, and the position-sensible convolution filter is generated on the basis of influence propagation, instead of a random matrix, as in the traditional convolutional neural network. Finally, we offer a multiple-perspective matching function to aggregate positional information at the word level, phrase level, and sentence level. Three standard datasets are used to evaluate our approach, namely ClueWeb-09-Cat-B for web search and TREC-QA and WikiQA for answer selection. It is notable that we achieve the new state-of-the-art performance on ClueWeb-09-Cat-B. Furthermore, on TREC-QA and WikiQA, our model outperforms all deep neural network approaches without an attention mechanism, and is comparable to if not better than approaches that rely on attention mechanisms.

Exploring the Paradigmatic Thinking and Representation in R. E. Obeng’s <i>Eighteenpence</i>: Beyond Plot

When narratives are mentioned, the first thing that springs to mind is plot. Plot is important because of its reference to development and process, which make possible the outlining and enacting of the forms of life that shape up around a particular time and structure. Meaning-making in a narrative is generally dependent on this arrangement and the forms of life it creates from it. Nonetheless, in producing meaning, plot is not the only way of designing a narrative. One other significant way of structuring or designing narratives and creating meaning in narratives is through a pattern: juxtapositioning, parallelism and contrasts. In these meaning making processes of either plot or pattern, time is significant. Plot depends upon a linear sequential process implicating process and development and therefore a beginning, a middle and an end, or time in progression, whereas pattern depends upon time that is held static in a paradigmatic structure of an eternal present, conflating past, present and future. Pattern can occur at the level of words, but also at the level of phrases and sentences (stylistics), or at the level of scenes, chapters, and in parts or divisions. The most essential thing to recognize about all this, however, is that the pursuit and crucial aspect of a narrative is that it seeks to create its own world through the process of packaging what it is creating through a design. The underlying principle of this packaging is ‘tying together’. Hence narratives tie together people, objects and facts. And they tie them together in a manner that is stylistically and grammatically acceptable. By tying together objects and facts, and tying people together, and by doing so through stylistic and grammatical means, the argument of the narrative is conveyed at a more implicit level than through an explicit level such as for plot; that is, through the very textual organization of accounts. Using R. E. Obeng’s Eighteenpence as example, this paper investigates the significance and effectiveness of creating consequence and meaning through the design patterns of juxtapositioning, parallelism and contrast for narratives which foreground the textual and structural organization of accounts to convey their meaning and arguments. Obeng’s Eighteenpence is the first full-length Ghanaian novel (1967), preceding Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968).

Prosodic asymmetries in nominal vs. verbal phrases in Bantu

Investigations into phonological differences between nouns and verbs focus almost exclusively on the lexical (word) level, showing that underlying contrasts are more numerous and stable (“faithful”) on nouns (Smith 1998, 1999). This raises the question of whether these (or other) alleged differences in word level phonology generalize to the nominal vs. verbal phrase. The Bantu family provides an ideal testing ground for such an investigation. Based on Bantu, I show that nouns are more likely to undergo modification at the phrase level than verbs, thereby obeying less “faithfulness” to the input than verbs. Nominal phrases also show more distinct outputs and complex idiosyncracies than their verbal counterparts. After establishing that there are distinct asymmetric properties in the phrasal phonology of nominal vs. verbal constituents in Bantu, I raise the question of what causes these asymmetries and whether they are general or pertain only to Bantu and other African languages.

НАВЧАННЯ ДІАЛОГІЧНОМУ ТА МОНОЛОГІЧНОМУ ЯПОНСЬКОМУ МОВЛЕННЮ: ОНЛАЙН-КУРС

The article represents basic psychological, psycholinguistic and methodological background of development of the online course for teaching basic Japanese dialogue and monologue. The mentioned prerequisites are to be seen in close relation to the modern tendencies of foreign language teaching. The role of modern teacher as a representer of the teaching process as well as facilitator of the studying process itself is also described. Basic factors that influence the process of forming communicative competence in Japanese language are presented. Thus, among methodological background the process of organizing studying by teacher, the individualization principles in teaching are mentioned. The individual styles of learning, as well as individual strategies are presented as essential psychological prerequisites of the studying process. The psycholinguistic process of getting the new information is presented as one of the factors of forming the communicative competence in speaking. Based on the mentioned factors, the online course for teaching basic Japanese dialogical and monological speech is described. The course is being at the process of development. The article deals with its basic steps of studying. Some practical aspects of the future course usage are shown. The course includes three basic steps, which present the whole process from getting sample phrases and text till presenting fluent self-made dialogues and speeches in Japanese. The first step presents video materials and printed materials where students get the information on the phrase level. The video component of the course allows saving the auditory time by doing a big amount of work online. The second step presents authorial dialogues in video and printed form. Together with the basic structure needed to present the dialogue students are given some extra information of cross cultural character. The aim of the step is to present self-made dialogues by students. The third step suggests work on the speech level. The purpose of the last step lies in creating authorial students` speeches based on the given material. The course presents a complex system of online and printed materials which, together with the teacher`s work in class, enable fast development of speaking skills. Furthermore, the perspectives of the future usage of the course are laid as a base for its practical development.

