Inflectional Morphology Research Articles

Syntactic and lexical-ase-are distinct suffixes

AbstractIn addition to the syntactic (inflectional) causative suffix-(s)ase-, Japanese displays a lexical (derivational) causative suffix-(a)se-(okur-ase-‘delay’,no-se-‘place on’) whosea-zero alternation is general in the stem-level phonology. Because the UR of syntactic-(s)ase-must include thesof its postvocalic alternant, the two suffixes necessarily have distinct phonological forms; there is thus no way to treat them as “high attachment” and “low attachment” versions of a single element. The division of labor between syntactic-(s)ase-and lexical-(a)se-invites the conclusion that no causative suffix is syntactic in some cases and lexical in others; if so, causatives pose no challenge to the position that while Japanese inflectional morphology is the phonological realization of syntactic representations, derivational morphology involves lexical listing of stems. The conclusion that there is no causative suffix that spans the syntactic/lexical boundary is validated by showing that forms that have been taken in the literature as exemplifying lexical-(s)ase-are in fact either lexical-(a)se-or syntactic-(s)ase-. As part of this demonstration, it is shown that, with minor exceptions, verb stems in-ase-have arisen as variants of pre-existing stems in-as-, and an explanation for this ongoing process of replacement is proposed.

A Morphosyntactic Analysis on Narrative Writing of the Fresh Year Students’s of Management Informatics AMIK MEDICOM

The purpose of the research is to analyze about morphology and sintactic structure in writing an English narrative essay. Morphology and Sintax are very important studies in learning English. Morphology is the study of how words are structured and how they are put together from smaller part, as morphemes are the smallest significant units of grammar. Meanwhile syntax discusses how sentences are structured. The purposes of this research are to cover the students morphosintactic errors operating on the students of the management informatics students’ narrative writing and how these errors affect the whole clause structure, the inflectional morphemes, derivational morphemes and the pattern of clause structure in the students narrative writing. The method used in this reserch is qualitative describtion where the data sources are taken from the fresh year students narrative writing. The finding revealse are two kinds of morphology, they are derivational and inflectional. Affixes such as suffixes, infixes, prefixes, ablaut and reduplication are kinds of derivational morphology, meanwhile plural, possessive, past time, progressive, comparative, and superlative are kinds of inflectional morphology. Syntactically, the errors occur becuse of not being aware how to build a phrase or a sentence in English. They write more than one verb in a phrase or a sentence which does not need but one. As well they are not sure about word order in English and how to build a simple sentence. They like to miss subject or object pronoun in their sentence. We can explain that by saying that all these forms do not exist in Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian Language), resulting in the tendency for the students to omit or add these forms in their writing. Too many clauses in one sentence often occur in their sentece.

Cross-linguistic influences of L1 on L2 morphosyntactic processing: An fNIRS study

This study examined how the morphological typology of second language (L2) learners' first language (L1) affected neural processing of L2 morphosyntactic knowledge. We used functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine adult L2 learners’ processing of English Subject-Verb number agreement (e.g., duck swims, ducks swim) during a picture-sentence matching task. Two English learner groups with contrasting L1s, Spanish (with rich inflectional morphology, n = 16) and Mandarin (with a lexical morphology, n = 18), were compared to native English speakers (n = 19). Both L2-learner groups demonstrated comparable accuracy on the picture-sentence matching task. However, neural results revealed L1 influence on L2 morphosyntactic processing. Mandarin-speaking English L2 learners showed greater neural activity in the left middle temporal gyrus (L-MTG) for singular (e.g., the duck swims) versus plural sentences (e.g., the ducks swim). Mandarin relies on semantic, rather than inflectional, information to infer number and L-MTG is involved in lexical-semantic processing, suggesting L1 influence on L2 inflectional processing. Spanish-speaking English L2 learners showed greater neural activity in areas including the right MTG and prefrontal cortex for the plural versus singular sentences whereas native English speakers showed greater activity for singular versus plural sentences. The plural form is morphologically marked in Spanish and greater neural activation for the plural rather than singular form suggests L1 influence. Importantly, cross-linguistic influences were only observed at the neural level, revealing that different neural activation patterns underpin similar behavioral results. Both L2-learner groups showed different patterns of neural activation corresponding to the specific linguistic features of their L1, indicating that L2 processing is affected by L1 characteristics in linguistically principled ways. This study advances our understanding of how morphosyntactically-distinct languages are organized and processed in adult L2 learners.

Contribution of morphological awareness to reading fluency of children with and without dyslexia: evidence from a transparent orthography.

