Morpheme Level Research Articles

Word- and Morpheme-Level Code-Switching in Crow

The Crow or Apsaalooke language, a member of the Siouan family, is spoken on and near the Crow Reservation in Southeastern Montana. Crow still exhibits considerable vitality, with three to four thousand speakers, virtually all of whom are bilingual—to various degrees—in Crow and English. There are many more Crows in their teens, twenties and thirties who understand Crow, and are able to speak it to a limited extent. And there are still a few children who are learning Crow as their first language. The high degree of bilingualism among Crow speakers leads to a considerable amount of code-switching. According to my analysis there are two quite different varieties of code switching. The first variety entails switching back and forth between Crow and English on the sentence, clause and phrase level. This type of code-switching occurs most commonly among speakers who are less fluent in Crow, or are more accustomed to using English in everyday conversation, often because they are married to a non-Crow-speaking spouse or are living offreservation. I am not going to say anything more about this variety. The second variety, which will be the focus of this paper, occurs on the word and morpheme level, and is employed by fluent Crow speakers.

Universals in semantics

This article surveys the state of the art in the field of semantic universals. We examine potential semantic universals in three areas: (i) the lexicon, (ii) semantic “glue” (functional morphemes and composition principles), and (iii) pragmatics. At the level of the lexicon, we find remarkably few convincing semantic universals. At the level of functional morphemes and composition principles, we discuss a number of promising constraints, most of which require further empirical testing and/or refinement. In the realm of pragmatics, we predict that Gricean mechanisms are universal, but suggest that the precise nature of presuppositions may be subject to cross-linguistic variation. Finally, we follow E.L. Keenan in concluding that the overarching universal of effability or translatability between languages cannot be upheld in its strongest form. A recurring theme throughout this survey is how much work still remains to be done in the relatively young field of cross-linguistic formal semantics.

Russian voice interface

In the paper, we describe a system SIRIUS for recognition of continuous Russian speech, which is developed in the group of speech informatics of SPIIRAS. The specific feature of this system is that the language and speech are represented on morphemic level. This allows one to significantly reduce the size of lexically recognizable dictionary and increase the processing rate. We describe the process of introduction of the Russian speech recognition system into the area of infotelecommunications for voice access to the Internet-version of the electronic catalogue “Yellow Pages of Saint Petersburg” with the purpose of creation of an automated call-center for answering subscriber’s calls. In the paper, we demonstrate the results of testing the system work with speech samples recorded both in offices and in conditions of phone conversations.

Text analysis and language identification for polyglot text-to-speech synthesis

In multilingual countries, text-to-speech synthesis systems often have to deal with texts containing inclusions of multiple other languages in form of phrases, words, or even parts of words. In such multilingual cultural settings, listeners expect a high-quality text-to-speech synthesis system to read such texts in a way that the origin of the inclusions is heard, i.e., with correct language-specific pronunciation and prosody. The challenge for a text analysis component of a text-to-speech synthesis system is to derive from mixed-lingual sentences the correct polyglot phone sequence and all information necessary to generate natural sounding polyglot prosody. This article presents a new approach to analyze mixed-lingual sentences. This approach centers around a modular, mixed-lingual morphological and syntactic analyzer, which additionally provides accurate language identification on morpheme level and word and sentence boundary identification in mixed-lingual texts. This approach can also be applied to word identification in languages without a designated word boundary symbol like Chinese or Japanese. To date, this mixed-lingual text analysis supports any mixture of English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. Because of its modular design it is easily extensible to additional languages.

Do transposed-letter similarity effects occur at a morpheme level? Evidence for morpho-orthographic decomposition

When does morphological decomposition occur in visual word recognition? An increasing body of evidence suggests the presence of early morphological processing. The present work investigates this issue via an orthographic similarity manipulation. Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the transposed-letter similarity effect (e.g., jugde facilitates JUDGE more than the control jupbe) in polymorphemic and monomorphemic words. If morphological decomposition occurs at early stages of visual word recognition, we would expect an interaction with transposed-letter effects. Experiment 1 was carried out in Basque, which is an agglutinative language. The nonword primes were created by transposing two letters that either crossed the morphological boundaries of suffixes or did not. Results showed a transposed-letter effect for non-affixed words, whereas there were no signs of a transposed-letter effect across morpheme boundaries for affixed words. In Experiment 2, this issue was revisited in a non-agglutinative language (Spanish), with prefixed and suffixed word pairs. Again, results showed a significant transposed-letter effect for non-affixed words, whereas there were no signs of a transposed-letter effect across morpheme boundaries for affixed words (both prefixed words and suffixed words). Experiment 3 replicated the previous findings, and also revealed that, for polymorphemic words, transposed-letter priming effects occurred for within-morpheme transpositions. Taken together, these findings support the view that morphological decomposition operates at an early stage of visual word recognition.