The Fall and Rise of Vowel Length in Bantu

Author(s): Hyman, Larry M. | Abstract: Although Proto-Bantu had a vowel length contrast on roots which survives in many daughter languages today, many other Bantu languages have modified the inherited system. In this paper I distinguish between four types of Bantu languages: (1) Those which maintain the free occurrence of the vowel length contrast inherited from the proto language; (2) Those which maintain the contrast, but have added restrictions which shorten long vowels in pre-(ante-)penultimate word position and/or on head nouns and verbs that are not final in their XP; (3) Those which have lost the contrast with or without creating new long vowels (e.g. from the loss of an intervocalic consonant flanked by identical vowels); (4) Those which have lost the contrast but have added phrase-level penultimate lengthening. I propose that the positional restrictions fed into the ultimate loss of the contrast in types (3) and (4), with a concomitant shift from root prominence (at the word level) to penultimate prominence (at the intonational and phrase level). In the course of covering the above typology and historical developments in Bantu, will show that there are some rather interesting Bantu vowel length systems, which I compare to tone, that may or may not be duplicated elsewhere in the world.

How canaries listen to their song: Species-specific shape of auditory perception.

The melodic, rolling songs of canaries have entertained humans for centuries and have been studied for decades by researchers interested in vocal learning, but relatively little is known about how the birds listen to their songs. Here, it is investigated how discriminable the general acoustic features of conspecific songs are to canaries, and their discrimination abilities are compared with a small parrot species, the budgerigar. Past experiments have shown that female canaries are more sexually responsive to a particular song element-the "special" syllables-and consistent with those observations, it was found that special syllables are perceptually distinctive for canaries. It is also shown that canaries discriminate the subtle differences among syllables and phrases using spectral, envelope, and temporal fine structure cues. Yet, while canaries can hear these fine details of the acoustic structure of their song, the evidence overall suggests that they listen at a more global, phrase by phrase level, rather than an analytic, syllable by syllable level, except when attending to some features of special syllables. These results depict the species-specific shape of auditory perception in canaries and lay the groundwork for future studies examining how song perception changes seasonally and according to hormonal state.

The Levels of English-Arabic Code-Mixing in Islamic Boarding School Students’ Daily Conversation

This study was aimed at discovering the levels of English-Arabic code-mixing in Islamic boarding school students’ daily conversation. This study departs from code-mixing theory in sociolinguistics. Qualitative approach was utilized as the research design. The data were in the form of word, phrase, and clause taken from utterances obtained by recording the conversations of students. From the data analysis taken from 20 situations, there were 98 utterances of code mixing, which were used by students in their conversation at Islamic boarding school covering intra- and extra-sentential code – mixing. The dominant occurrence is in word level totalling to 65 occurrences (66.4%), followed by clause level 13 occurrences (13.2%), phrase level 10 occurrences (10.2%), and sentence level 10 occurrences (10.2%). Therefore, the code – mixing did exist in students’ conversation. Even though the appearance of the code – mixing in students’ conversation was not really high but this needs to be re-examined the correct use of the code – mixing in orther to avoid the misunderstanding and miscommunication among the students and with teachers.

Old Finnish language and written Finnish literature in 1560–1640

The genesis of the old Finnish language (1560-1640) is unique due to two historical reasons: first, the literature of this period was religious; secondly, religious and literary languages represented a single entity. The material of the study was the texts of the period of Catholicism and early Lutheranism (1560-1640). The author employed the analysis of semantic models, rhetorical devices, language structures (helped to identify the peculiarities of the formation of the old Finnish language and the reasons for the growth of its influence on the audience), content analysis of texts (allowed to trace the stages of transition in the church service from Latin and German to Finnish) were used. Comparison of folk texts with the translated ones revealed their common features (repetitions at the level of phrase and alliteration). The development of Old Finnish language was decelerated by the excessive use of the Latin language. However, by the middle of the 16th century, the external and internal political situations in Finland were in favour of using the Finnish language as an instrument of religious authority and a means of cultural influence on society. The written literature of Finland in the studied period was of a translatable state. The translated literature was pivotal in the formation and development of verbal art. Educated people (Justen, Finno, Hemminki from Mask, Sorolainen and L. Petri) made a vast contribution to the written language. Due to them, it was enriched with various forms of dialects and a greater lexicon.

