Past Morpheme Research Articles

Iraqi Students' English Consonant Pronunciation Mistakes: An Analytical Study

In order to determine what kind of training is required for second language (L2) learners, it is helpful to diagnose the challenges they have with pronunciation. This study aimed to fill a gap in our understanding of Arab students' English pronunciation challenges by determining which English consonant phonemes and clusters Iraqi EFL students struggle with, and by exploring the ways in which the students' degrees of language proficiency impact their performance on these tests. The research included forty Iraqi female college students, twenty from each of two groups with varying degrees of English ability (20 from lower-intermediate to intermediate). A four-part productive pronunciation exam helped them see where they were going wrong while pronouncing certain clusters of consonants in different word positions. The participants' largest proportion of mistakes while pronouncing the following sounds were found in the data analysis: /ŋ/, /ʒ/, /p/, /ɹ/ and/ʧ/; /t/ and /d/ of the regular past tense morpheme -ed; and the three and four consonant clusters. In addition, students at the lower-intermediate level were more likely to make a mistake when pronouncing clusters and consonant sounds than those at the intermediate level. What's more, mistakes made by learners were more likely to vary in initial positions than in medial or final ones in words. According to the research, consonants which are located at the beginning or end of words are more likely to be problematic for pronunciation than those that are located in the middle of words.

The interaction between past and conditional morphemes in Turkish

This paper focuses on the two conditional antecedent morphemes in Turkish, -(y)sA and -sA, and how the past morpheme interacts with them to generate different interpretations. Inspired by von Fintel and Iatridou (2023), I refer to -(y)sA as the O-marking, which is restricted to the epistemically possible worlds, and -sA as the X-marking, which refers to a wider domain than this context set. I argue that the past in O-marking denotes the actual past time. However, when the past morpheme appears with X-marking, it further widens the domain to include even less possible or impossible worlds. In line with Kaufmann (2022), I also argue for different levels of remoteness in X-marked conditionals and suggest that the past widens the domain further than the first level of X-marking by shifting back in time as she suggests.

Building an elicited imitation task as a measure of implicit grammatical knowledge

Elicited imitation tests (EIT) are often used to measure the effects of a form?focused intervention on the development of L2 learners’ implicit grammatical knowledge, which is intuitive and retrieved without conscious awareness. This study investigated the relationship between an EIT focused on the English past tense and a set of other tests; it also examined whether the past-tense morpheme type, grammaticality of the verbs, their position in the stimulus utterances, and the explicitness of the test instructions influence learners’ imitation accuracy. Forty-four university-level students, all native speakers of Mandarin and enrolled in an English for academic purposes program in Canada, completed an EIT along with four other tests over two consecutive sessions. Results revealed that only the imitation of irregular verbs was significantly correlated with the other tests. In addition, the participants were more accurate in repeating the grammatical and correcting the ungrammatical regular verbs but neither the position of the verbs nor the type of instructions significantly influenced imitation. These findings suggest that several factors can influence learners’ performance and the knowledge that they draw upon during an EIT.

Output-conditioned and non-local allomorphy in Armenian theme vowels

AbstractCross-linguistically, it is difficult to tease apart allomorphy from readjustment rules. But regardless, both tend to respect locality and are sensitive to information that is present in the input, not the output. We document a counter-example to these tendencies from Western Armenian, and we discuss how the data falsifies such restrictive models of allomorphy. The Western Armenian theme vowel-i-changes to the theme vowel-e-due to two types of triggers. The first type of trigger is phonological: the change happens when the theme vowel is unstressed in the output. This is a type of allomorphy that is conditioned by output phonology. The second type of trigger is morphological: the change happens when the verb is in the past tense. The+Pastmorpheme can be either in the verb (adjacent to the theme vowel) or on a separate auxiliary in periphrasis. This amounts to a case of long-distance allomorphy that is conditioned across words, even in suspended affixation. For suspended affixation, I provide semantic and prosodic evidence that suspended affixation is created via base-generation and not via ellipsis. The inability to use ellipsis acts as additional evidence that the allomorphy is long-distance.

