Morphosyntactic Rules Research Articles

The role of awareness in implicit and explicit knowledge

Abstract This study investigates the initial incidental acquisition of two L2 morphosyntactic rules and their immediate usage in production. Using a miniature artificial language paradigm, multiple exposure sessions, realistic exposure, non-salient linguistic features, as well as multiple outcome measures, we demonstrate that adult learners can learn animacy with low levels of awareness, but not case. Forty adult native speakers of English participated in the experiment. Participants were exposed to audio sentences in the artificial language paired with pictures on the computer screen for three sessions. Knowledge of animacy and case was measured with production and grammaticality judgment tests. Results demonstrated that concrete, contiguous and easily trackable L2 properties that lend themselves to distributional learning, such as animacy marking, can benefit from incidental exposure. However, more abstract L2 properties, like the morphological paradigm of case, seem not to be learnable by incidental means, and opportunities for explicit learning must be provided.

Comparative analysis of morphosyntactic rule learning among monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual speakers: a study on Spanish preterite forms

ABSTRACT The research on language acquisition and retention has primarily focused on monolinguals and bilinguals, with comparatively few studies including trilinguals. To address this gap, the current study compares the acquisition and retention of a novel morphosyntactic rule in Spanish in twelve monolinguals, twelve bilinguals, and twelve trilinguals. The participants underwent training on the preterite verb tense in Spanish, and their ability to correctly identify the rule was tested after two days of training. The study also investigated the effect of verb type on the acquisition of novel morphosyntactic rules in monolinguals and multilinguals. The results revealed that all participants performed better during the delayed retention phase than the other phases. However, bilingual participants demonstrated significantly better accuracy in identifying newly learned tense forms than their monolingual and trilingual counterparts. The study also revealed that regular past tense forms were easier to learn than irregular past tense forms. Overall, the findings from this study suggest that individuals who speak more than two languages may face challenges in acquiring additional languages.

Anglicizing Urdu in Pakistani English Fashion and Lifestyle Blogs: A Morpho- Syntactic Analysis of Urdu Words in Express Tribune

Urdu words in the Pakistani variety of English have been anglicized because they follow the morpho-syntactic rules of the English language rather than Urdu. This present research paper identifies the process and the extent to which Urdu words in fashion and lifestyle blogs of Tribune.pk are being anglicized. The study involves analysis of the morpho-syntactic parameters involved in the process and the frequency of anglicized words and the reasons for Anglicization of Urdu in these blogs. Data from the selected text has been extracted by employing Content analysis and is further put to analysis through Rasool’s (2006) and Baumgardner et a’s (1996) models to find the morpho-syntactic parameters involved, the frequency of and the viable reasons for the anglicizing Urdu words respectively. The study finds that Urdu words in the selected text are anglicized for two reasons; either to fill the lexical gap or to retain the culture specific meanings.

BARE ENGLISH-ORIGIN NOUN-PHRASES IN ROMANIAN

English words borrowed in Romanian are most often adapted so as to conform to the morphosyntactic rules of the recipient language. However, sometimes borrowings remain uninflected for Romanian grammatical categories, by not receiving the relevant suffixes for gender, number, case, and definiteness. These unintegrated forms are known in the literature as bare forms. The present paper analyses such cases of English-origin bare nouns and noun phrases in Romanian, and tries to explain the structural, social and functional mechanisms that trigger their appearance.

Acquisition of Malayalam inflections: Complexity of morphosyntactic rules and its impact on developing grammars

In this article, we present an analysis of the complexity of grammatical constraints and their impact on early language acquisition of inflectional morphemes in Malayalam. We use the natural speech production data of two monolingual children acquiring Malayalam between the ages 1;9–2;10 and 2;3–3;0 and three bilingual children acquiring Malayalam-English between the ages 1;9–2;8, 2;0–3;0 and 1;10–2;11 to recover the underlying grammatical constraints that govern the correct productions as well as errors across monolingual and bilingual contexts. We find rules that reference lexico-semantic properties to be particularly challenging to young children.

