Paradigmatic Effects Research Articles

Paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects of information status on prosodic prominence - evidence from an interactive web-based production experiment in German.

In this paper, we investigate how information status is encoded paradigmatically and syntagmatically via prosodic prominence in German. In addition, we consider individual variability in the production of prominence. To answer our research questions, we collected controlled yet ecologically valid speech by applying an innovative recording paradigm. Participants were asked to perform an interactive reading task in collaboration with an interlocutor remotely via video calls. Results indicate that information status is encoded paradigmatically via the F0 contour, while syntagmatic effects are subtle and depend on the acoustic parameter used. Individual speakers differ primarily in their strength of encoding and secondarily in the type of parameters employed. While the paradigmatic effects we observe are in line with previous findings, our syntagmatic findings support two contradictory ideas, a balancing effect and a radiating effect. Along with the findings at the individual level, this study thus allows for new insights regarding the redundant and relational nature of prosodic prominence.

Transdisciplinary transformative change: an analysis of some best practices and barriers, and the potential of critical social science in getting us there

Biodiversity experts now widely acknowledge that transformative change is best supported through transdisciplinary collaborations. Yet, such collaborations rarely successfully occur in major biodiversity research institutions and those that do rarely achieve the paradigmatic effects they aim to deliver. To gain some insight into this global phenomenon, we surveyed Swiss-based researchers and non-academic stakeholders addressing global change and biodiversity. In this article, we connect our findings to global patterns in transdisciplinary transformative change initiatives (TTCIs) and heuristically divide collaboration barriers into two categories: lack of resources and lack of vital functional elements. Two of the major themes that emerged from this research were the continued difficulties with (1) establishing a common ‘language’, understanding, and goals, and (2) meaningful pluralization of knowledge in transdisciplinary collaborations aimed at addressing global change and biodiversity loss. The former is widely cited in the literature as contributing to the failure of TTCIs in the form of incoherent problem-framing, while the latter is often identified as contributing to the lack of structural transformative change (e.g., paradigmatic shifts) in completed initiatives. Another major theme reflected in TTCI literature was limited time. Moreover, based on our own extensive inter- and transdisciplinary experience, we agree with other experts that there is a persistent lack of understanding of the potential contributions of critical social science (CSS) to TTCIs. We thus argue that enhancing resource availability for TTCIs, especially tools for improving CSS literacy, could save time and support both problem-framing alignment and delivery of the structural/paradigmatic changes we aspire to.

Normative Conflicts in the context of Culture Wars

The article addresses the issue of normative conflicts from the theoretical perspective of philosophy of values and socio-cultural anthropology and in the context of the current culture wars in Western societies, instigated by radical ideologies that colonize all spheres of life, reversing normative axiological hierarchies and thus causing anthropological, societal and epistemic upheavals. Their sources and manifestations are described and certain paradigmatic effects on humanistic knowledge, language and literature are analyzed.

The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions, by Dominic Lash

The feeling of being utterly lost that is cultivated by David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), one of a handful of films central to Dominic Lash’s The Cinema of Disorientation: Inviting Confusions, might be the paradigmatic effect of the body of work that Lash refers to as the “cinema of disorientation”. These films insistently problematise the viewer’s relation to the unfolding diegesis, leaving them without the stability of interpretive points of reference that audiences have come to expect and rely upon, or shifting these points of reference as soon as they have been established. In The Cinema of Disorientation, Lash takes these films as case studies, using their disorientations to flesh out a humble but profoundly robust methodology of filmic analysis centered around his idea of orientation and the means by which a film construes it. As he puts it, “[u]nderstanding is always operative and always under negotiation, continually shifting and developing; examining disorientating films can help bring this process clearly into view”

The Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Priming Effect of Part of Speech Representation

Part of speech feature is the representation between syntactic morphology and semantic category. Priming effect experiment can test the correlation between the parts of speech feature and the lexical processing process. This article puts forward part of speech representation paradigmatic and syntagmatic effect hypotheses. The experiments applied the design pattern of 3 (part of speech: noun by predicate by nonword) ∗ 2 (interval time: 50 by 500 milliseconds) ∗3 (English level: elementary by intermediate by advanced). Subjects are requested to make options of the part of speech of the target words. This study shows that when Chinese English learners extract an individual word, their choices are still influenced by part of speech factor without the restrictions of constructive syntagmatic semantic conditions. Both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic effects are verified. Part of speech priming effect intensity is influenced by the English acquisition levels of the subjects.

