Morphosyntactic Variation Research Articles

A FRAGMENT OF THE LEXICAL SYSTEM OF KAZYM KHANTY: THE VERBS PITTI ‘TO FALL; TO GET INTO SOMEWHERE’ AND ΧƆJTI ‘TO TOUCH; TO HIT THE TARGET’, AND THEIR ARGUMENT STRUCTURE

The study describes the semantics of the Kazym Khanty verbs pitti ‘to fall; to get into somewhere’ and χɔjti ‘to touch; to hit the target’ as analyzed from the perspective of the frame-based approach to lexical typology. According to this approach, semantic fields consist of certain situation types, or frames, which are denoted by the lexemes belonging to the field. The situation types correspond to distributional patterns and serve as a basis for cross-linguistic comparison of word meanings. The paper identifies and illustrates the sets of physical meanings of the verbs in question, with a special focus on the domain of variation between pitti and χɔjti. It is shown that these verbs concur in contexts involving the semantics of either getting (occasionally) into somewhere (cf. A fly got into my soup) or hitting the target (cf. The arrow hit him in the arm). Evidence from Kazym Khanty, as well as from available cross-linguistic data, suggests that these meanings are adjacent to each other, while the meaning ‘to get into somewhere’ is closer to the domain of falling, and the meaning ‘to hit the target’ is closer to the domain of physical contact. Thus, the meanings ‘to fall’, ‘to get into somewhere’, ‘to hit the target’, and ‘to touch’ form a semantic continuum with no clear-cut boundaries between the semantic fields. This hypothesis is further supported by morphosyntactic variation in encoding of the patientive argument of the verb χɔjti, which seems to be influenced by the morphological pattern inherent to the verb pitti.

Not only size matters: limits to the Law of Three Consonants in French phonology

Grammont’s (1914) influential Law of Three Consonants (LTC) states that French schwa is obligatorily pronounced in any CC_C sequence to avoid three-consonant clusters. Later works have shown that schwa presence is also sensitive to the nature of the consonants involved, at least at the word and phrase levels. However the LTC is still generally considered as accurate under its original formulation to describe schwa-zero alternations at the stem level. The goal of the paper is to test whether the LTC should be relaxed even in this context. The paper presents two studies using judgment data to compare the behavior of schwa in derived words (stem-level phonology) and in inflected words (word-level phonology). The results of the two studies show that the nature of consonants involved in the CC_C sequence plays a role at both stem and word levels. Moreover, the same phonotactic asymmetries among consonant clusters are found in both contexts. The data therefore support a weaker version of the stem-level vs. word-level divide than what is usually assumed for French. This conclusion is strengthened by the results of a modeling study showing that a constraint-based grammar with the same phonotactic constraints across stem- and word-level phonologies provides a better fit to the judgment data from Study 1 and Study 2 than a grammar with different phononotactic constraints in the two morphosyntactic domains. The paper also replicates a number of earlier findings on the role of morphosyntactic domains, clash avoidance, and dialectal variation in schwa-zero alternations.

Language Variation in the Writing of African American Students: Factors Predicting Reading Achievement.

PurposeThis study aims to examine the predictive relation between measures obtained from African American students' written narrative language samples and reading achievement, as measured by standardized academic assessments.MethodWritten language samples were elicited from 207 African American students in Grades 1–8. The samples were examined for morphosyntactic variations from standardized written Generalized American English (GAE). These variations were categorized as either (a) specific to African American English (AAE) or (b) neutral across AAE and standardized written GAE (i.e., considered ungrammatical both in AAE and in standardized written GAE). Structural equation modeling was employed to then examine the predictive relation between the density of AAE-specific forms in students' writing and their performance on standardized assessments of literacy and reading vocabulary. This relation was examined while accounting for the density of dialect-neutral morphosyntactic forms, reported family income, age, and written sample length.ResultsThe written samples were highly variable in terms of morphosyntax. Younger students and those from lower income homes tended to use AAE-specific forms at higher rates. However, the density of AAE-specific forms did not significantly predict standardized literacy scores or reading vocabulary after accounting for dialect-neutral variations, income, and sample length.ConclusionsThese results support the ongoing need to better understand the language, literacy, and overall academic development of students from all backgrounds. It may be essential to focus on dialect-neutral language forms (i.e., morphosyntactic forms that are consistent across both AAE and standardized written GAE) in written samples to maximize assessment validity across students who speak varying dialects of English.Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.16879558