Japanese no datta and no de atta in written discourse

Abstract The present study examines no datta and no de atta, which are the past-tense forms of no da and no de aru in written Japanese. The analysis demonstrates that the choice between the present-tense no da/no de aru and the past-tense no datta/no de atta does not affect the temporal interpretation when they follow past-tense morphemes. However, a close examination has also revealed that the past-tense no datta/no de atta cannot follow a past-tense morpheme when the ongoing mode of discourse is non-narrative, while no da/no de aru and no datta/no de atta are both available options when the discourse is in the mode of narrative. The present study also suggests that when no datta/no de atta is used in narrative, it indicates that the stated information is less impactful, less dramatic, and more temporally distant, compared to the cases where no da/no de aru is used.

Allophonic Variations in Educated Yoruba-English Bilinguals’ Pronunciation

The study of Nigerian English phonology had been taken to the regional levels such as Hausa-English, Igbo-English and Yoruba-English by different scholars. This study is a response to the clarion call of Jowitt (2020:28) that the concentration of the scholars should be on the task of identifying, describing, and analyzing the forms of English usage in Nigeria for the purpose of working towards the codification of the variety called Nigerian English and, most importantly, the reception of the international recognition it deserves. While Standard English remains a model and a reference point against which other varieties can be evaluated, the local standard also needs to be specified, described, and recognized as belonging to the assemblage of world Englishes. A total number of 64 respondents comprising newscasters, lecturers, pastors, and part three University students were purposively selected for the study. The study employed Chomsky and Halle’s Generative Phonology to generate rules which account for the variations attested in the realisations of conditioned past tense morphs by educated Yoruba-English bilinguals in Southwestern Nigeria. Findings reveal that the pronunciation of Nigerian broadcasters can be described as a supportive model of Standard British English for Nigerian users of English. Also, noticeable variations in the realisations of the conditioned past tense morphemes by other participants; lecturers, pastors and students can be described as the reflections of Nigerian spoken English which can be arranged in form of re-written rules explicable within the scope of Generative Phonology.

함축 척도를 활용한 한국어 과거 시제 ‘-었-’의 습득 연구

This study was designed to research the developmental patterns of the past tense ‘-eott-’ produced by the L1 Chinese learners of Korean. For the purpose of this study, the participants were asked to produce a free writing assignment on the same topic, and different from previous studies, the assignments were analyzed using the Accuracy Method as well as the Implicational Scaling Method. The results of studies using the Accuracy Method are achievement verbs, accomplishment verbs, psycho-cognitive verbs, activity verbs, and stative verbs. This is different from the outcome of the Implicational Scaling Method, which are accomplishment verbs, achievement verbs, activity verbs, psycho-cognitive verbs, and static verbs. The results of the two methods differed, and this difference illustrates that in the study of past tense acquisition, using only the Accuracy Method is insufficient. However, both results are consistent with the current predictions that the past tense morphemes are generally acquired first on [+telic] semantic verbs. (Yonsei University)

A compositional account of counterfactual conditional clauses in Old Japanese

The paper is concerned with tenselessness of the past tense morpheme in counterfactuals. The question is twofold. One is why is it the past tense that marks counterfactuality (Iatridou 2000, Ogihara 2000), which indicates anteriority. Another question is why the past tense is tenseless (or “fake tense”) in the counterfactuals. The previous theories (past tense as modal and past tense as exclusive operator) have not offered answers to these questions. In this paper, I argue that the conditional clauses originate in temporal adverbial clauses, and therefore it is only natural for the conditionals to be represented by temporal abstracts (Stump 1985). Second, I argue that the temporal abstracts are intensionalized in conditionals and causatives. This assumption not only provides a compositional analysis for the conditional, causal, and temporal adverbial clauses but also explains the reason why a proposition in the past tense can denote anteriority in the extensional context but counterfactuality (a temporal interval in the possible world) in the intensional context. I support my proposal by presenting data of counterfactuals from Old Japanese. The previous studies show the past tense morpheme is essential to counterfactual interpretation cross-linguistically (Karawani 2014) but I show that it is not a necessity, as counterfactual interpretation originates in the temporal abstract represented by the temporal adverbial clauses. I present four types of temporal clauses from which the counterfactual can be formed: at the time when, whenever (always when), in the circumstance/event that, and and then. All these temporal clauses can be intensionalized to be conditional or causal clauses under a modal operator.