The goal of this study was to investigate the contribution of morphological awareness to reading fluency of children with and without dyslexia in a transparent orthography, such as the Greek one. The sample consisted of 256 Greek-speaking children (2nd grade: 32 dyslexic and 105 typical readers, 5th grade: 28 dyslexic and 91 typical readers). Morphological awareness was assessed with three tasks, examining inflectional, derivational, and compounding morphology. Reading fluency was evaluated at word, text, and silent level. The results indicated that dyslexic children both in 2nd and 5th grade face significant difficulties in inflectional, derivational, and compounding morphology compared to their peers. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that morphological awareness significantly contributed to reading fluency of children with and without dyslexia, after controlling for non-verbal intelligence, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. Among typical readers, results indicated that inflectional, derivational, and compounding morphology had a small but significant effect on word, text, and silent reading fluency in 2ndgrade and derivational and inflectional morphology on text and silent reading fluency in 5th grade, after controlling for non-verbal intelligence, vocabulary, and phonological awareness. For dyslexic children, a moderate-to-large effect of inflectional and derivational morphology on text and word reading fluency was restricted to 2nd grade. Overall, morphological skills may play a supportive role in reading fluency of Greek children in first and last elementary grades. On the other hand, for Greek children facing reading problems morphological skills appeared to have a strong role in reading fluency only in first grades. Our study provided some preliminary data for the dyslexics' ability of morphological processing as a scaffolding skill for reading fluency. Implications of these findings for education are discussed.

Online Assessment of Morphological Awareness in Grades 2–4: Its Development and Relation to Reading Comprehension

The aims of the study are to construct an online instrument to assess different aspects of morphological awareness and to examine its development and its relation to reading comprehension in grades 2–4 in Hungarian children. Altogether, 4134 students were tested. The online test evaluated inflectional, derivational, and compound morphological skills with five subtests. The instrument proved to be reliable. CFA examinations revealed that the five subtests were empirically distinguishable dimensions. Inflectional, derivational, and compound morphology as the three main dimensions of morphological awareness were also empirically supported by our data. Morphological awareness skills improved significantly and developed in parallel with reading skills throughout grades 2–4. The increase in the development of morphological awareness from grade 2 to grade 3 tends to be faster than the growth between grade 3 and 4. Positive moderate correlations were found between morphological skills and reading comprehension and the relationships seem to be stable throughout the three grades. The most significant predictor of reading comprehension is the Affix Identification for Nonwords subtest. Our study showed that morphological awareness could be assessed efficiently through online media and drew attention to the importance of morphological awareness in the development of reading comprehension and linguistic intelligence.

Grammaticalization, Language Contact, and the Emergence of a Hortative in Guaraché, a New Mixed Language in Paraguay

This paper discusses the emergence of a hortative marker in Guaraché, a new mixed language in Paraguay, the result of language mixing of the Indigenous Aché language and Paraguayan Guaraní. After settlement on reservations, the formerly nomadic Aché hunter-gatherers began shifting to the national language Guaraní, resulting in Guaraché, which is currently learned by children as their first language. Guaraché speakers have incorporated parts of the lexicon and morphology from Aché and Guaraní into their verbal repertoires, including parts of the Guaraní inflectional morphology. Thereby, they are modeling their use of the Guaraní 1pl.in marker ja-/ña- on a specific function that it has in Guaraní, hortative mood. Neither Aché nor Guaraní have grammatical hortative markers. Such a reanalysis and transfer of only one function of ja-/ña- suggests that a novel grammatical distinction is emerging between ja-/ña- for the hortative and the free pronoun ñande/nande for all other cases of 1pl.in. This paper analyzes hortative constructions in a corpus of recordings of naturally occurring interactions from children and adults. This case of grammaticalization is a strong indicator of a gradual transformation of Guaraché from language-mixing practices into a new mixed language.

Verb Inflection in English and Arabic: A Contrastive Analysis Study

Inflection, the change of word form to mark grammatical distinctions, occurs in a variety of grammatical classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc. The purpose of the present paper is to describe the verb inflectional morphology in English and Arabic and to conduct a contrastive analysis of both of them. The research question which is put forth is: how do the verb inflectional morphology in English and Arabic differ from/resemble each other? To answer this question, a systematic descriptive comparative study is carried out with a unique focus on the verb inflectional categories. Eventually, it was found that the Arabic verb inflectional morphology is richer and varied from that of the English. Such a study has implications in fields like foreign language teaching/learning, translation, electronic dictionaries, natural language processing, and the like.