Children’s Acquisition of Morphosyntactic Variation

ABSTRACT This article presents a developmental pathway for the acquisition of morphosyntactic variation. Although there is abundant evidence that morphosyntactic variation is pervasive among adults, much less is known about how children acquire such variation. The literature thus far indicates that the pathway of development involves first producing only one of the variable forms (Step 1), producing both forms but in mutually-exclusive contexts (Step 2), then producing both forms in some overlapping linguistic contexts (Step 3), and finally producing both forms in more contexts (Step 4). The research reviewed indicates that input patterns are influential each step of the way, playing an important role in determining children’s use of forms as well as the contexts in which the forms are produced. In addition to considering input effects, we also draw on various tendencies that children evince in the face of variable input to explain the pathway of development, including regularization and assigning different meanings to different forms. The article also includes suggestions for testing the hypotheses generated by the proposed pathway of development, which we illustrate by drawing on the acquisition of variable Spanish subject pronoun expression.

The locus of parametric variation in Bantu gender and nominal derivation

AbstractIn this paper, we capture the crosslinguistic variation in Bantu nominal structure in a unified analysis of gender onn(Kramer 2014,2015). We demonstrate that this analysis accounts for the morphosyntactic properties of basic nouns as well as locative and diminutive derivations. Moreover, it allows us to capture intra- and inter-language morphosyntactic variation by reference to just three parameters – one strictly morphological and two structural. The presence of one or twonheads, and the size of the complement distinguish between different types of locatives (structural variation); the presence or absence of a spell-out rule of adjacentnheads differentiates “stacking” versus “non-stacking” prefixes in diminutive and augmentative derivations (morphological variation only).

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.

Variation awaiting bias: Substantively biased learning of vowel harmony variation.

This article examines whether children alter a variable phonological pattern in an artificial language towards a phonetically-natural form. We address acquisition of a variable rounding harmony pattern through the use of two artificial languages; one with dominant harmony pattern, and another with dominant non-harmony pattern. Overall, children favor harmony pattern in their production of the languages. In the language where harmony is non-dominant, children's subsequent production entirely reverses the pattern so that harmony predominates. This differs starkly from adults. Our results compare to the regularization found in child learning of morphosyntactic variation, suggesting a role for naturalness in variable phonological learning.

A Novel COVID-19 Data Set and an Effective Deep Learning Approach for the De-Identification of Italian Medical Records.

In the last years, the need to de-identify privacy-sensitive information within Electronic Health Records (EHRs) has become increasingly felt and extremely relevant to encourage the sharing and publication of their content in accordance with the restrictions imposed by both national and supranational privacy authorities. In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), several deep learning techniques for Named Entity Recognition (NER) have been applied to face this issue, significantly improving the effectiveness in identifying sensitive information in EHRs written in English. However, the lack of data sets in other languages has strongly limited their applicability and performance evaluation. To this aim, a new de-identification data set in Italian has been developed in this work, starting from the 115 COVID-19 EHRs provided by the Italian Society of Radiology (SIRM): 65 were used for training and development, the remaining 50 were used for testing. The data set was labelled following the guidelines of the i2b2 2014 de-identification track. As additional contribution, combined with the best performing Bi-LSTM + CRF sequence labeling architecture, a stacked word representation form, not yet experimented for the Italian clinical de-identification scenario, has been tested, based both on a contextualized linguistic model to manage word polysemy and its morpho-syntactic variations and on sub-word embeddings to better capture latent syntactic and semantic similarities. Finally, other cutting-edge approaches were compared with the proposed model, which achieved the best performance highlighting the goodness of the promoted approach.

