Morphosyntactic Patterns Research Articles

On definiteness and person in Romanian vocatives

We investigate the correlations between the various morphosyntactic types of Romanian vocatives (+/- vocative-morphology, +/- definiteness) and the main types of vocative uses – addresses, evaluative, selecting calls and non-selecting calls (where ‘selecting calls’ by and large correspond to Schaden’s (2010) identificational vocatives). The Romanian data show that selecting calls and evaluative vocatives have structural properties that distinguish them from the other vocatives (used in addresses and non-selecting calls). Identificational vocatives, which are used when an addresee is selected from a larger group of potential addresees, involve a special Voc head that selects a definite DP, which may be unmarked for Person when the DP is nominal but is necessarily marked as 2nd person, via agreement, when the DP is pronominal. Morphologically-marked vocatives and [-def] vocatives obligatorily carry 2nd person. All four morphosyntactic patterns are available for addresses and non-selecting calls, the choice of one particular pattern being subject to lexical restrictions. We argue that morphological Vocative marking involves movement to the Voc-layer, as opposed to unmarked vocatives. Evaluative vocatives are obligatorily Voc-marked definites. We attribute the obligatory Voc-marking to the fact that for evaluative vocatives, the assignment of the NP property to the Addressee is new information. The specialization of the definite vocative-marked form for the evaluative use is explained as a morphological peculiarity of the nominalizing suffix that we postulate for evaluative adjectives, under the assumption that this suffix is also present with non-derived nouns used as evaluative predicates.

Testing the Early Differentiation Hypothesis: A Case Study of a Spanish-English Bilingual Child

This paper contributes to the field of simultaneous bilingual first language acquisition (2L1). Specifically, it examines the developmental stages of a bilingual child in two languages, Spanish and English. The analysis is performed by analyzing bilingual acquisition data from CHILDES database with the CLAN program. The study aims to support several hypotheses proposed in the field of 2L1 (e. g., The Early Differentiation Hypothesis). The results show that the developmental stages of a bilingual child correspond to the stages of a monolingual child acquiring a language; the only difference is the number of languages that is being acquired. The data also show that the child’s caregivers use certain strategies in their socialization as the important prerequisite for 2L1 (e.g., frequency of input, discourse strategies and maximal engagement with a minority language available in the input). The results of the study confirm the Early Differentiation Hypothesis that argues for the language-specific morphosyntactic patterns in child’s grammar. The study has very important pedagogical implications for parents who raise their children in bi- and multilingual families.

Does Parkinson's disease affect verb production in picture descriptions?

Research on Parkinson's disease (PD) has documented significant deficits in verb production, with more robust results in single word retrieval tasks than in connected speech, yet the underlying causes of these deficits are disputable, especially concerning connected speech production. We analyzed picture descriptions provided by 48 individuals with PD and 48 age-matched healthy controls, and examined the percent of nouns and verbs of all words, the number of described events, verbs denoting activity, verbs in active morpho-syntactic patterns, and transitive verbs. Individuals with PD produced a lower percent of verbs than did control participants, but the groups differed in no other variable. Scores on a cognitive screening task associated with the percent of verbs and the number of events. We suggest that verb retrieval in connected speech in PD reflects no specific difficulty with action semantics, but rather the spread of PD pathology into more diffuse verb-specific neural networks.

Arabicization via Loan Translation: A Corpus-based Analysis of Neologisms Translated from English into Arabic in the Field of Information Technology