Cessation implicature and simultaneous readings

Altshuler & Schwarzschild (2013a, 2013b) provide an account of the simultaneous reading of past-under-past sentences in English (called the sequence-of-tense (SOT) phenomenon) based on a lack of cessation implicature. However, this analysis encounters empirical and technical issues in accounting for the English data in the same construction involving the future auxiliary would, the past perfect, and the future-under-future configuration. It also faces difficulty in accounting for the cross-linguistic data that concerns tense in verb complements. We are, therefore, led to conclude that the traditional solution to this problem (Abusch 1988, 1997, Ogihara 1996, von Stechow 1995, Stowell 1996, and Kratzer 1998) that renders structurally lower past tense morphemes in English semantically empty (or plain variables) is preferable. This system allows us to adopt the same semantic mechanism for both SOT languages such as English and non-SOT languages such as Japanese.

The non-actualization meaning in -eya ha- modal sentences

In this paper, I discuss the non-actualization inference which arises from the interaction between a modal expression -eya ha- and a past tense morpheme. After discussing the general properties of the Korean priority modal -eya ha-, I show that the non-actualization inference we often find in -ess-eya ha- modal sentences does not belong to a traditional classification. By adopting Tonhauser et al.’s (2013) classification which uses a distinction between at-issue and not-at-issue meanings, I show that the non-actualization inference in -ess-eya ha- modal sentences is a not-at-issue entailment. I argue that, in this way, we can differentiate various subclasses of inferences in a unified way.

Cross-linguistic transfer between aspect in Cantonese and past tense in English in Cantonese-English bilingual preschool children

Purpose: This study addresses the question of whether sequential bilingual children’s past tense marking development in their second language (L2) is affected by their knowledge of temporal marking in their first language (L1). We investigated whether Cantonese-English sequential bilingual children’s knowledge of aspect markers in Cantonese (L1), along with external and internal factors, predicts their past tense marking in English (L2). Method: We examined 39 pre-school children’s production of perfective aspect markers in Cantonese and regular and irregular past tense morphemes in English using a story-retell task administered in both languages. Result: The results showed that children produced significantly more irregular past tense verbs than regular past tense verbs in English. Their English irregular past tense use, but not regular past tense use, was predicted by their knowledge of aspect markers in Cantonese. Conclusion: Findings suggest that semantic transfer between Cantonese and English might contribute to the early stages of acquiring English past tense marking. Clinically, the results could potentially lead to more informed assessment procedures and better diagnostic decision making for bilingual children.

Question formation strategies in Kunuz Nubian

This is an analytical and descriptive study that is based on a general theoretical framework which can be characterized as “basic linguistic theory”. It aims to study Kunuz Nubian interrogative pronouns and question markers. Previous studies failed to pay adequate attention to these features. It is an attempt to characterize the strategies used in question formation and to identify the question markers. I argue that the question markers in this Nubian dialect fall into three sets: (a) the set of question markers -yaa, -naa, and -waa are used with sentences (non-copular construction) involving the neural marker -r-. (b) the set of questions markers that are used if the neural marker –r- is in a copular construction: -yaa, -re, -waa. (c) another set of question markers are attached to a declarative sentence in which the verb or copular verb is accompanied with the past tense morpheme. The study has also provided a list of interrogative pronouns that can occur with or without the question markers. Moreover, it has been shown that both compound and complex sentences are turned into interrogatives via the same question strategies used in simple sentences.