Cross-linguistic influence in L1 processing of morphosyntactic variation: Evidence from L2 learners

AbstractThe current study investigates cross-linguistic influence of second language (L2) learning on native language (L1) processing of morphosyntactic variation in proficient L2 learners immersed in their L1. Despite Spanish pre- and postverbal clitic pronoun positions being grammatical in complex verb phrases, preferences of use have been well attested in naturalistic language production. To examine whether those preferences obtain for comprehension in monolinguals, as well as how those preferences might be modulated by learning an L2 with fixed pronoun positions, we administered a self-paced reading experiment to 20 Spanish monolinguals as well as 22 proficient learners English (L1 Spanish). The results of a Bayesian mixed effects regression analysis suggest that preferences in production are echoed in comprehension—but only for the monolingual group. We find support for facilitation in the bilingual group precisely where both languages overlap, as well as evidence that bilinguals may not use clitic position as a reliable cue at all. We interpret the results as evidence that learning an L2 that lacks variation for a particular feature may lead to reduced sensitivity to that feature as a cue in an analogous L1 structure. We situate these results in an experience-based, shared-syntax account of language processing.

Combining contextualized word representation and sub-document level analysis through Bi-LSTM+CRF architecture for clinical de-identification

Clinical de-identification aims to identify Protected Health Information in clinical data, enabling data sharing and publication. First automatic de-identification systems were based on rules or on machine learning methods, limited by language changes, lack of context awareness and time consuming feature engineering. Newer deep learning techniques for sequence labeling have shown better results with a reduction in feature engineering efforts and the use of word representation techniques in vector space. However, they are not able to jointly represent the polysemic and context-dependent nature of words, as well as their morpho-syntactic mutations characteristic of handwriting. To address these limitations, a new de-identification approach based on deep learning techniques for Named Entity Recognition has been proposed, whose key factors are: (i) a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory + Conditional Random Field architecture for sequence labeling that takes advantage of the widest possible representation context; (ii) a contextualized language model, working at character level, to capture the polysemy of words and manage the morpho-syntactic variations typical of handwritten notes; (iii) more word representations stacked to better capture latent syntactic and semantic similarities. This approach has been tested on the official Informatics for Integrating Biology & the Bedside 2014 de-identification dataset, showing similar or higher performance than state of the art with respect to category and binary recognition, but without any feature engineering or handcrafted rules. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, in particular with regard to category level recognition which is essential to correctly replace entities with surrogates for anonymization purposes.

Introduction to special issue on morphosyntactic variation within the individual language user

Introduction to special issue on morphosyntactic variation within the individual language user

La distribuzione diatopica di alcuni predicati complessi sardi

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to examine the diatopic variation of some Sardinian complex predicates, mainly from a morphosyntactic (and, secondarily, a semantic) perspective. I will discuss (i) the distribution of Camp(idanese)ai/ Log(udorese)-Nu(orese)àere a+ inf(initive), lit. ‘to have to’ + inf., and of the agglutinated and univerbated forms of Log.-Nu.dèvere/dèppere+ inf., lit. ‘must’ + inf., both constructions expressing (different types of) future time reference; (ii) the diffusion of person and number in the modal complex predicate Camp.fai/ Log.-Nu.fàghere/fàchere a+ inf., lit. ‘to do to’ + inf., with the sense of ‘being able/allowed to do something’; (iii) cases of double accusative marking of clitic pronouns expressingcausee/beneficiaryandundergoer, and agreement between these pronouns and the past participle of ‘make’/‘let’ in the causative constructions Camp.fai/ Log.-Nu.fàghere/fàchere+ inf., lit. ‘to make’ + inf., and Camp.lassai/ Log.-Nu.lassare/(dassare)+ inf., lit. ‘to let’ + inf.; (iv) the ongoing diffusion of the reiterative and/or purposive values of Camp.torrai a/po/ Log.-Nu.torrare a/pro+ inf., lit. ‘to return to’ + inf.; (v) the ongoing diffusion of the aspectual complex predicate Camp.(am)megai/ Log.-Nu.(am)megare de/a+ inf., conveying progressive aspect, according to Blasco Ferrer (1991; 2002) and my data. In conclusion, I will argue that isoglosses of morphosyntactic variation of Sardinian complex predicates seem to be more ‘conservative’ (in the sense of Virdis 1988) and to englobe wider and more homogenous areas, if compared to phonological isoglosses.