Abstract This study aims to use a corpus-based analysis to examine loan translation (LT) as an Arabicization technique in Written Standard Arabic (WSA) for information technology (IT) and investigate the factors impacting LT formation. Data were collected from four corpora: four Arabic online newspapers, the Microsoft Language Portal, two user manuals, and the Arabic Corpus of King Abdul-Aziz City for Science and Technology (KACST). Four LT strategies were identified: morphosyntactic pattern alteration, literal translation, loan blending, and metaphorical extension. Literal translation occurred in three degrees: full LTs, partial LTs, and non-LTs, through calquing. Metaphors based on functional similarity played a crucial role in understanding and accepting IT terms in WSA. Paradigmatic variation prevailed in LTs, with synonymous variations more common than nonsynonymous ones, and no syntagmatic variation. The KACST analysis showed significant differences in occurrence frequency among LT variants. LT formation and variation were influenced by linguistic factors such as lexical need, semantic transparency, and lexical borrowing, as well as extralinguistic factors such as nationalism and lack of coordination among Arabic language academies. The study concludes with implications for addressing the absence of coordination between these academies and improving IT-related LT quality between English and WSA.

Case and agreement variation in contact

Abstract This study investigates the influence of language contact on morphosyntactic variation in World Englishes, specifically focusing on the joint variation of case and agreement in it-clefts with pronominal clefted constituents. Employing a multifactorial approach within the framework of probabilistic grammar, we examine the distribution of the four relevant it-cleft variants in the GloWbE corpus. We find that language contact, as a language-external factor, impacts the strengths and rankings of language-internal factors but not their directions. Additionally, we observe an intricate interplay between language contact and language-internal factors in shaping morphosyntactic patterns: low-contact varieties tend to display feature-based case and agreement with a high degree of variability, while high-contact varieties tend to exhibit position-based case and agreement with a low degree of variability. These findings shed light on the mechanisms underlying the development of language diversity and structural simplification in World Englishes.

A diachronic study determining syntactic and semantic features of Urdu-English neural machine translation

Machine translation produces marginal accuracy rates for low-resource languages, but its deep learning model expects to yield improved accuracy with time. This longitudinal study investigates how Google Translate's Urdu-to-English translated output has evolved between 2018 and 2021. Accuracy and acceptability of the translations have been determined by, a) an interlinear gloss that identifies core semantic units and grammatical functions to be translated and, b) a descriptive comparison of the translated text's syntactic and semantic properties with those of the source text. Overall, despite a 50 % error rate that persists over the three-year interval, the research reports significant improvement in the overall intelligibility of the translations, in contrast to initial results from 2018, which exhibited rampant non-localized errors. Working backwards from instances of errors to morphosyntactic and semantic patterns underlying them, the study concludes that the pro-drop feature of Urdu, Urdu's case-marking system, identification of clause boundaries, polysemous terms, and orthographically similar words pose the greatest difficulty in neural machine translation. These results point to the need for incorporating syntactic information in training data.

A developmental account of the role of sequential dependencies in typical and atypical language learners

ABSTRACT The Gerken lab has shown that infants are able to learn sound patterns that obligate local sequential dependencies that are no longer readily accessible to adults. The Goffman lab has shown that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) exhibit deficits in learning sequential dependencies that influence the acquisition of words and grammar, as well as other types of domain general sequences. Thus, DLD appears to be an impaired ability to detect and deploy sequential dependencies over multiple domains. We meld these two lines of research to propose a novel account in which sequential dependency learning is required for many phonological and morphosyntactic patterns in natural language and is also central to the language and domain general deficits that are attested in DLD. However, patterns that are not dependent on sequential dependencies but rather on networks of stored forms are learnable by children with DLD as well as by adults.

Variation learning in phonology and morphosyntax

While variation occurs in both phonology and morphosyntax, phonological variation also includes phonetic variation motivated by articulatory or perceptual factors. While learning in both domains is subject to cognitive biases, phonological learning may also be biased by physical factors, which may enhance learnability of phonetically motivated alternations. This study aims to identify whether learning differs when children are exposed to phonological or morphosyntactic patterns with equal complexity. Cantonese-speaking children learned an artificial language involving rounding harmony, where unround [e] or round [o] harmonizes with the following noun, or gender agreement, with feminine and masculine allomorphs lo ~ le. Patterns applied variably in 67% of training items, or categorically.Children were tested on generalization to novel stems. In the categorical learning conditions, participants showed comparable rates of harmony/agreement. In the variable phonological learning conditions, application of harmony exceeded the rate of exposure in training, suggesting the influence of a bias toward phonetically grounded rounding harmony. In the variable morphosyntactic condition, participants applied agreement below the rate of exposure. This finding points to a qualitative difference between learning in the two domains, with phonological (but not morphosyntactic) learning influenced by substantive grounding.