Paradigmatic Relations Interact During the Production of Complex Words: Evidence From Variable Plurals in Dutch.

A growing body of work in psycholinguistics suggests that morphological relations between word forms affect the processing of complex words. Previous studies have usually focused on a particular type of paradigmatic relation, for example the relation between paradigm members, or the relation between alternative forms filling a particular paradigm cell. However, potential interactions between different types of paradigmatic relations have remained relatively unexplored. This paper presents two corpus studies of variable plurals in Dutch to test hypotheses about potentially interacting paradigmatic effects. The first study shows that generalization across noun paradigms predicts the distribution of plural variants, and that this effect is diminished for paradigms in which the plural variants are more likely to have a strong representation in the mental lexicon. The second study demonstrates that the pronunciation of a target plural variant is affected by coactivation of the alternative variant, resulting in shorter segmental durations. This effect is dependent on the representational strength of the alternative plural variant. In sum, by exploring interactions between different types of paradigmatic relations, this paper provides evidence that storage of morphologically complex words may affect the role of generalization and coactivation during production.

Nominal Paradigms In Kina Rutul

The paper provides a description of nominal inflection in Kina Rutul, a variety of the Rutul language (< Lezgic < Nakh-Daghestanian). The description is based on three concepts of paradigmatic classification: class of inflectional equivalence, inflectional type and paradigmatic effect. Class of inflectional equivalence describes main patterns of concatenation between root, case/number exponents and stem formatives. Inflectional type is responsible for the description of more subtle differencies within classes of inflection equivalence (morphological irregularities and/or non-concatenative morphophonology). These differencies are generalized over different inflectional types by means of paradigmatic effect.

Mediating Knowledge through Expressing Surprises: A Frame-based Analysis of Surprise Markers in Research Articles across Disciplines and Research Paradigms

ABSTRACT Taking a cognitive approach to genre-specific language, this corpus-based study investigated the disciplinary and paradigmatic effect on the use of a specific type of attitude markers—surprise markers—with an analytical framework informed by frame semantics. A Surprise frame was generated and then used to analyze the use of surprise markers in a 2,000,000-word corpus consisting of 320 full-length empirical research articles collected from two social sciences (applied linguistics vs. clinical psychology) cutting across two research paradigms (qualitative vs. quantitative). Results from multiple binary logistic regression analyses show that the research paradigm can reliably predict the absence or presence of five categories across four frame elements of the Surprise frame. This study not only extends the application of frame semantics to discourse analysis but also has the potential to create a new direction for research in English for academic purpose.

On the interplay between family and series effects in morphological masked priming

The aim of our research is to further investigate the role of suffixes in morphological processing and to verify whether morphological series (i.e., paradigms of complex words sharing the same suffix) play a role in lexical representation and processing, as suggested by paradigm-based approaches (Bybee 1988, 1995; Booij 2010). The premise of our study is that, while the relationship between words belonging to the same morphological family has been extensively confirmed by psycholinguistic research, experimental studies on the relationship between words belonging to the same morphological series have been scarce so far and produced inconsistent results. On such premises, we carried a series of masked priming experiments on Italian, which consider truly suffixed words with respect to words with non-morphological endings (it. inquina-mento ‘pollution’–cemento ‘cement’) and we focused on series which display different degrees of internal consistency. Crucially, in order to facilitate the emergence of the series effect, we used a semantic categorization task associated with the masked priming technique, instead of the traditional lexical decision (LDT). Our results show that when the masked priming effects are not inhibited by formal factors (as happens with LDT), the facilitation induced by the words organization in series emerges more easily, although it is affected by series consistency in different ways. Firstly, while the series effect approaches significance for consistent series, it fails to emerge for non-consistent ones (Exp. 1). Secondly, the base effect is more robust and clear-cut in consistent than in non-consistent series. Thirdly, in more consistent series the interference of formal/orthographic factors is absent or reduced, while it significantly affects processing in less consistent series (Exp. 2). All in all, our results demonstrate that the paradigmatic effects are inherently graded as they crucially depend on series internal consistency and that they crucially interact with family effects during word access.

Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects

Most psycholinguistic models of lexical processing assume that the comprehension and production of inflected forms is mediated by morphemic constituents. Several more recent studies, however, have challenged this assumption by providing empirical evidence that information about individual inflected forms and their paradigmatic relations is available in long-term memory (Baayen et al. 1997; Milin et al. 2009a, 2009b). Here, we investigate how whole-word frequency, inflectional paradigm size and morphological family size affect production latencies and articulation durations when subjects are asked to read aloud isolated Estonian case-inflected nouns. In Experiment 1, we observed that words with a larger morphological family elicited shorter speech onset latencies, and that forms with higher whole-word frequency had shorter acoustic durations. Experiment 2, for which we increased statistical power by using 2,800 words, revealed that higher whole-word frequency, inflectional paradigm size, and morphological family size reduced both speech onset times and acoustic durations. These results extend our knowledge of morphological processing in three ways. First, whole-word frequency effects of inflected forms in morphologically rich languages are not restricted to a small number of very high-frequency forms, contrary to previous claims (Niemi et al. 1994; Hankamer 1989; Yang 2016). Second, we replicated the morphological family size effect in a new domain, the acoustic durations of inflected forms. Third, we showed that a novel paradigmatic measure, inflectional paradigm size, predicts word naming latencies and acoustic durations. These results fit well with Word-and-Paradigm morphology (Blevins 2016) and argue against strictly (de)compositional models of lexical processing.

New thoughts on an old puzzle

This study addresses the peculiar pattern of root-allomorphy exhibited by the Italo-Romance preterite. Stimulated by a recent study by Mark Elson, which depends on upholding the traditional view that the phenomenon in Italo-Romance is attributable to sound change and to the subsequent analogical extension of its paradigmatic effects, I review familiar and new examples both from Italo-Romance and from Ibero-Romance, arguing instead that the available evidence casts doubt on the phonological interpretation, and strongly favours an interpretation couched in purely morphological terms.

The Disappearing Act

This collaborative interdisciplinary essay explores how competitive freediving (observed at Vertical Blue 2015 in Long Island, The Bahamas) challenges commonplaces about performance by perforating the edge zones of beach and sea, air and water, surface and depth across horizontal and vertical planes. Competitive freediving, which combines the regimentation of a rule-bound sport with the grace and self-mastery of yoga, disturbs and defies paradigms of the limits of human endurance and the precarity of life through its paradigmatic physiological effects on body and mind. The paradox of the striving athlete and the fully relaxed freediver makes this an unusually challenging pursuit. The necessity for managing a single inhalation for the duration of the dive and ascent invites a superficial resemblance with other sporting performances, but the effects of breath-holding makes the physical feats incommensurable. The sea intensifies the challenge of gravitational force and atmospheric pressure with each vertical metre traversed. This necessitates intense physical as well as mental discipline, but how the latter is achieved—and experienced—varies considerably among those interviewed for the essay.Freediving is fundamentally a disappearing act. On the surface there are all the trappings of a sport (timekeepers, medics, coaches, supporters and spectators) that provides a lively mise en scène, but the vertical dimension is where the performance is achieved. Here, the surface world's preoccupation with reason and judgement, which seeks to optimize divers' achievements while regulating their authenticity, is at odds with freedivers' proprioceptic experience of depth.

Sharon Inkelas, The interplay of morphology and phonology. (Oxford surveys in syntax and morphology, 8)

The author of this book has worked on the topic of the interplay of morphology and phonology since the beginning of her linguistic career. She has also taught this topic for many years in various forms, and it is therefore great that she has managed to finish a monograph on this topic, which, in line with the aims of the book series in which it has been published, presents a thorough survey of the various types of interplay between morphology and phonology found in natural languages, and of the theoretical proposals and debates on how to analyze the relevant phenomena.1 The range of languages studied is impressive, and the book is very rich in data. Through its extensive references and indexes readers of this book are guided towards more detailed studies of the various phenomena discussed. The book does not advocate particular theories, and starts systematically from a range of data, and then discusses the analytical problems that they raise. That is, its goal is “an exposition on and reflection about the many types of interplay between morphology and phonology that should inform contemporary theories” (p. 3). The chapters deal with the following topics: Morphologically conditioned morphology, Process morphology, Prosodic templates, Reduplication, Infixation, Interleaving: The phonological interpretation of morphologically complex words, Morphologically derived environments effects, When phonology interferes with morphology, Nonparallelism between phonological and morphological structure, and Paradigmatic effects. There are three indexes: an index of languages, an index of authors, and an index of subjects.

