Noun Class Research Articles

The Phonetic and Morphosyntactic Dimensions of Grammatical Gender in Spanish Heritage Language Acquisition

Abstract Previous studies disagree as to whether heritage bilinguals demonstrate loss of knowledge of Spanish grammatical gender. As phonetic variability is known to affect the acquisition of certain grammatical markers, we examine whether bilinguals’ gender difficulties relate to bilingual contact-induced phonetic variability, namely, reduction in the inventory of word-final unstressed vowels. We analyzed narratives from children in the United States (n = 49, ages 4–12). All NP s (n = 1415) were analyzed for structure, noun class, and morphology. Word-final vowels were sub-selected for acoustic analyses. Morpho-syntactically, group results show high accuracy with gender (95%), but with wide individual variation (44%–100%). Speakers also show individual variability and substantive numbers of vowel misclassifications (6%–33%) with higher variability for /a/ and /o/. We found bilingual effects in both domains but no association between phonetics and gender accuracy. These findings have implications for the relationship between phonetics and grammar, and for the morphosyntax of Spanish gender.

FARKLI YAŞ GRUPLARINDA ÇAĞRIŞIMSAL CİNSİYET ALGISI-TÜRKÇE BAĞLAMINDA

Turkish has no noun classes or grammatical gender. However, in terms of biological gender, it can be said that lexical/semantic gender is reflected to nouns lexically. Although Turkish has no grammatical gender, it does have various means based on semantic system in which nouns are assigned to a gender according to its referent’s biological sex to recognize gender. It can also be said that there is a covert gender marking that denotes some person reference words as masculine or feminine. The aim of this study is to describe the phenomenon of associative gender, which carries the social-psychological context, in the case of certain categories (colour, animal, vegetable/fruit, clothing, body, transportation, sports, profession, material and natural features/plants). Also it was aimed at see the current associative gender perceptions of the lexicalized covert words (e.g., hemşire ‘nurse’, gömlek ‘shirt’) based on the assumption that the associative gender perception of sociocultural context may change in parallel with social changes. For this aim, how participants from different age groups (N 400) perceive the gender in Turkish is researched. A survey consisting of close-ended questions with 3 rating scale (masculine, feminine, neutral) for each category was conducted. The most general conclusion in this study is that in the associative gender assignment, neutral is dominant. This is followed by male and female dominance. In terms of the context of database, gender bias varies from masculine-feminine to neutral when the process from childhood to adulthood is looked at. In other words, while the children's perspective in marking gender is more towards masculine-feminine, the characteristics of the language appear more prominently and the tendency to assign gender decreases with age. Another consequence is male participants marked more masculine than female participants. This may be identified with the social gender perception.

PROSES PEMBENTUKAN DERIVASI DAN INFLEKSI PADA RUBRIK EDUKASI KOMPAS.COM

The word formation process is inseparable from the morphological process of affixation. The formation of verb word classes can be derived from verb, noun, adjective, and adverb word classes. This phenomenon causes morphological symptoms of derivation and inflection. Derivation is the process of forming new words that cause changes in lexical identity, while inflection does not change lexical identity. This study aims to obtain a description of the process of forming derivation words and forming inflected words on Kompas.com. Research using qualitative methods. The data and data sources used are online news Kompas.com, the January 2022 edition of the education rubric. The analysis technique used in analyzing the data uses the distribution method with the direct element division technique. The results of this study found words that experienced derivation and inflection with various kinds of forming affixes. Derivative and inflected affixes in Kompas.com consist of prefixes, suffixes, confixes and combinations of affixes. Initial prefixes or affixes are in the form of meN-, di-, ke-, ber-, ter, se-, and peN-; suffixes or final affixes consist of -an, -i, and -kan; confix affixes have forms of ke-an, penN-an, per-an, and beran; as well as combinations of affixes consisting of the forms of memper-/-kan, meN- -i, di-/-i, meN-/-kan, di-/-kan, diper-/-kan, and diper-/-i. The phenomenon of the affix meN- is an affix that forms an active verb, while the affix di- forms a passive verb. Also found ter- and ke-an affixes which are affixes forming anti-passive ergative verbs. Based on the productivity aspect, inflection is more productive than derivation.