How to Point with Language: English Source-Based Language to Describe Taste Qualities

Western languages notoriously lack specific, abstract vocabulary to describe sensory perception. Despite the paucity of specific lexical items, descriptions of sensory characteristics of food abound in English. One of the most common strategies is source-based language (e.g., creamy), which allows speakers to evaluate and communicate a current sensory experience with respect to a prototypical source of the sensation. The aim of this paper is to review the different morphosyntactic patterns used to convey source-based information to describe flavour, and to provide a taxonomy of the constructions involved. The three types of source-based language discussed are organised along a cline from more analytical (i.e., X tastes like Y), to more synthetic (i.e., adjectival suffixes), with a medial stage in which the source of the sensation is morphologically free, but syntactically embedded in constructions following the pattern N1 of N2 (e.g., a splash of chilli). Previous literature has accounted for this phenomenon either as motivated by conceptual metonymy, or as a case of “pointing structures”. I argue that the two different theoretical accounts need not be in stark opposition, rather they both contribute to our understanding of the figurative usage of concrete items in language. Data were retrieved online from a collection of gin Tasting Notes, created by expert tasters to evaluate the flavour profile of the liquor.

The Simple View of borrowing and code-switching

Aims and Objectives: In this paper, a novel approach to the distinction between borrowing and code-switching is proposed, called the Simple View of borrowing and code-switching. Under this view, listedness is seen as the key condition for classifying words or multiword units (MWUs) as borrowings. For MWUs, listedness is operationalized with mutual information (MI) scores: the higher the MI score of a given set of words, the higher the likelihood it is listed in the lexicon. Under the Simple View, the distinction between borrowing and code-switching is seen as a specific instantiation of the distinction between what belongs in the lexicon (fixed, arbitrary patterns) and what is computed online (productive rules), and should therefore be considered as part of the grammar. Methodology: Assumptions from the Simple View were tested on a corpus of switches of single words and MWUs from a Turkish-German code-switching corpus (87,000 words), which was transcribed in CHAT format. Data and analysis: The frequency of switches in either direction, and their morphosyntactic integration patterns were analysed with CLAN. The formulaicity of the MWUs was analysed with MI scores through Sketchengine. Findings: The MI scores of the donor language MWUs were found to be above 3, which is the cut-off point for formulaicity in Corpus Linguistics. Thus, the MWUs were found to be borrowings. In addition, MWUs were found to be more likely to be borrowed than single words. Originality: Insights about formulaic language from Corpus Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition were used to inform analyses of language contact phenomena, and new ways to test the model are proposed. Significance: The Simple View offers a unified approach to borrowing of lexical items and function words and opens a new avenue for research using neuroscientific methods to test whether items are listed in speakers’ mental lexicons.

Tracing and classifying German intensifiers via information theory

We apply information theoretic notions to model intensifiers in German. We show that information theory can explain that despite their common referential meaning, some intensifiers are extremely frequent (so), while others are uncommon (arsch ‘butt’), and seem to induce a stronger intensifying effect. We introduce two notions to model the expressivity of an intensifier in a given message: the local (paradigmatic) information content of an intensifier (surprisal), and the transitional information, based on Markov transition probabilities. Based on a large corpus of intensified predicative adjective phrases from German Twitter data, we confirm that (1) local information and transitional information are strongly anti-correlated: The more common an intensifier is, the lower its expressive value in communication and the less it constrains following adjectival heads; and (2) “stackings” of multiple intensifiers are frequent and are used to frame and strengthen the expressiveness of the intensification. We further confirm that stackings tend to occur in incremental surprisal rank order, following the Uniform Information Density hypothesis. Our analyses show that information theory is not limited to the domain of referential semantics and morphosyntactic patterns of reduction, but offers a framework to capture the expressive function of German intensifiers.