Derivation of the Apparent Narrow Scope of Sentence-Final Particles in Chinese: A Reply to Erlewine (2017)

Abstract Erlewine (2017) suggests that certain sentence-final particles (SFPs) in Mandarin Chinese such as “sentential le” and eryi are located lower than the C-domain, using a number of arguments relating to the scopal interaction of these SFPs, subjects, and other verb phrase (vP) level elements. The present paper proposes an alternative view of the phenomena considered by Erlewine (2017) and maintains the claim that sentential le and eryi are C-domain elements. First, I argue that shi ‘be’, in the negative form – bu shi ‘not be’ – should be analyzed as an independent verb, which takes a clausal complement headed by le or eryi. The apparent narrow scope of le and eryi is due to the biclausal analysis of the entire sentence. Second, the sentence-initial determiner phrase (DP) cannot be analyzed as the real subject of the verb shi ‘be’ but must be analyzed as the matrix topic of the entire sentence and, therefore, is higher than the complementizer phrase (CP) headed by le or eryi. This explains why sometimes le or eryi does not have scope over the subject. Third, the wh-subject cannot get an indefinite reading in a sentence with a final particle le because the ∃-closure triggered by le applies at the I′-level by excluding the subject systematically (Huang 1982). The ∃-quantifier, which is introduced in a position lower than the surface subject position, cannot bind the wh-subject as a variable. The position where ∃ is generated remains independent of whether the ∃-closure is triggered by low particles, such as le, or by high particles, such as the yes–no question particle ma. Therefore, the low peripheral particles le and eryi are still within the CP domain and thus higher than vP.

Poetic speech melody: A crucial link between music and language.

Research on the music-language interface has extensively investigated similarities and differences of poetic and musical meter, but largely disregarded melody. Using a measure of melodic structure in music––autocorrelations of sound sequences consisting of discrete pitch and duration values––, we show that individual poems feature distinct and text-driven pitch and duration contours, just like songs and other pieces of music. We conceptualize these recurrent melodic contours as an additional, hitherto unnoticed dimension of parallelistic patterning. Poetic speech melodies are higher order units beyond the level of individual syntactic phrases, and also beyond the levels of individual sentences and verse lines. Importantly, auto-correlation scores for pitch and duration recurrences across stanzas are predictive of how melodious naive listeners perceive the respective poems to be, and how likely these poems were to be set to music by professional composers. Experimentally removing classical parallelistic features characteristic of prototypical poems (rhyme, meter, and others) led to decreased autocorrelation scores of pitches, independent of spoken renditions, along with reduced ratings for perceived melodiousness. This suggests that the higher order parallelistic feature of poetic melody strongly interacts with the other parallelistic patterns of poems. Our discovery of a genuine poetic speech melody has great potential for deepening the understanding of the music-language interface.

Slang in “If You Know What Happened in MCI”

Abstract—This study classifies the form and formation of slang as a kind of an extra-linguistic form. To achieve the objective, the theory of word formation (Ridwan, 2003) was used. Data were obtained from “If You Know What Happened in MCI” novel. Referential method was made use in analyzing the data. The results of data analysis show that slang language occurs not only at the word level, but also at phrase and clause level. The majority, however, occurs at the word level. Language types included in the slang construction are not bound to one language but of many kinds, such as Indonesian, English, local language, mixture of two different languages and some of unrecognizable languages which were intensely code-mixed. Slang are formed through ten processes: coinage; borrowing; compounding; blending; clipping; conversion; back formation; acronym; derivation; multiple processes. Future nature of language would be adding on the existing theory of word formation, particularly that of morphological process of new words formation. 
 Keywords: Slang; word formation; “If You Know What Happened in MCI” novel

Loss and preservation of case in Germanic non-standard varieties

This paper deals with inflectional change in Germanic standard and non-standard varieties, challenging the standard model of phonologically driven case loss in favour of a model that allows for interaction between phonological, syntactic, and purely morphological processes. After providing evidence from the language histories of the modern, standardised varieties of High German and Swedish which calls into question the exclusive role of phonology, we concentrate on two Germanic non-standard varieties: Visperterminen Alemannic, a successor of Old High German, and Övdalian, which stems from Old Dalecarlian (Old Swedish is used as a proxy to Old Dalecarlian). Both can serve as a testing ground for system-internal morphological change, as they carry on specific phonological aspects of their ancestral varieties, and have not been subject to excessive language contact that could have triggered external simplification processes. Using these non-standard varieties as an empirical base, we examine the patterns of loss of inflectional case marking and corresponding compensation strategies on the level of the nominal phrase. It can be shown that, while there are extensive syncretisms in noun inflection, these are systematically compensated for in the noun phrase for dative, but not for the nominative-accusative syncretism. The systematic (non-)compensation in the noun phrase can be explained by word order. Based on our results, we propose an alternative model for morphological change in Germanic that is less prone to counterevidence from non-standard varieties.