Periphrastic causative in West Circassian

AbstractThis paper looks at a grammaticalized periphrastic causative construction in West Circassian. West Circassian is a polysynthetic language and expresses information largely through morphological means, which makes this construction all the more unusual. As interest in the complexities of polysynthetic languages grows, it is important to look at periphrastic strategies and syntactic operations in these languages beyond those governed by their morphosyntactic rules. Here, a causative construction based on the West Circassian ‘do’ exists alongside a highly productive morphological causative. Questions of how and why the appearance of such a construction is possible in West Circassian, but has not happened in closely related Abaza, are important and are a reminder that we should look beyond the complex morphosyntax of such languages to less studied and less conspicuous structures that can challenge our understanding of polysynthetic paradigms.

O OBLIČKOJ REALIZACIJI LEKSIČKIH ANGLICIZAMA U SRPSKOM JEZIKU U KOMENTARIMA NA DRUŠTVENOJ MREŽI JUTJUB

This paper deals with morphological adaptation of Anglicisms used by speakers of Serbian when posting comments on YouTube. Given the main focus of our re- search, we rely on Prćićʼs classification of Anglicisms in Serbian. According to Prćić, there are three types of Anglicisms in Serbian: raw, obvious and hidden. Raw Anglicisms are not adapted in any way and are used as such in Serbian. For example, in all-inclusive aranžman, all-inclusive is an example of a raw, non-adapted Anglicism. Obvious Anglicisms are Eng- lish words that have been fully adapted to the linguistic system of the Serbian language. These anglicisms are orthographically, phonologically, and morphosyntactically Serbian, but it is obvious that they are loanwords. For example, lajk (eng. like), daunloudovati (eng. download)... Hidden Anglicisms refer to the phenomenon of Serbian words and phrases being used in the same way as their English counterparts. For example, Serbian word kopija might develop the same meaning as its English counterpart copy. In addition to Prćićʼs classification, we simultaneously rely on Filipovićʼs ideas about the primary and secondary morphological adaptation of English loanwords. Primary morphological adaptation entails deciding how the word will be written and pronounced in Serbian. After that, the word undergoes secondary morphological adaptation, that is, it must be used in accordance with all the morphosyntactic rules of Serbian. New forms of the word (for example, adjectival forms...) are derived using standard Serbian affixes. The goal of this paper was to describe the ways in which subscribers adapt English words, if they happen to do that at all. The analysis of the morphological adaptation of An- glicisms in Serbian is based on a corpus of 100 Anglicisms that Serbian subscribers incorpo- rated into their comments. The research results were the following: (1) the most commonly used Anglicisms are raw and obvious Anglicisms; (2) both raw and obvious Anglicisms undergo secondary morphological adaptation (for example, klilbejterski, contentom); (3) ex- amples of hidden Anglicisms were not found in the corpus; (4) subscribers sometimes adapt only one or one part of the Anglicism (for example, family frendli, clickbejter; Ajde lajk ko zeli part 2); (5) morphological adaptation is varied, arbitrary, and entirely subjective. Given that the use of raw and obvious Anglicisms, particularly on different social media platforms, such as YouTube, remains unabated, it is necessary to raise awareness about the importance of proper morphological adaptation of foreign words in Serbian, which is one of the essential prerequisites for their proper usage and preservation of the Serbian language.

ITEXT-BIO: Intelligent Term EXTraction for BIOmedical analysis

Here, we introduce ITEXT-BIO, an intelligent process for biomedical domain terminology extraction from textual documents and subsequent analysis. The proposed methodology consists of two complementary approaches, including free and driven term extraction. The first is based on term extraction with statistical measures, while the second considers morphosyntactic variation rules to extract term variants from the corpus. The combination of two term extraction and analysis strategies is the keystone of ITEXT-BIO. These include combined intra-corpus strategies that enable term extraction and analysis either from a single corpus (intra), or from corpora (inter). We assessed the two approaches, the corpus or corpora to be analysed and the type of statistical measures used. Our experimental findings revealed that the proposed methodology could be used: (1) to efficiently extract representative, discriminant and new terms from a given corpus or corpora, and (2) to provide quantitative and qualitative analyses on these terms regarding the study domain.