From verbal to adjectival

This study addresses categorization issues related to adjective candidates in Estonian, focusing on the category of participles. The aim of the analysis was to assess the ranges of the prototypical adjective and to determine its degree of deviation on the prototypicality scale. The investigation was based on a group of validated adjectives – selected adjectives included in the Basic Estonian Dic­tionary – and two control groups of more and less lexicalized participles. We tested seven morphosyntactic corpus patterns characteristic of adjectives. The test patterns were based on the prototypical features of the adjective, as well as on observations made in the actual lexicographic analysis. To assess the sam­ple words and determine the significance of the test patterns from the point of view of defining adjectivity, we used deviation analysis. The results of this study can be applied to establish a measure of adjectivity for lexicographic judgments when distinguishing, for instance, lexicalized participles from regular ones.

Značenjske intencije apsolutnog objekta u kur'anskom tekstu

This paper deals with semantic intentions of the absolute object in the Qur’anic text. The aim is to establish frequent morphosyntactic patterns by which the absolute object is realized in the Qur'anic text, and then to offer a linguistic description of the role the absolute object plays in shaping the semantic dimension of the Qur'anic text, and based on selected linguistic expressions to establish individual semantic intentions of the absolute object in the Qur'an. In this paper we used an analytical-descriptive method, which was realized by applying a linguistic-stylistic analysis based on classical Arabic grammatical analysis of marking frequent linguistic patterns of the absolute object, and an analysis procedure based on the theory of naẓm, which was established by 'Abdulqāhir al-Ğurğānī, and which deals with the role of linguistic units in a statement. The research results show that each individual form of the absolute object has a targeted role in the Qur'anic text that can be discerned on a structural and semantic level. In addition to the intensity, description of the quality and number of acts, the absolute object realizes numerous semantic intentions, among which are: the confirmation of a real event realization, introduction of optimism, description of the quality of the realization of the act of reciting and delivering the Qur'an, glorification, display of the God's omnipotence and the beauty of His creation, admonishment and fear-mongering, threat, reprimand, plea, etc. As a frequent element of the Qur'anic discourse, the absolute object is an important argumentative marker significantly affecting the realization of the overall semantic intentions and the understanding of the Qur'anic text.

Theresentences in extreme southern Italy

AbstractAmong the morpho-syntactic patterns by which Italo-Romance varieties codetheresentences, a peculiar structure surfaces in extreme southern varieties, particularly in Salento and in southern Calabria: this involves an invariable 3rd person form of the outcome ofhabēreas the copula, with no agreement with the postcopular nominal, the so-called pivot. Even though this pattern is attested in other Romance languages too, it proves, however, to be peculiar, insofar as it hosts top-ranking definite NPs (especially 1st and 2nd person pronouns), which are generally disallowed within ‘to have’theresentences in the Romance varieties. In the present paper, we infer that this pattern depends on the contact with Italo-Greek, which displays similar constructions, with an invariant 3rd sg. form of ‘to have’, the lack of the proform and the pivot marked as accusative. However, a diachronic investigation reveals that neither the extreme southern Italo-Romance varieties nor Italo-Greek displayed in their Medieval stage a similar construction, since both of them exhibited the definiteness effect. Sociolinguistic factors can account for how the two systems influenced each other by ruling out the definiteness effect from the respective patterns at the end of the interference process.