Aceh Traditional Culinary Kuah Pliek U: How it Sustains Eco-Lexicon Diversity

"Kuah Pliek" is the famous Acehnese cuisine that utilizes most ecological materials. However, only a few researchers have discussed the sustainability of the lexicon contained within the cuisine from an eco-linguistics perspective. This study focuses on Aceh's traditional cuisine, "Kuah Pliek U" (KPU), to assess the raw materials' eco-lexicon diversity and the Acehnese's knowledge of the identified eco-lexicon. This study employed a qualitative research design to address the problems in which data collection included in-depth interviews, Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), passive and active observation, and the examination of documents such as research reports and journal articles. The analysis of data then used a qualitative interactive model. The result demonstrates that the number of the eco-lexicon within KPU is about 35 – 40, as same as its total of raw materials and ingredients. It consists of biotic and abiotic, with plants comprising the majority. Linguistically, the lexicon belongs to the noun class, but semantically, it can be divided into nouns, prepositional eco-lexicons, and nouns and conjunction. This study also reveals that Acehnese knowledge of KPU has decreased, despite its continued popularity in Aceh society. It means that the existence of three dimensions that influence language sustainability cannot guarantee that local people's cultural knowledge will remain intact.

Naming of plants in Nyamwezi and Sukuma societies of Tanzania

Since research has shown that the classification of plants into noun classes varies from one Bantu language to another (Legère, 2020), the present article contributes to the formation of the canonical noun classes for plants in the Nyamwezi and Sukuma languages in Tanzania. The data was gathered in Mwanza, Shinyanga, Simiyu and Tabora regions mainly through elicitation, revealed that the language has developed a lexicon of plant names based on four word formation strategies: (i) assignment of plant names to canonical tree noun classes 3/5 and 5/6, event for reduplicated, compounded and borrowed nouns; (ii) compounding of verbs and nouns to derive plant names; (iii) reduplication of verbs and nouns to derive plant names, and (iv) lexical borrowing from Swahili and English. The abundance of nouns in classes 5/6 suggests innovation in that classes 3/4 are being replaced by classes 5/6. Also, the paper shows that under the compounding, reduplication and phrasal mechanisms of nouns formation, many plant names express: (a) the structure and physiology of the plants, e.g. scent, softness or hardness; (b) physical environment where plants flourish, e.g. on mountain tops; (c) the berries and tubers produced by the plants; (d) the (gender) sex of the plants, and (e) the scent/smell produced by the plants. Based on the findings, it becomes plausible to establish that the Nyamwezi and Sukuma people employ both linguistic resources and physical and natural environment in assigning names to plants. This is a testimony that plants have formed a central part in the ethno-cultural practises of this community.

Morphophono-Logics of Interrogatives in Fulfulde Noun Classes

Fulfulde language is classified under African languages, as a family member of Niger-Congo, under West Atlantic group. It has some family members such as Wolof, Serer, and Joola. (Greenberg 1963). It has six dialects across West Africa, which are: Fuuta Tooro, Fuuta Jaaloo, Masina, Sokoto and Western Niger, Central Northern Nigeria and Eastern Northern Nigeria, and Adamawa (Arnott 1972 p. 8). In Fulfulde language, nominal stems must be accompanied by a nominal class suffix (McIntosh 1984 p. 43) and agreement in noun affects both words and sentences in the language (Ahmed 2011 p. 27). The noun classes peculiar to Adamawa dialect of Fulfulde attach an interrogative –yee suffix to form an interrogative word. In order to answer the questions formed by attaching the –yee suffix, a modification of -yee to -yaa occurs in the process. The formations and the answers of the interrogatives follow some logical ordering from simplex to complex, which are discussed in this paper, and supported with examples. This paper is a descriptive linguistics research with a native intuition of the researcher, whom is a native to the Adamawa dialect, as a primary source of data. In conclusion, the paper found out that in Fulfulde dialect of Adamawa, all the noun classes form an interrogative word by adding -yee affix, and form an answer through ablaut of -yee to –yaa morphemes. Phonological processes such as assimilation, deletion and metathesis occur in the formation of the interrogatives.