The Use of Inflection Morphology of Tense and Agreement in English Among Chinese Second Language Learners in College

This study examines how Chinese learners of English use four English verb inflectional morphological changes, namely the third person singular -s, the past tense -ed, the copula be and the auxiliary be. Unlike English, subject-predicate agreement and tense marking tense markers are not present in Chinese. Therefore, this difference between the two languages can cause difficulties in second language learning. To explore English language learners' use of verb inflection changes, this study investigated the spontaneous production data of four Chinese college students in online classes. The results show that the four Chinese undergraduates had the highest error rate in the inflection change of the third-person singular verb, slightly higher than the inflection change of the past tense of the verb. That indicates the correct rate of verb inflection change of past tense is slightly higher than that of agreement. Moreover, the copula be and the auxiliary he is rarely used by learners. This has implications for English teaching activities, and Chinese university English teachers can adapt their teaching to these situations by focusing more on students' use of inflexion changes in production tasks.

Reflexes of exponent movement in inflectional morphology

Seemingly non-local phonological operations triggered by inflectional exponents have been observed in a number of languages. Focussing on de-spirantization in Barwar Aramaic, accent shift in Lithuanian, ni-insertion in Quechua, ruki rule application in Sanskrit, and vowel harmony in Kazakh, we argue that these phenomena should be analyzed as strictly local phonological reflexes of movement in a pre-syntactic autonomous morphological component. Such morphological movement is shown to arise without further assumptions under the approach to inflectional morphology based on Harmonic Serialism (McCarthy 2016) developed in Müller 2020. Here, each morphological operation immediately gives rise to an optimization procedure, morphological structure-building is subject to simple alignment constraints, and counter-cyclic operations are precluded. Against this background, phonological reflexes of movement are predicted to show up when a potentially complete word triggers a phonological cycle, which is then followed by morphological movement. Finally, we argue that constraint-driven morphological movement is superior to alternative accounts based on (i) non-local phonology, (ii) base-derivative faithfulness, (iii) phonological movement, (iv) counter-cyclic operations (interfixation, lowering, local dislocation), (v) syntactic movement, and (vi) strata.

Rules and exceptions: A Tolerance Principle account of the possessive suffix in Northern East Cree.

Debate around inflectional morphology in language acquisition has contrasted various rule- versus analogy-based approaches. This paper tests the rule-based Tolerance Principle (TP) against a new type of pattern in the acquisition of the possessive suffix -im in Northern East Cree. When possessed, each noun type either requires or disallows the suffix, which has a complex distribution throughout the lexicon. Using naturalistic video data from one adult and two children - Ani (2;01-4;03) and Daisy (3;08-5;10) - this paper presents two studies. Study 1 applies the TP to the input to extrapolate two possible sets of nested rules for -im and make predictions for child speech. Study 2 tests these predictions and finds that each child's production of possessives over time is largely consistent with the predictions of the TP. This paper finds the TP can account for the acquisition of the possessive suffix and discusses implications for language science and Cree language communities.

Testing the Representational Deficit Hypothesis: From the Aspect of Chinese Learners' Acquisition of Affixation '-s' for Third Person Singular Verbs and Plural Nouns.

The persistent difficulty in making verbal inflections is commonly recognized for second language learners, especially for Chinese-speaking students. Researchers put forward different hypotheses to explain the problems in acquiring inflectional morphology. Among them, the representational deficit hypothesis deficit (RDH), advocated by Hawkins and Liszka, indicates that adult learners will fail to make inflectional morphology to interpret the corresponding syntactic feature if there is no counterpart system in their native language. In English, affix morpheme ‘-s’ marks either third person singular (3SG) in the present tense or regular plural nouns. In contrast, Chinese is a language which lacks 3SG markings but presents the morpheme ‘men’ to reflect a plural feature for nouns with a human property. To test the applicability of the RDH in the domain of affix ‘-s’ for English learners of Chinese, the present study observed the morphological inflections of the third person singular and plural ‘-s’ in 33 Chinese EFL learners’ written and spoken production tasks. The results show that the participants distinguished between the inflectional morphology in regular plural and 3SG thematic verb markings, which was compatible with the RDH. Additionally, other phenomena related to 3SG and plural morphological inflections provided strands of evidence for the RDH, for instance, L2 exposure age, a prominent overuse of plural ‘-s’, and exceptional cases for more 3SG ‘-s’ markings in the written data. Except for the account of morphosyntactic processes in the RDH, other factors, such as input frequency, difficulty of paradigm uniformity, and acquisition order, were referred to as the way that the L2 learners’ acquisition of the morphological inflections was affected.