Using social-media data to investigate morphosyntactic variation and dialect syntax in a lesser-used language: Two case studies from Welsh

Data gathered from social media have been used extensively to examine lexical dialect variation in widely used languages such as English and Spanish, but their use to date in morphosyntax and for lesser-used languages has been more limited. This paper tests the usefulness of using data derived from Twitter to address traditional questions in dialect syntax and sociolinguistics. It uses two cases studies from Welsh – the form of the second-person singular pronoun in various syntactic contexts, and the availability of auxiliary deletion – to assess whether datasets based on Twitter data can successfully replicate and enhance results derived by traditional means. The results of the case studies coincide to a large extent with distributions established in existing studies, even ones using entirely different methods, such as dialect questionnaires or acceptability judgment tests. Twitter data also show considerable success in establishing implicational hierarchies and conditioning factors comparable to those typical of the field. Where the results differ from existing studies, the differences may be due to the younger demographics of Twitter users, or to differences in the quantity of data provided by different methodologies. The results produce patterns closer to spoken data than to written data, giving us reasonable confidence in such data as a relatively good proxy for spoken usage of large numbers of language users.

Nominal property concepts and substance possession in Mandarin Chinese

This paper investigates two puzzles regarding property concept (PC) lexemes (Dixon in Where have all the adjectives gone? And other essays in semantics and syntax. Mouton, The Hague, 1982) in Mandarin: why degree modifiers such as hen ‘very’ are compatible with gradable adjectives such as gao ‘tall’ as well as PC nominals such as zhihui ‘wisdom’, but not with concrete mass nouns such as shui ‘water’ in simple declarative clauses, and why degree modifiers are obligatory to block comparative interpretation in sentences with gradable adjectives and possessive PC nominal phrases. I demonstrate the data of PC nominals in possessive constructions with positive and comparative interpretations. Following Francez and Koontz-Garboden (Semantics and morphosyntactic variation: qualities and the grammar of property concepts. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017), I argue that PC nominals and other mass nouns in Mandarin are semantically distinct in such a way that the latter lack inherent measures. Furthermore, I argue that gradable adjectives and possessive PC nominal phrases are model-theoretically equivalent. Moreover, I propose that degree modifiers such as hen are compulsory to block comparative interpretations in PC sentences because possessive PC phrases are Adjective Phrases and require an overt degree modifier or a covert comparative operator to satisfy the T[+ V] constraint in Mandarin proposed by Grano (Nat Lang Linguist Theory 30:513–565, 2012).

An interview with Naomi L. Shin

Naomi L. Shin is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Hispanic Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. Her primary interests include child language acquisition, bilingualism, language contact, and sociolinguistics. Her research focuses on patterns of morphosyntactic variation, examining how these patterns are acquired during childhood and how they change in situations of language contact. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Journal of Child Language, Cognitive Linguistics, International Journal of Bilingualism, Language Acquisition, Language Variation and Change, Language in Society, Foreign Language Annals, Spanish in Context, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics, and International Journal of the Sociology of Language. She is the co-author of Gramatica Espanola: Variacion Social, which explores grammar in a way that emphasizes the social underpinnings of language.Website: http://www.unm.edu/~naomishin/index.html

Speaking Style Modulates Morphosyntactic Expectations in Young and Older Adults: Evidence from a Sentence Repetition Task

ABSTRACT Previous research has shown that talker identity and speaking style affect the processing of morphosyntactic violations. The present study examined whether speaking style modulates comprehension and subsequent production of case variants in German prepositional phrases across the life span. To this end, we conducted a sentence repetition and completion experiment with young and older adults. After a familiarization phase with two talkers (one with a careful pronunciation and one with a casual pronunciation), participants were asked to repeat utterances produced by these two talkers. Critical case markers were replaced by white noise. The results showed a main effect of speaking style in the responses of both age groups, suggesting that young and older adults can adjust their expectations about variants usage to the talker’s speaking style and can alter their subsequent production accordingly. These findings have implications for research on processing and producing morphosyntactic variation and expectation-based language processing.