Effects of oral corrective feedback on the development of complex morphosyntax

This exploratory study examined the relationship between corrective feedback (CF) and linguistic target complexity. In a pre-test/post-test/delayed post-test design, 44 adult intermediate L2 Italian learners from different L1 backgrounds were assigned to a didactic recast, a prompt and a no-feedback group. They were compared on oral and written measures on the development of passato prossimo, an Italian compound past form characterised by a set of complex semantic and morphosyntactic rules and participles displaying different degrees of form-meaning transparency. Mixed-effects models elucidated the extent to which feedback frequency predicted accuracy, whilst controlling for the effect of individual difference covariates and random variation. Only the frequency of didactic recasts predicted development of full passato prossimo sentences, whereas both feedback types were significantly related to participle development, a single aspect of the construction. Furthermore, only prompt frequency was positively related to accuracy in participles displaying more transparent (less complex) form-meaning relationships.

Syntactic co-activation in natural reading

ABSTRACT The extent to which syntactic co-activation occurs during natural reading is currently unknown. Here, we measured the eye movements of Welsh-English bilinguals and English monolinguals as they read English sentences. Target words were manipulated to create nonwords that were consistent or inconsistent with the rules of Welsh soft mutation (a morphosyntactic process that alters the initial consonant of words). Nonwords were only visible in parafoveal preview, and a direct fixation triggered the presentation of the normal English word. Linear mixed effects analyses revealed a robust parafoveal preview benefit for identity (television) compared with mutated (delevision) and aberrant previews (belevision), and a parafoveal-on-foveal effect in our bilingual sample. Bilingual readers' sentence reanalysis was affected by the implicit Welsh mutation, but only in contexts that would elicit a mutation in Welsh. Our findings suggest that morphosyntactic rules are co-activated during natural reading, however further investigations must evaluate the robustness of this effect.

Reliance on Predicative Units as a Method of Analysing and Translating Amharic Written Texts

In analysing and translating Amharic texts, most foreign students have experienced major problems while trying to ‘redirect’ the rigidly leftbranching syntax of Amharic into the predominantly right-branching syntax of most European languages. The way out of this difficulty proposed by some teachers of Amharic consists in the so-called ‘translating from the end’ principle: the student begins to decipher the structure of an Amharic sentence from the finite verb form at its very end and gradually proceeds towards the beginning of the sentence, untangling—one by one—the syntactic structures involved. In the course of teaching Amharic, I have found this method largely inadequate for the purpose it is supposed to achieve. As an alternative to the ‘translating from the end’ method the author proposes another strategy which could be termed ‘reliance on predicative units’. In using this strategy, the student should, first of all, single out verb forms which are likely to perform the function of (final or dependent) predicates. The second step consists in delimiting groups, or units, headed by every such verb form. The third step is to provide a rough, working translation of every such unit without taking into consideration its relations to the other units in the sentence. The fourth, and final, step consists in joining the translations of the predicative units together; at this stage, detailed knowledge of Amharic morphosyntactic rules is very much required.

How the brain composes morphemes into meaning.

Morphemes (e.g. [tune], [-ful], [-ly]) are the basic blocks with which complex meaning is built. Here, I explore the critical role that morpho-syntactic rules play in forming the meaning of morphologically complex words, from two primary standpoints: (i) how semantically rich stem morphemes (e.g. explode, bake, post) combine with syntactic operators (e.g. -ion, -er, -age) to output a semantically predictable result; (ii) how this process can be understood in terms of mathematical operations, easily allowing the brain to generate representations of novel morphemes and comprehend novel words. With these ideas in mind, I offer a model of morphological processing that incorporates semantic and morpho-syntactic operations in service to meaning composition, and discuss how such a model could be implemented in the human brain. This article is part of the theme issue 'Towards mechanistic models of meaning composition'.