Diagnosing Saudi Students' English Consonant Pronunciation Errors

Diagnosing the pronunciation difficulties second language (L2) learners encounter assists in identifying their training needs. Since a clearer profile of Arab students' English pronunciation difficulties is yet to be reached, this study tried to identify which English consonant sounds and clusters Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students have difficulty in pronouncing, and examine how students' language proficiency levels may influence their English consonant pronunciation performance. Forty Saudi female university students with two different English proficiency levels (lower-intermediate versus intermediate) took part in the study (20 students in each group). They completed a 4-section productive pronunciation test diagnosing their errors in pronouncing problematic consonant sounds and clusters in varied word positions. The data analysis showed that the participants' highest error percentages were in pronouncing: /ʒ/, /ŋ/, /p/, /ɹ/ and/ʧ/; /t/ and /d/ of the regular past morpheme -ed; and the 4- and 3-consonant clusters. It was also found that the lower-intermediate level students made more errors than the intermediate ones in pronouncing the majority of the consonant sounds and clusters, and that the variance between their errors is generally higher in the word-initial positions than the word-medial and -final ones. The study indicates that the consonants in the word-initial and -final positions are likely to cause more pronunciations difficulties than the ones in the word-medial position.

Diagnosing Saudi Students' English Consonant Pronunciation Errors

Diagnosing the pronunciation difficulties second language (L2) learners encounter assists in identifying their training needs. Since a clearer profile of Arab students' English pronunciation difficulties is yet to be reached, this study tried to identify which English consonant sounds and clusters Saudi English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students have difficulty in pronouncing, and examine how students' language proficiency levels may influence their English consonant pronunciation performance. Forty Saudi female university students with two different English proficiency levels (lower-intermediate versus intermediate) took part in the study (20 students in each group). They completed a 4-section productive pronunciation test diagnosing their errors in pronouncing problematic consonant sounds and clusters in varied word positions. The data analysis showed that the participants' highest error percentages were in pronouncing: /ʒ/, /ŋ/, /p/, /ɹ/ and/ʧ/; /t/ and /d/ of the regular past morpheme -ed; and the 4- and 3-consonant clusters. It was also found that the lower-intermediate level students made more errors than the intermediate ones in pronouncing the majority of the consonant sounds and clusters, and that the variance between their errors is generally higher in the word-initial positions than the word-medial and -final ones. The study indicates that the consonants in the word-initial and -final positions are likely to cause more pronunciations difficulties than the ones in the word-medial position.

An Analysis On Pronunciation Errors Made By First Semester Students Of English Education Department STKIP CBN


 Abstract :This study is conducted to find out the pronunciation errors made by the first semester students of English Education Department in STKIP CBN. In conducting the data, the researcher gave the pre-test to the informants, then; the researcher recorded the performances and transcribed the data. The secondary data was gathered from the interview. Based on the data analysis The researcher counted that there are nine types of errors pronunciation made by the subjects. The first error is the subjects substituted a vowel /æ/ and six consonants /kj/,/tʃ/,/ʃ/,/dʒ/ and /ʒ/ with Indonesian sounds. The second error is the subjects substituted some English vowels into Indonesian vowel. The third error is word cognates cases. The fourth is language interference. The fifth is pronouncing the silent consonant /h/. The sixth error is Deleting or omitting some consonants that appeared at the end of some English words. The seventh error is the subjects pronounced the silent consonant /t/ in the word “often”. The eighth error is the subjects added the consonant /r/ at the word, that word doesn’t required the consonant /r/. The last error is some subjects seemed to generalize the pronunciation of the past tense morpheme which is ended by a bound morpheme /ed/. This research is founded that there are three causes of students’ pronunciation error made in speaking English. The first is an interference errors, the second is an intra lingual errors and the last is a developmental error.