On the Stylistic Variation in the Quranic Genre

Stylistic variation is one of the intriguing linguistic problems of Quranic discourse. It deals with sentences that are structurally similar, yet they are stylistically and semantically dissimilar. Stylistic variation echoes language behaviour and mirrors the stylistic patterns produced by linguistic strategies and ad hoc linguistic tools. Stylistic variation is Qur'an-specific and is context and co-text sensitive. In other words, context and co-text are the linguistic habitat of stylistic variation. Stylistic variation is directly influenced by the surrounding grammatical, lexical, and phonetic environment of a given sentence. To capture the colourful manifestation of this unique phenomenon, a multi-pronged level of Quranic Arabic needs to be investigated. Stylistic variation in Quranic genre occurs at the micro and macro levels. At the micro level, stylistic variation takes place at the morpheme, word, and sentence levels. At the macro level, however, stylistic variation takes place in texts that are far away from each other. The stylistic behaviour of sentences is attributed to a set of linguistic and phonetic factors, such as word order change within the sentence which is due to contextual factors, grammatical co-text, and grammatical differences. The other factors include idioms, case endings, the morphological form of a word, lexical co-text, phonetic co-text, gender, tense, and definiteness.

Conceptual and Textual Chaining in Qur'anic Discourse

Chaining is a linguistic mechanism that is concerned with the construction of texts, their textuality and their network of semantic relations. It is concerned with the practical investigation of the constituent units of a given text of any length. This means that we can carry out an in-depth textual analysis of the text at the level of all units of language – morpheme, word, sentence and paragraph levels. Chaining is also concerned with textual progression and processing. When projected onto Qur' anic discourse, chaining produces the Qur'anic text in an upside-down pyramid shape. Thus, there is more reason for the longest suras to be placed at the beginning and the shortest ones at the end. Looking at the upside-down pyramid text, we can appreciate why the Qur'anic message is concluded by monotheism (Q. 112) and divinity (Q. 114), while the wider top surface of the pyramid is the textual environment for lordship (Q. 1) and Islamic legal rulings (Q. 2, Q. 4, etc.), with numerous intervening leitmotifs that are conceptually and intertextually interrelated. Conceptual and intertextual chaining makes the text more accessible to the reader: it is not necessarily characterised by superfluous repetition, but rather is linguistically marked by a high degree of informativity.

Competitive processes during word-form encoding

Abstract: A highly constrained model of phonological encoding, which is minimally affected by the activation levels of alternative morphemes and phonemes, is proposed. In particular, weaver11predicts only facilitatory effects on word production of the prior activation of form related words. However, inhibitory effects of form priming that suggest that a more strongly competitive system is required exist in the literature. Despite superficial similarities, the approach taken by Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer to the problem of word-form encoding differs fundamentally from previous attempts to model this process. This difference hinges on the attitude taken to noise in the system. The encoding of most words occurs within a sea of activated alternative morphemes and their constituent sublexical representations. Some of this activation comes from external sources such as the speech of others or written language. Some activation will be generated directly by the utterance to be produced (i.e., the residual activation of the morphemes just articulated and the anticipatory activation of those to be generated). There is also activation of words that do not form part of the intended utterance but are related in form to a word to be produced (e.g., malapropisms: saying “apartment” when you intended to say “appointment”). Traditionally, models of word-form encoding have used this riot of background activation to explain how speech errors can occur by incorporating selection mechanisms that are sensitive to the activation levels of alternative representations. In Dell’s (1986) model, the selection of a given phoneme is determined by its level of activation during an ordinal selection process. Alternatively, inhibitory or competitive mechanisms have been proposed. Stemberger (1985) postulates inhibition between form-related lexical representations activated by feedback from shared phonemes. Sevald and Dell (1994) propose competition between activated phonemes during a left-to-right assignment process of segments to frames. In contrast, Levelt et al. postulate no competitive selection process at the morpheme level and no feedback of activation from phonemes to morphemes. In addition, the selection by checking device employed in weaver11 divorces the selection and encoding of phonemes from their level of activation, thereby ensuring that encoding runs correctly regardless of the activation levels of alternative phonemes. weaver11 restricts competition to phonetic encoding processes but even here the activation of form related morphemes will speed encoding of the target by increasing the numerator of the access ratio for the target syllables compared with unrelated syllable programs. The strict limitations on activation spreading and competition