English Second Language Strategies For Teaching Irregular Plural Noun Morphological Inflection

Nouns are one basic component of the syntactic category of the English language because they can be used as subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, subject complements, object complements, appositives, or adjectives of sentences. Transforming regular nouns from singular to plural forms is comprehensible since the usual patterning is used. Converting irregular nouns from singular to plural forms causes difficulties to non-native learners of English since conversion does not follow the usual patterning. The study examined English second language strategies for teaching irregular plural noun morphological inflection to Grade 8 learners. The researcher used a quantitative research design because the results could be analysed mathematically and statistically. A probability technique was used to randomly sample 25 participants whose ages ranged from 14 to 16 at Ndaedzo Secondary School in Limpopo Province, South Africa. A statistical Package for Social Sciences version 22 was utilised to interpret the findings. Initially, the participants were incompetent in this regard but after utilising the ‘irregular plurals reversi memory game’, and ‘irregular plural nouns in movement game’ strategies, learners’ performance improved remarkably. The research recommends teaching irregular plural noun morphological inflection using the games.

A role for verb regularity in the L2 processing of the Spanish subjunctive mood: Evidence from eye-tracking

AbstractThe present study investigated the second language processing of grammatical mood in Spanish. Eye-movement data from a group of advanced proficiency second language users revealed nativelike processing with irregular verb stimuli but not with regular verb stimuli. A comparison group of native speakers showed the expected effect with both types of stimuli, but these were slightly more robust with irregular verbs than with regular verbs. We propose that the role of verb form regularity was due to the greater visual salience of Spanish subjunctive forms with irregular verbs versus regular verbs and possibly also due to less efficient processing of rule-based regular inflectional morphology versus whole irregular word forms. In any case, the results suggest that what appeared to be difficulty with sentence processing could be traced back to word-level processes, which appeared to be the primary area of difficulty. This outcome seems to go against theories that suggest that L2 sentence processing is shallow.

Type frequency is not the only factor that determines productivity, so the Tolerance Principle is not enough

Abstract Inflection classes that have many members often gain members from classes that have fewer. While this tendency is often pointed out in diachronic linguistics, the American psycholinguist Charles Yang (2016) goes further. He claims this to be always the case, so that minority classes cannot be productive at the expense of majority classes, and that productivity actually can be predicted. By this view, productivity is a direct function of type frequency; there are no other factors determining whether a pattern is productive. The claim of this paper is that type frequency is not the only factor determining productivity, and that while Yang’s approach, the ›Tolerance Principle‹, is interesting, it cannot be upheld in its present form. The paper presents an example of suppletion spreading in Germanic, and it presents examples of minority patterns spreading in North Germanic. Parallels outside of Germanic are pointed out. Also, it is argued that Yang’s (2016) analysis of English verb inflection and German noun inflection is insufficient, so these important case-studies, presented in favour of the Tolerance Principle, do not support it. In general, the paper emphasises the importance of ›local generalisations‹ and of seeing language as a ›system‹ of low-level regularities, not all-encompassing rules. While type frequency certainly seems important for productivity, inflectional morphology is a complex matter; productivity is also influenced by various factors of a more structural nature.

A Lemmatizer for Low-resource Languages: WSD and Its Role in the Assamese Language

The morphological variations of highly inflected languages that appear in a text impede the progress of computer processing and root word determination tasks while extracting an abstract. As a remedy to this difficulty, a lemmatization algorithm is developed, and its effectiveness is evaluated for Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD). Having observed its usefulness, lemmatizer is considered for developing Natural Language Processing tools for languages rich in morphological variations. Among various Indian highly inflected languages, Assamese, spoken by over 14 million people in the North-Eastern region of India, is also one of them. In this present work, after a detailed study on the possible transformations through which surface words are created from lemmas, we have designed an Assamese lemmatizer in such a manner that suitable reverse transformations can be employed on a surface word to derive the co-relative (similar) lemma back. And it has been observed that the lemmatizer is competent to deal with inflectional and derivational morphology in Assamese, and the same was evaluated on various Assamese articles extracted from the Assamese Corpus consisting of 50,000 surface words (excluding proper nouns), and the result that it yielded with 82% accuracy was quite encouraging and satisfying, as Assamese is a low-level language and no research work has been done in the Assamese language regarding the lemmatization of words. Considering the result obtained, the lemmatizer is then evaluated for Assamese WSD. For this purpose, 10 highly polysemous Assamese words are taken into account for sense disambiguation. We have also regarded varied WSD systems and observed that such systems enhance the effectiveness of all the WSD systems, which is statistically significant.