Combinability of the verbal relative «исходя из»: left and right components

This article is devoted to the process of grammaticalization in Russian on the example of the transition of the verbal unit «исходя из» into the prepositional one. Object of study is grammaticalization, due to which there is a transition from content words to function, the subject – the units that are grammaticalized and have a frontier status between content and functional units. The study focuses on combinability because only in the context the meaning and function of a unit is determined, the level of its grammaticalization is reflected and new features of lexical units are denoted. At present considerable attention is paid to derivative nominative prepositional neologisms. In the last two decades, a large number of studies have appeared which consider both single prepositional units and groups of units. A number of works are devoted to the description of nominative prepositions. At the same time, verbal prepositional neologisms have been neglected. The present paper is devoted to the description of the verbal relative «исходя из», the semantic and syntactic features of which have not been described in detail - this is the originality of the research. The study uses quantitative and descriptive methods of linguistic analysis. In the article lexico-semantic classification of verbs, which take position of the left component (main) in the combinations with the studied preposition, classification of nouns, which take position of the right component (dependent), as well as lexico-semantic correlation of components are given.

Grammatical categories of the English noun and their expressing in the sentence

Grammatical categories of the English noun and their expressing in the sentence

Maltese as a merger of two worlds: A cross-language approach to phonotactic classification.

Maltese is a prime example of a language that emerged through extensive language contact, joining the two linguistic worlds of Semitic and Italo-Romance languages. Previous studies have shown this shared origin on the basis of hands-on comparative methods. However, such approaches may be biased by the researchers perspective and the selected material. To avoid this bias, we employed a naive computational method that classifies words on the basis of their phonotactics. Specifically, we trained a simple two-layer neural network on Tunisian and Italian nouns, i.e. the languages that Maltese emerged from. We used the trained network to classify Maltese nouns based on their phonotactic characteristics as either of Tunisian or of Italian origin. Overall, the network is capable of correctly classifying Maltese nouns as belonging to either of the original languages. Moreover, we find that the classification depends on whether a noun has a sound or broken plural. By manipulating the segment identity in the training input, we found that consonants are more important for the classification of Maltese nouns than vowels. While our results replicate previous comparative studies, they also demonstrate that a more fine grained classification of a language's origin can be based on individual words and morphological classes.

Penguasaan Kosakata Bahasa Indonesia Siswa SD Ditinjau dari Aspek Kelas Kata: Studi Kasus pada Tiga Sekolah Dasar di Kota Ternate, Provinsi Maluku Utara

This paper examines the vocabulary mastery of Indonesian elementary school students in the city of Ternate. The problem in this study is formulated in the question, how is the mastery of Indonesian vocabulary by elementary school students in Ternate city? This study aims to determine the vocabulary mastery of Indonesian elementary school students in the city of Ternate, North Maluku Province. The method used in this study is the survey method, which is a research method that takes samples from the population and collects data through questionnaires as the main data collection tool. The findings obtained in this study are that the level of mastery of Indonesian vocabulary by elementary school students in Ternate is classified in the poor category. On average, elementary school students in Ternate do not master Indonesian vocabulary. In this study, there are seven aspects of word class as seen from the level of vocabulary mastery, namely nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, pronouns, and numerals. If viewed from the word class, the mastery of Indonesian vocabulary in the categories of prepositions, adverbs, and pronouns is quite mastered by elementary school students, while the mastery of vocabulary in the categories of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and numerals is not mastered by elementary school students.