Morphological Integrity in Ilocano

The status of morphology and procedures of morphological production vary in remarkably diverse ways among languages of different typologies. The analysis presented in this study documents pervasive phenomena manifested in the discourse of Ilocano, as a result of the unique highly-prefixing typology of the language, which may contribute to our understanding of the concepts of lexeme, morphological integrity, and affixal boundness. From a thirty-hour corpus of natural interactions among native speakers of Ilocano, certain patterns of language production are introduced that typify the need to understand the synchronic role of morphology in a polysynthetic language and the status that inflectional and/or derivational affixes have in the lexicons of the speakers (Rubino 1994a). This paper will illustrate the intricate workings of the Ilocano language with regard to inter-morphemic pausing, production of affixes without lexical roots, the post-production restructuring of affixation, and the many uses of the versatile empty root kua which is employed by speakers who have uttered the syntactic frame of the word with appropriate affixes, before accessing the lexical root, suggesting that planning and production often take place at the morphemic level. It will then become apparent how the use of discourse data can be utilized to better our understanding of morphology and morphological processes.

Repetition blindness: Levels of processing.

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to detect or recall repetitions of words in rapid serial visual presentation. Experiment 1 showed that synonym pairs are not susceptible to RB. In Experiments 2 and 3, RB was still found when one occurrence of the word was part of a compound noun phrase. In Experiment 4, homonyms produced RB if they were spelled identically (even if pronounced differently) but not if spelled differently and pronounced the same. Similarly spelled but otherwise unrelated word pairs appeared to generate RB (Experiment 5), but Experiment 6 produced an alternative account. Experiments 7 and 8 demonstrated that repeated letters are susceptible to RB only when displayed individually, not as part of two otherwise different words. It is concluded that RB can occur at either an orthographic (possibly morphemic) level or a case-independent letter level, depending on which unit (words or single letters) is the focus of processing.

Code‐mixing by English–Chinese bilingual teachers of the People's Republic of China

ABSTRACT: A study was conducted among Chinese–English bilingual teachers from the People's Republic of China (PRC) to find the sociolinguistic and social psychological factors affecting their choice of codes when interacting among themselves, and the functional and linguistic features of their code‐mixing behaviour. Findings indicated that participants and their role relationship, topic, setting, the speaker's social psychological motivation, and his/her perception of his/her social reality all affected the bilinguals' choice of codes, and that socio‐cultural norms exerted an overall influence as well. Three functions of code‐mixing by the subjects were identified as: (1) to achieve ease of expression, (2) to achieve articulateness and simplicity, and (3) to produce rhetorical effect. Linguistically, transfer occurred at the lexical, phrasal, clausal and sentential level, but not at the morphemic level. The code‐mixed texts were all marked by textual cohesion and functional appropriateness.

Synonymy and Literary Meaning

IN CHAPTER FOUR OF The Aims of Interpretation, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. argues for existence of genuine synonymy, the expression of an absolutely identical through different linguistic forms.'1 His immediate purpose in doing so is to deflate the false methodological optimism that seeks in stylistic analysis reliable system of interpretation (p. 50), and insofar as object of his attack is blithely mechanical application of increasingly refined methods of stylistic analysis his effort is welcome indeed. But Hirsch means to do more than this. His defense of possibility of synonymy is also, as he recognizes (p. 10), crucial to his argument for existence of determinate textual meaning. For if synonymy exists (if different linguistic forms express an identical meaning), then form does not always compel meaning, as Hirsch puts it; stable textual meaning, therefore, be sought in linguistic forms of text but must derive from a guess about intention that cannot be fully determined [or confirmed] by stylistic (p. 71). Conversely, since diversity of interpretation, according to Hirsch, demonstrates the imperfect congruence of letter and spirit and compels us to recognize that letter must be an imperfect representation of meaning (p. 21), stable textual be discovered from stylistic analysis alone.2 All roads, it seems, lead to stable that can only derive from a guess about intention.3 Hirsch begins with lower-level linguistic phenomena. At phonemic level, he argues, dogs and cats have different endings, but at morphemic level they have absolutely identical endings (the two different phonemes signify an identical plural number). In other words, of final sounds is different, but their is same (p. 57). To anticipated objection that such linguistic features do not really count as elements of style, Hirsch rightly counters that it will not do to define in advance as actualized meaning unless we wish to preserve formulation style is meaning by reducing it to tautology, an empty circularity (p. 58). The problem is not with Hirsch's conception of style, however, but with his notion of meaning. We can grant that difference between two phonemes is