(Ir)regularity of verbs revisited

In three experiments we explored the representation and encoding of verb regularity. Contrasting articulation latencies of present and past regular and irregular forms from paradigms consisting of regular, irregular, or hybrid verbs (regular in present, but irregular in past tense), allowed us to differentiate between affixation and stem selection processes. The analyses revealed that regular verbs in the present and past tense were produced significantly faster than all other forms. Crucially, the naming latencies of hybrid and irregular verbs did not differ from each other in both tenses. We conclude that regularity is not a property of individual verb forms, but generalizes to all forms within a paradigm. In a third, picture word interference experiment, we tested whether regularity, when not bound to individual verb forms, is represented in the form of abstract regularity nodes, as assumed for gender or conjugational class. However, the critical conditions did not exhibit the expected congruency effect. Consequently we conclude that the paradigmatic effects could be explained as a result of the complexity of lexical entries. The retrieval of a complex entry (irregular and hybrid verbs) takes longer than the retrieval of a single stem entry (regular verbs).

Putting the “Design” Back into Organizational Design

Currently there is no veritable role for design, designers, or design methodology associated with ‘organizational design’. Rather, the design of an organization is a byproduct of tactics and management bureaucracy. In postmodern, post-industrial, and post-capitalist organizational entities the role of design is subordinate and residual at best. In this concept paper the authors demonstrate that (a) an entrepreneurial and organic perspective on design is challenged by the paradigmatic and transformational effects of information and information technology on firm; and (b) that the apparent problematic absence of a design theory and the existence of the firm can be reconciled via the involvement of design managers with their presumed design-methodological grounding. They advocate substituting the anachronistic evolutionary speciation of organizational design with a perspective based on ‘intelligent design’.

Virtual Processes and Quantum Tunnelling as Fictions

In this paper it is argued that virtual processes are dispensable fictions. The argument proceeds by a comparison with the phenomenon of quantum tunnelling. Building on an analysis of Levy-Leblond and Balibar, it is argued that, although the phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling certainly occurs and is at the basis of many paradigmatic quantum effects, the implied conceptualization of it as a free particle burrowing through a potential barrier is flawed. An alpha particle, for example, does not exist as a free particle inside a uranium nucleus and then “burrow through” the massive potential barrier of the repulsive Coulomb potential: rather, it can be interpreted as existing in a bound state which gives it a corresponding (absolutely tiny, but) finite probability of appearing on the other side of the barrier. If the part of the state function representing the transmission through the barrier is conceived as representing a particle trajectory, the particle will have imaginary momentum and negative kinetic energy. A similar analysis then applies to virtual processes. For example, if (as in Hawking’s conception of black hole radiation) one imagines a pair of particles created at the Schwarzschild radius, one of which drops into the black hole, at its creation that particle will have imaginary momentum and negative kinetic energy; so will the pion that is imagined as mediating the nuclear exchange force on the standard model. In each case, it is argued, the phenomenon can be understood in terms of a finite probability of transmission predicted by quantum theory, without appealing to particle trajectories. The idea that a particle “penetrates” a barrier that it does not have the energy to surmount, or that a pair of particles is “virtually” produced one on either side of the Schwarzschild radius, in defiance of energy conservation, should be discarded as unphysical.

An amorphous model for morphological processing in visual comprehension based on naive discriminative learning.