KINGA NOUN CLASSES AND THEIR SEMANTICS

Kinga is one of the endangered languages in Tanzania. This study is on Kinga noun classes. It is important as it adds knowledge to the studies on Bantu languages. The qualitative approach was used in the study and data were collected by an unstructured interview. From the observation by the researcher, Kinga has 19 noun classes. Most of the classes have no immanent nouns completely belonging to a particular class, different nouns like animals, objects and geographical features can fit to different classes. Class one and two are the only classes that have defined nouns belonging to them; they are nouns referring to human beings. In some classes the nouns lack the prefix, the augment is used instead. There are wonderful semantic features in Kinga noun prefixes. Prefixes can communicate lot of information. The prefixes can communicate behavioral aspects of an individual. Kinga is endangered by Kiswahili. Kiswahili lexicon has penetrated Kinga language. Many Kiswahili words are used in Kinga. The contacts between the two languages endanger Kinga. An account of Kinga language is very minimal. With exception of the book by Schaderberg (1973) about Kinga being a restricted tone system, Kinga language can only be read in the religious books including the New Testament in Kinga written by SIL international. The researcher recommends documenting Kinga and other vernacular languages in Tanzania. It is vital for the future linguistic history. Syntactical, morphological, phonological, semantic and other aspects of language should be documented. Swahili may have a treasure from which lexicon may be added to Swahili instead of taking words from Arabic. Swahili is a Bantu language.

Word Formation of Indonesian and English Used by Indonesian Children in Playing Online Games

Online games become more popular among the children since the spread of Covid virus over the world in 2019. Childs became aware of playing online games though most of the plays use English as their communication. English language, as their second language must be comprehended as well. Word formation process of Indonesian and English language color the conversation. The study aims at analyzing word formation process of Indonesian and English language used by some Indonesian children when they are playing online games. The method used in this study is a qualitative method. According to Cresswell, a qualitative method is an approach or a research to explore and understand a central phenomenon. To understand this central phenomenon, the study was done by using qualitative observation and qualitative documents. The speaking of the participants was recorded during their playing on online games and transcribed phonemically. The transcription is classified into three parts. They are morphological process in English, morphological process in Indonesian, and morphological process in English and Indonesian. After classifying the data, then it’s analyzed by using Alwi and O’Grady theories. The results show that there is morphological process constructed on their conversation during their playing such as derivational and inflectional affixes, reduplication in word class of noun, mixing code Indonesian and English. The children spontaneously and fluently combine both Indonesian and English in constructing the word. However, Indonesian language is still dominantly used and influence to the use of English one.

Anomalies in the Noun Class Systems of Niger-Congo: Towards a Typology of the Atypical

The paper focuses on minor noun classes and minor genders in Niger-Congo languages, which are usually regarded as anomalies in class systems. It takes into consideration data from 243 languages, and shows that such anomalies are most characteristic for quite specific meanings, namely those traditionally regarded as prototypical meanings of noun classes: ‘person’, ‘thing’, ‘foot’, ‘tree’, ‘eye’, ‘place’, etc. Thus, the particular patterns of class agreement observed, or particular correlations between singular and plural noun classes, often do not represent accidental exceptions, but are better thought of as a kind of marker of noun class paradigmatic semantics.