Infixation in the Americas: A Cross-Linguistic Survey

This article gives an overview of American infixes, with a focus on their morphosyntactic properties. A large-scale survey of both North and South American languages reveals several patterns, such as: (i) infixes fall within one of five categories, number, person, tam, voice/valency, and word formation; (ii) infixes usually have non-infixal allomorphs and are generally highly restricted in their distribution; (iii) few languages have more than one infix; (iv) a conspicuous number of infixes contain a glottal consonant. An attempt is made to explain morphosyntactic patterns with respect to the diachronic origin of infixes. It is concluded that the abundance and diversity of American infixes call out for further research on their formal and functional properties. Such studies would promise to inform, for instance, diachronic theories of morphophonology and morphosyntax, accounts of the inflection-derivation continuum, and our understanding of the semantic and grammatical category of number.

Experiential motivation and the linguistics of sitting, standing, and lying.

The three human at‐rest postures of sitting, standing, and lying are basic, recurring features of human behavior and may reasonably be called primary postures. The three postures share the property of being stable through time, but they are also differentiated in terms of their overall shape, their physiological properties, and typical associated behaviors such as the association of sitting with social interaction, and lying with sleeping. The experiential realities of the three postures underlie and motivate a range of cross‐linguistic phenomena involving morphemes with meanings of “sit”, “stand,” and “lie”. The relevant linguistic phenomena include higher frequencies of occurrence compared with other kinds of posture verbs and differential behavior with respect to some morphosyntactic patterns involving notions such as agentivity. The posture morphemes can also be the source for a variety of semantic extensions reflecting experiential realities of the postures, such as the extension of “lie” to mean “sleep” in some languages. Extensions also include grammaticalizations of the posture morphemes to locative and aspectual markers which reflect the temporal stability and spatial fixedness of the postures themselves.This article is categorized under:Linguistics > Cognitive LinguisticsLinguistics > Language in Mind and Brain

Acquisition of cumulative conditioning effects on words: Spanish-speaking children’s [subject pronoun + verb] usage

Child language acquisition research has provided ample evidence of lexical frequency effects. This corpus-based analysis introduces a novel frequency measure shown to significantly constrain adult language variation, but heretofore unexplored in child language acquisition research. Among adults, frequent occurrence of a form in a particular discourse context that conditions usage accumulates in memory over time and shapes the lexical representation of that form. This study contributes to the body of research on frequency effects in child language acquisition by testing whether such cumulative conditioning effects are also found among children, and, if so, at what age such effects appear. Specifically, the study investigates the influence of a distributional frequency measure (each verb form’s likelihood of use in a switch vs same-reference discourse context) on variable subject personal pronoun (SPP) expression ( N = 2227) in Spanish (e.g. yo voy ~ voy, both meaning ‘I go’) in the speech of 65 monolingual children in two age cohorts. Results reveal sensitivity to the contextual conditioning of discourse continuity (switch reference) among both the younger (6- and 7-year-olds) and older (8- and 9-year-olds) children in support of previous research. In addition, each verb’s likelihood of use in a switch-reference context significantly predicted the SPP use among the older children, but not the younger ones, suggesting that the cumulative effect of a probabilistic pattern takes time to emerge during childhood. The lexically specific accumulation in memory of contextual conditioning effects supports exemplar models of child language acquisition: each instance of use in discourse contributes to the lexical representation of that form and, over time, plays a role in the creation of morphosyntactic patterns during language development.