Cerca mío/aorcerca de mí ? A variationist analysis of Spanish locative + possessive on Twitter

AbstractSpanish locative adverbs may be followed by either a prepositional phrase (PP) (e.g.cerca de mí‘close to/(of) me’) or, nonstandardly, a tonic possessive (TP) (e.g.cerca mío‘lit. close mine’). Some also take feminine forms (e.g.cerca mía, detrás mía). Using R, I analyze 16,809 tweets representing 14 locatives from Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Mexico City and demonstrate that, although dialects and individual locatives vary widely in their rates of TP use, the person, number, and animacy of the possessor significantly predict PP/TP selection across varieties. Also, feminine possessives are used almost exclusively in Spain, and the seemingly feminine morphology of locatives ending in–a(e.g.encima) and subsequent extension to other locatives via analogy is the most plausible explanation for their use. Further evidence of analogy is TP use in non-locative contexts (e.g. Arg.pensás mío‘you think of me,’ Sp.enamorado tuyo/a‘in love with you’). These findings illuminate the interactions between avoidance of ambiguity, form-based analogy, and speakers’ conceptualization of possession. My findings regarding animacy, which find parallels in research on English dative and genitive constructions, highlight the utility of both cross-linguistic and cross-constructional comparisons in analyzing morphosyntactic variation.

Constituting agency in the delivery of telephone-mediated victim support

ABSTRACTIn telephone helpline interactions, a practical problem for participants is how to advance a relevant course of action about what can be done within the institution’s remit that may not be what a caller asks for or needs. This study investigates how call-takers progress delivering support for callers ringing a service for victims of crime and trauma. It focuses on how actions are advanced by the call-taker using linguistic formats that can be broadly characterised as directive-commissive speech acts. The research asks how agency is constituted through the linguistic format parties’ use to display what can be done and who decides. Using conversation analysis to examine 80 cases where the delivery of support is progressed, the results show that subtle morpho-syntactic variation in the format of interrogatives (i.e., ‘Did you want to,’ ‘Do you want to’) display orientations to who can do or decide upon a future course of action. Evidence is presented that the ‘did you form’ tilts the agency toward the Self as something she can progress whereas the ‘do you’ format tilts the balance toward the Other to decide. More obviously, the actions can be formulated in terms of the Self committing to an action (e.g., ‘I’ll pop you through’) or as clearly deferring to the Other to decide (e.g., ‘would you like me to’). This study furthers the general intellectual project of discursive psychology by providing an empirical demonstration of the way classic questions about the nature of subjectivity and individual agency can be re-specified as shared practices for accomplishing action in social interaction.

Bewertung und Grammatikalität regionaler Syntax.

This paper addresses how morphosyntactic variation stemming from the Alemannic regional variety is perceived, evaluated, and judged in written and spoken language. Based on data from a questionnaire and speeded grammaticality judgments, this study examines which grammatical variants are salient to the listener as a function of speaker accent (regional vs. standard) and listener background (students from different school types and cities). The results show that, in addition to the regional morphosyntax, regional accent co-determines grammaticality judgements, in particular for naive listeners. Expert listener (students of language and literature) judgements are less affected by speaker accent, and appear to follow their subjective normative expectations concerning the prescriptive syntax usage. The most normative judgments on both syntactic and phonological levels were observed for dialectal variants within a group of high school students, despite being active users of the Alemannic variety. This result is a likely consequence of an explicit discard of dialect usage during classroom interactions.

“Sollte dies mein Geschreibsel meine theure Heymath erreichen”: Linguistic variation in the diary of a nineteenth-century Swiss German migrant

Abstract Increasing migration from the nineteenth century onwards has led to the production of letters and travel diaries that allowed migrants to stay in touch with their home country. Taking the perspective of ‘language history from below’, this paper focuses on a Swiss variety of written German, as used in the diary of Matthias Dürst, and its status in relation to the standardization of written German, the local dialect, and the new majority language English. The study is couched in pre-immigration socio-economic and educational history. The paper systematically analyzes orthographic and morphosyntactic variation, as well as lexical use that are compared to the findings of Elspaß’s (2005. Sprachgeschichte von unten: Untersuchungen zum geschriebenen Alltagsdeutsch im 19. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Niemeyer) study on German migrant letters. As the results show, the text contains some influences of dialect, especially concerning diminutives and the lexicon. Moreover, the findings reveal a gradual exposure to English as the new majority language, thus settling within the focus of this special issue on Germanic languages in contact with English. The study of the diary proves once again how valuable ego-documents, and also heritage language ego-documents, are for the field of historical sociolinguistics.