Morphological and syntactical aspects of Romanian/ English codeswitching

This paper examines the grammatical structure of Romanian/ English codeswitching in the speech of a ten-year-old bilingual child. The analyzed data set consists of single-word switches and phrases, the main focus of the paper being the morphological integration of these English elements in Romanian and the relations they establish with their larger syntactic environment. Using the principles of the Matrix Language Frame model developed by Myers-Scotton (2002, 2006), we show that the structural integrity of Romanian is maintained during codeswitching, and that the English material is used according to the rules imposed by the Romanian grammar. Although Romanian inflectional morphology is often absent on switched words and phrases, the placement of these elements in the grammatical frame of the sentence follows matrix language specifications and word order; moreover, function words in mixed constituents, such as determiners and prepositions, tend to come from Romanian.

A Developmental Approach to Assessing and Treating Agrammatic Aphasia.

There is mounting evidence that the agrammatism that defines Broca's aphasia can be explained in processing terms. However, the extant approach simply describes agrammatism as disparate deficits in a static, mature system. This tutorial aims to motivate and outline a developmental alternative. This alternative is processability theory (PT), a root-to-apex theory of language development, with its origins in the field of second language acquisition, which can connect the findings of aphasia research. This tutorial critically reviews research on agrammatism as a language deficit, a representational deficit, and a processing phenomenon. Given evidence from research applying PT to language disorders, this tutorial outlines PT's multidimensional architecture of language processing. Using an emergence (onset) criterion, PT predicts fixed developmental stages in word order (syntax) and inflection (morphology) and individual differences in the timing of syntax and morphology. To link PT to agrammatism, this theory's applications to diagnosis and teaching are overviewed, and a case study of five individuals with moderate agrammatism is presented. Analysis showed that all individuals were positioned in the early PT stages and differed in their timing of syntax and morphology consistent with theoretical predictions. Evidence from the case study suggests that, although agrammatism results from neural damage and associated language loss, the processing procedures necessary for relearning remain and can be exploited for recovery. A program of diagnosis and intervention is proposed, and future research directions are discussed. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.19416488.

Investigation of Acquisition of Oromo Inflectional Morphology in Typically Developing Children

This research is aimed at investigating patterns of acquisition of Oromo inflectional morphology in typically developing children. The study specifically tries to look into he acquisition of some verbal inflections (tense and aspect) and nominal inflections (number and case). Although linguistic descriptions on various aspects of the Oromo language have extensively been done, there were no research available on the child language acquisition in Oromo in general and inflectional morphology acquisition in particular. The study employed a descriptive cross-sectional research design. Data were collected from thirty children age range 3;0-7;11 years. The study employed primarily elicited production through picture naming method. The speech samples were transcribed first Oromo script and then phonetically transcribed using the IPA symbols. The results showed that some morphological processes attested in children’s productions. In this process, the children employed substitution, and overextension strategy in naming the pictures. In addition, majority of the children omitted noun inflectional morphemes, even at the age 6 through 7. Furthermore, the omission of some inflectional morphemes on the locative case and progressive aspect morpheme were observed, but the lexical morphemes are retained for the latter two items. As to the two past and future tenses, almost all participants performed well. This implies the children acquired these tenses even before the age of 3;3. Evaluating the children’s performance based on sex at the same age, the study revealed an insignificant difference among both sexes.

Double plurals in Breton: Evidence for a split analysis of plurality

Traditional analyses of plurality situate number features within Num(ber)P between NP and DP projections. However, such an analysis does not easily account for all of the properties of plural forms cross-linguistically, particularly those that surface with multiple plural morphemes affixed simultaneously to a single stem. Kramer (2016b) proposes that number features can be exponed on the n category head in addition to on the Num head, generating plural nouns with either one or two plural suffixes. Yet, questions remain about the ability of this analysis to generate multiple plurals in other languages, such as Breton. In this paper, I test the predictions made by Kramer on Breton, which has a complex set of possible plural nominal forms. I present a morphosyntactic description of Breton noun phrases from the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), and I propose several adjustments to the theory of split n/Num plurality as presented by Kramer (2016a). This analysis is an alternative to previous descriptions of Breton number that situate double plurals within theories of lexicality (e.g., Acquaviva 2008) or that assume a strict dichotomy between inflectional and derivational morphology (e.g., Stump 1989, 1990).

Investigation of Acquisition of Oromo Inflectional Morphology in Typically Developing Children

Investigation of Acquisition of Oromo Inflectional Morphology in Typically Developing Children