ЛЕКСИЧНІ ЗАПОЗИЧЕННЯ У НЕОЛОГІЧНОМУ ВИМІРІ СУЧАСНОЇФРАНЦУЗЬКОЇМОВИ

The article deals with the state of neologism processes and the dynamics of borrowing in the modern French language for the period 2015-2018, examines the theoretical foundations of the above-mentioned linguistic phenomena and a justified method of researching various aspects of neologisms and the results of the analysis of borrowings. The use of the Néoveille platform made it possible to semi-automatically detect, describe linguistically, and trace the temporal evolution of neologisms from three complementary points of view: temporal, linguistic, and socio-pragmatic. In the temporal aspect, it is important to distinguish three moments in the life of neologisms: appearance, possible distribution and possible lexicalization. Linguistic approach allows to describe formation mechanisms, as well as combinatorial and distributive properties of loanwords. A socio-pragmatic point of view makes it possible to identify the places where neologisms are used. By applying these points of view, a system capable of semi-automatically detecting lexical innovation and tracing its evolution on a large dynamic corpus was modeled. Borrowings make up about 6 % (or 1,429 tokens) of innovations in modern French [3]. About a thousand xenisms should be added to this number, as well as a significant number of other formations from borrowed bases. Over 90 % of these loanwords are of Anglo-American origin, while xenisms show more linguistic diversity. The spheres of human activity that are most open to borrowing are fashion, sports, technology, and the economy, and among the resources, the women's press, Parisian magazines, and the yellow press are the most fruitful. Borrowings, like all neologisms, are more than 75 % hapax or quasi-hapax, or rather neologisms with low or very low diffusion. The appearance of Anglo-American borrowings is explained both by the needs of the nomination and motivated by the prestige of the English language, which in recent decades,especially with the advent of digital communication, has acquired the status of a second integrated language used by the French in private and professional life. English plays the same role for most modern languages. This global lingua franca is an instantly accessible resource for lexical innovation and a provider of productive morphosyntactic patterns, usually of a synthetic nature, actively implemented in French. The study of neologisms of higher frequency shows that the popularity of social networks and some social practices contributed to the emergence of borrowings in many fields. The described parameters made it possible to present cases of diffusion of borrowings, not only through stabilized repetitions, but also to state certain linguistic phenomena, in particular, integration into the morphogrammatic subsystem of the French language.

Bir Roman Lehçesi Olarak Doğu Anadolu Domcasının Biçimsel Örüntüleri

This study is aimed at explaining morpho-lexical and morpho-syntactic patterns in Domani, as two basic features that are related to the lexicon and grammar of this substrate, contact, secret and endangered Romani dialect. The study data was obtained by conducting face-to-face interviews with Doms living in the Van and Ağrı-Doğubayazıt regions in Turkey and making use of their oral narratives. The recordings made between 2017 and 2019 are over 10 hours. Kurmanji, which has a typological affinity with Domani, was used as a mediating language in the communicative process. The structures exhibiting significant permeability from Kurmanji to Domani are izafe, ergative case and the auxillary verb kirin ‘to do’, and its combinations. It is understood that the morpho-lexical and morpho-syntactic affixes such as {-xete-}, {-gev}, {-ole} and {–ote}, which are seen as belonging to Domani, lose their functionality and continue to exist as redundant structures. On the other hand, case markers {-gi} and {-ge} and in predicative domains {-avi(n)} partly maintain their domain of use in Domani. Some derivational morphemes of Turkish, such as {-Iş} and {-CI} are also distinctive in the lexical formation of Domani in the derivation of nevişçi ‘begger’ with the negation prefix of Kurmanji {ne-}. The compositional features in this word should be considered as ‘creative languaging’ for substrate language Domani, that is losing its lexical properties due to contact with superstrate languages.

Typology of number systems in languages of Western and Central Siberia

This paper investigates the linguistic expression of number in seven languages from Western and Central Siberia. In a first step the number system of each language is described in detail, and afterwards the most relevant convergences and divergences of the languages are dealt with. Three particularly interesting phenomena are discussed in more detail: First, it is shown that the concept of general number, denoting noun forms underspecified for number, is able to account for a range of related phenomena (unmarked noun forms after numerals, nouns denoting paired objects). Second, singulatives in Selkup, Ket and partly Eastern Khanty are analyzed, whereby it is argued that their similar morphosyntactic and grammaticalization patterns allow for analyzing them as a contact phenomenon. Third, two splits on the animacy hierarchy between the first and second person in Dolgan as well as Chulym Turkic are presented. Finally, the results are evaluated against a broader areal-typological background, whereby it is shown that the category of number does not support any larger areal groupings within Western and Central Siberia, but that the analyzed languages rather adhere to patterns of number marking present all over Northern Eurasia.