PRODUCTIVITY OF SELECTED SUFFIXES IN THE TERMS OF MATHEMATICS

The article deals with the analysis of mathematical terms, i.e. simple nouns. Complex terms are avoided in order to prepare a detailed lexico-grammatical analysis. The research examines the term formation within the word class of nouns. Origins of the English and Slovak terms are analysed, described and compared. Latin and Greek languages are languages of science for the English language. The original languages of terms in both languages. Furthemore, Slovak terminological equivalents are compared with the English ones in term preference the Latin/Greek term or the native term if exists. According to term formation processes, the following suffixes representing bound morphemes are analysed: -er, -or, -ion. The terms formed by affixation using the selected suffixes are compared with the Slovak counterparts in terminology of mathematics. Terms are analysed according to principles for term formation. The following principles should be followed in the formation of terms and appellations, as far as possible and as appropriate to the language: transparency; ⎯ consistency; ⎯ appropriateness, linguistic economy; ⎯ derivability and compoundability; ⎯ linguistic correctness; ⎯ preference for native language. Subject of analysis are terms taken from the Slovak National Corpus 10.0, i.e. English –Slovak Parallel Corpus 4.0 en, Slovak –English Parallel Corpus 4.0 sk and the British National Corpus. In the research, electronic corpora are applied. They use mathematical ad statistical methods to evaluate e.g. occurrence, frequency, collocability of words. The previous mentioned methods are taken into consideration and help to prepare the effective, precise and objective analysis of the planned analysis. The research is based on both languages and comparison of terms in both parts of the corpus. Specific trends and tendencies in the strategies of term formation are analysed. Descriptive method is used and the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis are applied. Due to analysis of two languages, contrastive and comparative approaches are entailed. Terminology records of terms are examined from lexico-grammatical point of view and on the basis of term-formation tendencies in each analysed language. i.e. Slovak language and English language. Records include entry, identification number, reference to the term, synonyms, subject field, formula, abbreviation, context, reference to the context, definition, reference to the definition. 

Frequency and structures of lexical bundles in the German Goethe-Institut website

Corpus linguistics allows researchers to discover the nature of language use through lexical bundles throughout genres, registers, and language varieties. With the fast-changing development of the internet, the language of websites has become one fascinating variety to investigate. In the contexts of German language studies, Goethe-Institut is a worldwide German cultural institution dedicated to teaching German and propagating German culture, with its website becoming a well-known source for German-related studies. Under these considerations, this research is interested in analyzing the German language patterns in Goethe-Institut website by examining their frequency and structure of lexical bundles. Using a mixed-method approach, the corpus was found to be dominated by lexical bundles within the ranges of three- and four-bundles, with the least quantity of lexical bundles in the range of five. The majority of the four-word lexical bundles on this site fell into the categories of noun, preposition, or verb groups. Meanwhile, the adverb, conjunction, and adjective groups were the fewest to appear in the four-word lexical bundles. The language in the Goethe-Institut was shown to contain semi-formal expressions according to the frequency of use of the prepositions, nouns, verbs, and the active sentence expressions. The utilization of standardized German language and basic vocabulary indicates that this website is designed to be accessible for everyone, including German language learners. The language usage also demonstrates that the Goethe-Institut is especially a user-oriented website with expressions that evoke a ‘sense of belonging’.

A set-based semantics for person, obviation, and animacy

This article provides a general analysis of the semantics of person, broadly construed, through a case study of Ojibwe (Central Algonquian). Ojibwe shows person-like distinctions based on whether an entity is living or nonliving (i.e. animacy) and, within living things, whether a being is prominent or backgrounded in the discourse (i.e. obviation). The central principle of the account is contrast: the activation and interpretation of a feature is driven by the requirement that it makes a cut to derive the proper categories within a given inventory. With this principle, I show that a small set of bivalent features denoting first-order predicates can capture Ojibwe as well as a wider typology of person, animacy, obviation, and noun classification distinctions.

The V and CV augment and exhaustivity in Kinyakyusa

In addition to the stem and noun class prefix, the structure of nouns in Bantu languages may contain an augment. This augment typically is a vowel, but some languages show a CV augment. Interestingly, the Bantu language Kinyakyusa shows nouns with a V as well as with a CV prefix, both of which have been analysed as augments (De Blois 1970). In this short paper we clarify the formal and functional properties of the ‘CV augment’ in Kinyakyusa. First we show that it does not behave like the V augment, but is a separate marker that is attached to the noun phrase. Second, we narrow down the previous analyses of the CV marker that describe it as ‘emphatic’ (De Blois 1970, Persohn 2020): On the basis of a range of focus tests, we argue that the CV marker functions as a marker of exhaustivity. This is remarkable, as exhaustive focus is in Bantu languages typically associated with marking in the clause and not on the noun itself.