Adpositions in Media Lengua: Quichua or Spanish? – Evidence of a Lexical-Functional Split

After decades of debate in linguistic theory, the lexical/functional status of adpositions is still controversial. Lexicon-Grammar mixed languages such as Media Lengua, spoken in Northern Ecuador, are excellent testing cases for such grammatical categories: This mixed language displays a conservative Quichua morphosyntactic frame while approximately 90% of its lexical roots are relexified from Spanish. Thus, due to the lexical-functional split Media Lengua displays, whether adpositions in this language are realized in Quichua or Spanish can speak to their status as a lexical/functional category. This study reports data from recent field research, conducted with speakers trilingual in Media Lengua, Quichua and Spanish who participated in two tasks (video description and translation). The results show a split between lexical and functional adpositions in Media Lengua, manifested in the dual-language realization of complex (multimorphemic) items: The lexical part of these complex items is relexified from Spanish while the functional part is retained in Quichua – even when participants are structurally primed. This suggests that Media Lengua across communities systematically follows Quichua morphosyntactic rules.

Proactive and Reactive Language Control in the Bilingual Brain.

The current experiment investigated bilingual language control within the dual mechanisms framework. In an fMRI investigation of morphosyntactic rule production, the presence or absence of target language cues was manipulated to investigate the neural mechanisms associated with proactive and reactive global language control mechanisms. Patterns of activation across nine regions of interest (ROIs) were investigated in seventeen early Spanish–English bilingual speakers. A cue by phase interaction in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and pre-supplementary motor area (Pre-SMA) was observed, suggesting that these regions were more active during cue phases, and less active during execution phases, when target language cues were presented. Individual differences analyses showed that variability in proactive control (informative > non-informative cued trial activation during preparation) in the basal ganglia was correlated with proactive control in the left DLPFC, left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), and right precentral ROIs. In contrast, reactive control (non-informative > informative cued activation during execution) in the anterior cingulate was correlated with reactive control in the Pre-SMA and left orbital frontal ROIs. The results suggest that, consistent with the dual mechanisms framework, bilinguals differ in the degree to which they use cues to proactively prepare to use a target language.

Locality domains and morphological rules

Korean subject honorification and Korean negation have both affixal and suppletive exponents. In addition, Korean negation has a periphrastic realization involving an auxiliary verb. By examining their interaction, we motivate several hypotheses concerning locality constraints on the conditioning of suppletion and the insertion of dissociated morphemes (‘node-sprouting’). At the same time, we come to a better understanding of the nature of Korean subject honorification. We show that Korean honorific morphemes are ‘dissociated’ or ‘sprouted,’ i.e., introduced by morphosyntactic rule in accordance with morphological well-formedness constraints, like many other agreement morphemes. We argue that the conditioning domain for node-sprouting is the syntactic phase. In contrast, our data suggest that the conditioning domain for suppletion is the complex X0, as proposed by Bobaljik (2012). We show that the ‘spanning’ hypotheses concerning exponence (Merchant 2015; Svenonius 2012), the ‘linear adjacency’ hypotheses (Embick 2010), and ‘accessibility domain’ hypothesis (Moskal 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Moskal and Smith 2016) make incorrect predictions for Korean suppletion. Finally, we argue that competition between honorific and negative suppletive exponents reveals a root-outwards effect in allomorphic conditioning, supporting the idea that insertion of vocabulary items proceeds root-outwards (Bobaljik 2000).

The effect of emotion on morphosyntactic learning in foreign language learners.

Emotions have crucial influence on vocabulary learning and text comprehension. However, whether morphosyntactic learning is influenced by emotional conditions has remained largely unclear. In this study, we investigated how induced positive and negative emotions affect the learning of morphosyntactic rules in a foreign language. It was found that negative emotion increased the accuracy and efficiency of syntactic learning, but had no significant effect on the learning of morphological marking rules. Positive emotion was not found to be significantly associated with learning outcomes. The findings shed light on the effects of affective states on the structural aspects of foreign language learning.