A 2-layer symbolic network model based on the equilibrium equations of the Rescorla-Wagner model (Danks, 2003) is proposed. The study first presents 2 experiments in Serbian, which reveal for sentential reading the inflectional paradigmatic effects previously observed by Milin, Filipović Đurđević, and Moscoso del Prado Martín (2009) for unprimed lexical decision. The empirical results are successfully modeled without having to assume separate representations for inflections or data structures such as inflectional paradigms. In the next step, the same naive discriminative learning approach is pitted against a wide range of effects documented in the morphological processing literature. Frequency effects for complex words as well as for phrases (Arnon & Snider, 2010) emerge in the model without the presence of whole-word or whole-phrase representations. Family size effects (Moscoso del Prado Martín, Bertram, Häikiö, Schreuder, & Baayen, 2004; Schreuder & Baayen, 1997) emerge in the simulations across simple words, derived words, and compounds, without derived words or compounds being represented as such. It is shown that for pseudo-derived words no special morpho-orthographic segmentation mechanism, as posited by Rastle, Davis, and New (2004), is required. The model also replicates the finding of Plag and Baayen (2009) that, on average, words with more productive affixes elicit longer response latencies; at the same time, it predicts that productive affixes afford faster response latencies for new words. English phrasal paradigmatic effects modulating isolated word reading are reported and modeled, showing that the paradigmatic effects characterizing Serbian case inflection have crosslinguistic scope.

Paradigmatic correspondences in the Brazilian Portuguese verbal vowel system

In this paper, we reanalyse the alternation in the Brazilian Portuguese verbal system called verbal vowel harmony (VH), which applies to verb stems in the second and third conjugations (e.g., beber ‘to drink’ > bebo ‘I drink’; segir ‘to follow’ > sigo ‘I follow’). We pose the following questions concerning VH: (i) Is it a synchronic process? (ii) Does it exhibit paradigmatic effects? and (iii) How can it be described in Optimality Theory? To answer question (i), we present a corpus of BP dictionarized verbs in the third person and results from empirical tests that evaluate acceptability/productivity in the conjugation of pseudo-verbs. Concerning question (ii), we show that a paradigmatic correspondence between verbal forms in BP accounts for misapplication patterns. Answering question (iii), we offer a description of the process in line with Transderivational Correspondence Theory (Benua 1997).

Paradigmatic effects in auditory word recognition: The case of alternating voice in Dutch

Two lexical decision experiments addressed the role of paradigmatic effects in auditory word recognition. Experiment 1 showed that listeners classified a form with an incorrectly voiced final obstruent more readily as a word if the obstruent is realised as voiced in other forms of that word's morphological paradigm. Moreover, if such was the case, the exact probability of paradigmatic voicing emerged as a significant predictor of the response latencies. A greater probability of voicing correlated with longer response latencies for words correctly realised with voiceless final obstruents. A similar effect of this probability was observed in Experiment 2 for words with completely voiceless or weakly voiced (incompletely neutralised) final obstruents. These data demonstrate the relevance of paradigmatically related complex words for the processing of morphologically simple words in auditory word recognition.

Functional connectivity during Stroop task performance

Using covariance-based multivariate analysis, we examined patterns of functional connectivity in rCBF on a practice-extended version of the Stroop color-word paradigm. Color-word congruent and incongruent conditions were presented in six AB trials to healthy subjects during 12 H2(15)O PET scans. Analyses identified two reproducible canonical eigenimages (CE) from the PET data, which were converted to a standard Z score scale after cross-validation resampling and correction for random subject effects. The first CE corresponded to practice-dependent changes in covarying rCBF that occurred over early task repetitions and correlated with improved behavioral performance. This included many regions previously implicated by PET and fMRI studies of this task, which we suggest may represent two "parallel" networks: (i) a cingulo-frontal system that was initially engaged in selecting and mapping a task-relevant response (color naming) when the attentional demands of the task were greatest; and (ii) a ventral visual processing stream whose concurrent decrease in activity represented the task-irrelevant inhibition of word reading. The second CE corresponded to a consistent paradigmatic effect of Stroop interference on covarying rCBF. Coactivations were located in dorsal and ventral prefrontal regions as well as frontopolar cortex. This pattern supports existing evidence that prefrontal regions are involved in maintaining attentional control over conflicting response systems. Taken together, these findings may be more in line with theoretical models that emphasize a role for practice in the emergence of Stroop phenomena. These findings may also provide some additional insight into the nature of anterior cingulate- and prefrontal cortical contributions to implementing cognitive control in the brain.