A Classless Analysis of Italian Nouns and their Theme-Vowel Alternations

The decompositional, non-lexicalist, approach to word-structure and the theory of roots have proven highly rewarding. One grey area, however, comes from Romance since, rather than roots, the word structure primitive appears to be the stem: root + ‘stem-formative/theme vowel’. Regardless, there have been perspicacious decompositional accounts of Italian, however these are still marred by the large number of morphological/item-specific irregularities, motivating arbitrary noun classes. Additionally, there are roots that do not inflect: consonant-final and vowel-final forms when these are oxytonic or loanwords. Given these irregularities, previous analyses in Italian have included the use of lexical exceptions and class features. We challenge the use of class features in generating the attested patterns (and their exceptions). Instead, we propose a new categorisation of root-shapes, which, when combined with the exponents of nominal inflection, produce the correct surface pairings, as well as the non-alternating forms. In our analysis, there is no diacritic or special marking of lexical exceptions, all forms inflect regularly in accordance to their phonological shape. This requires the innovation of one new mechanism (Inhibition), but we back it up by showing that it leads to an unexpected beneficial prediction that solves a long-standing problem associated with Raddoppiamento Sintattico (RS).

Grammatical Gender Features in English and Arabic

Gender in language is like sex in the outside world . Sex is considered as the most important basis for gender distinction . Sex stands for either male or female creatures.The main purpose behind this paper is to provide a comparative study between English and Arabic gender . It deals with gender as a grammatical category . The paper is divided into three sections: Section one gives an account of the term gender ; Section two deals with gender in Arabic while section three displays gender in English then the conclusion of the study is displayed . It reflects the main points of contrast between the two languages under study as far as gender is concerned .The distinction of gender into feminine and masculine is an important feature in Arabic , Unlike English where the majority of words do not make this distinction clear .In addition, Languages differ in the number of gender they recognize . English has three genders masculine , feminine and neuter which stand respectively for male , female and neither sex . On the other hand , Arabic has two gender categories : masculine and feminine. Both languages under study use the natural gender in classifying the nouns into masculine and feminine. i.e. every noun that belongs to the class of masculine nouns refers to male animate and vise versa.In Arabic ,masculine nouns are considered as the basis from which feminine nouns can be derived through the addition of certain markers . These markers can be added to both nouns and adjectives , whereas , a few nouns in English are marked for gender . In Arabic , there are certain irregularities inconsidering and forming the feminine nouns whereas in English some pronouns are gender sensitive.On the syntactic level , In Arabic , there should be an agreement between the noun that is marked for gender and the other elements of the sentence while in English such agreement can be manifested between the nouns and their pronouns in the singular case only.

Problèmes d’acceptabilité des occurrences relevées dans les corpus informatisés : exemple des prédicats nominaux désignant une propriété ou un trait de caractère

In this paper, we present the problems encountered during our research in the field of nominal predication in Polish, in particular concerning nouns referring to properties and character traits. In a previous work on predicates referring to various activities and behaviors, carried out with the use of electronic corpora (the National Corpus of Polish Language, as well as electronic sources available on the Internet), we obtained a dictionary of verb-noun collocations with high lexical coverage comparing to traditional dictionaries (not based on electronic corpus research). Using the same corpus data and methodology as before, we conducted a study of the class of predicative nouns referring to properties and character traits. However, the results obtained following the application of this method proved to be unsatisfactory. In this article, we consider the reasons for this in order to optimize research methods later in our work.