Morphological representations are extrapolated from morpho-syntactic rules

The field of psycho- and neuro-linguistics has long-debated the decompositional model of visual word processing: Are written words processed via the visual forms of stem and affix morphemes, or as complex wholes? Although many have now settled upon a decompositional view, it is unclear what heuristic the brain uses to generate these visual morpheme-forms in the first place. Here we conduct a magneto-encephalography study to test two hypotheses for how this may be done: i) the brain encodes representations of the morphemes that follow the morpho-syntactic rules governing constituents: A stem morpheme will be represented if the word obeys the grammatical behaviour associated with its suffix; ii) the brain only encodes stem morphemes that occur with multiple suffixes or as words in isolation. Our results indicate that words with morpho-syntactic wellformedness as stem-suffix combinations are decomposed by the system, thus supporting the former hypothesis. This suggests that knowledge of morpho-syntactic rules can be used to form morphological representations of written words, in absence of independent experience with all of their constituent morphemes. Possible mechanisms supporting this computation are discussed.

The bilingual language network: Differential involvement of anterior cingulate, basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex in preparation, monitoring, and execution

Research on the neural bases of bilingual language control has largely overlooked the role of preparatory processes, which are central to cognitive control. Additionally, little is known about how the processes involved in global language selection may differ from those involved in the selection of words and morpho-syntactic rules for manipulating them. These processes were examined separately in an fMRI experiment, with an emphasis on understanding how and when general cognitive control regions become activated. Results of region-of-interest analyses on 23 early Spanish-English bilinguals showed that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) was primarily engaged during the language preparation phase of the task, whereas the left prefrontal (DLPFC) and pre-supplementary motor areas showed increasing activation from preparation to execution. Activation in the basal ganglia (BG), left middle temporal lobe, and right precentral cortical regions did not significantly differ throughout the task. These results suggest that three core cognitive control regions, the ACC, DLPFC, and BG, which have been previously implicated in bilingual language control, engage in distinct neurocognitive processes. Specifically, the results are consistent with the view that the BG “keep track” of the target language in use throughout various levels of language selection, that the ACC is particularly important for top-down target language preparation, and that the left prefrontal cortex is increasingly involved in selection processes from preparation through task execution.

Cortical thickness of planum temporale and pars opercularis in native language tone processing

The present study investigated the relationship between linguistic tone processing and cortical thickness of bilateral planum temporale (PT) and pars opercularis of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFGpo). Swedish tones on word stems function as cues to upcoming endings. Correlating structural brain imaging data with participants’ response time patterns for suffixes, we found that thicker cortex in the left PT was associated with greater reliance on tones to anticipate upcoming inflections on real words. On inflected pseudoword stems, however, the cortical thickness of left IFGpo was associated with tone-suffix processing. Thus cortical thickness of the left PT might play a role in processing tones as part of stored representations for familiar speech segments, most likely when inflected forms are accessed as whole words. In the absence of stored representations, listeners might need to rely on morphosyntactic rules specifying tone-suffix associations, potentially facilitated by greater cortical thickness of left IFGpo.

Formas de tratamento: português e espanhol em foco

Ser competente linguisticamente, além de dominar as regras morfossintáticas e a semântica próprias de cada língua, é conhecer também o conjunto de normas que regulam o comportamento adequado dos membros de um determinado meio social. A língua, como meio de interação com outros indivíduos, não pode ser desvinculada de suas características socioculturais. Ao respeito, cada sociedade estabelece regras, nas quais se incluem as formas de tratamento, que sancionam as condutas comunicativas como sendo adequadas ou inadequadas. A forma como tratamos o outro se insere num código social que, quando transgredido, pode causar prejuízo no relacionamento entre os interlocutores. Especificamente, as formas de tratamento designam tanto os termos que se referem ao par falante-ouvinte, como os vocativos usados para chamar a atenção do destinatário, englobando os chamados pronomes pessoais de tratamento assim como as formas nominais. O objetivo deste trabalho é fazer considerações sobre as formas de tratamento no português do Brasil e no espanhol ibérico; apresentar teorias que abordam o tema da cortesia; e, a partir de dados obtidos de duas obras de teatro brasileiras do século XX, analisar e comparar as estratégias pragmáticas desenvolvidas mediante as formas de tratamento tanto no português do Brasil como no espanhol ibérico. Com este estudo, pretendemos, também, oferecer aos professores de língua estrangeira algumas apreciações acerca das dificuldades, pragmalinguísticas e sociopragmáticas que, no processo de aquisição/aprendizagem das formas de tratamento, podem ocorrer por nfluência da língua materna.