An Analysis on Pronunciation Errors Made By First Semester Students of English Department STKIP CBN

This study is conducted to find out the pronunciation errors made by the first semester students of English Education Department in STKIP CBN. In conducting the data, the researcher gave the pre-test to the informants, then; the researcher recorded the performances and transcribed the data. The secondary data was gathered from the interview. Based on the data analysis The researcher counted that there are nine types of errors pronunciation made by the subjects. The first error is the subjects substituted a vowel /æ/ and six consonants /kj/,/tʃ/,/ʃ/,/dʒ/ and /ʒ/ with Indonesian sounds. The second error is the subjects substituted some English vowels into Indonesian vowel. The third error is word cognates cases. The fourth is language interference. The fifth is pronouncing the silent consonant /h/. The sixth error is Deleting or omitting some consonants that appeared at the end of some English words. The seventh error is the subjects pronounced the silent consonant /t/ in the word “often”. The eighth error is the subjects added the consonant /r/ at the word, that word doesn’t required the consonant /r/. The last error is some subjects seemed to generalize the pronunciation of the past tense morpheme which is ended by a bound morpheme /ed/. This research is founded that there are three causes of students’ pronunciation error made in speaking English. The first is an interference errors, the second is an intra lingual errors and the last is a developmental error.

Towards a New Explanation of Sequence of Tense

Past-under-past embeddings have two readings, a simultaneous and a backward-shifted one. While existing accounts derive these readings via distinct mechanisms, be it by means of an ambiguity at the level of LF or via blocking of a cessation implicature, we propose an alternative account which avoids such ambiguity. For us, the meaning of a past tense morpheme, like -ed, is comprised of two components. Syntactically, every past tense morpheme carries an uninterpretable past feature [uPAST], to be checked by a (single) covert past tense operator Op- PAST carrying an interpretable feature [iPAST]. Semantically, the past tense marker encodes a relative non-future with respect to its closest c-commanding tense node (informally: ‘not later than’), immediately yielding the two distinct readings.

Contradictory (forward) lifetime effects and the non-future tense in Mandarin Chinese

Lifetime effects refer to the inferences about the life/death of the individual in sentences with individual-level predicates like ‘Mary is/was blue-eyed’. In English, contradictory lifetime inferences arise when the subject denotes one living and one dead individual (e.g. Saussuredead and Chomskyliving #are/??were both linguists.), but no such inferences arises in Mandarin Chinese, a language that has been considered “tenseless” due to the lack of past tense morphemes. This paper investigates the online processing of contradictory lifetime effects and presents additional empirical observations about “forward lifetime effects”, which suggest that both covert past tense and tenseless accounts of Chinese are inadequate for capturing temporal interpretations in this language; instead, finite clauses in Chinese display a Future/Non-Future distinction and are likely to possess a tense node. We discuss our findings in relation to the typology of tense as well as implications for other superficially tenseless languages.

ORDER OF MORPHEMES ACQUIRED BY THE FIRST SEMESTER STUDENTS OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT THE FACULTY OF EDUCATION

This research is pertinent to the morphemes made in the writing examination by the first semester students or freshman of English Department of Faculty of Education Catholic University of Saint Thomas in the academic year 2012/2013. There are two classes of the first semester students in English Department, and one class with 34 students is taken out as a sample to represent the whole first semester students in the academic year 2012/2013. The research data is taken from the result of the first semester writing examination, especially paragraph writing. Thus, there are 34 paragraphs thoroughly examined one by one to obtain morphemes both inflectional and derivational morphemes, including compounding words. The result of data analysis shows that the students produce 550 morphemes comprising 450 inflectional morphemes, 100 derivational morphemes, and 20 compounding words. Of the inflectional morphemes, irregular past morpheme amounts to 169, and that of regular one amounts to 101. But if it is seen from the verb form without the frequencies, the regular verb form amounts to 59 verbs, while the irregular amounts to 36 verbs only. In other words, the irregular verb form has much more frequencies than that of the regular one. Then, this number is followed by the plural morpheme which amounts to 77 frequencies. Meanwhile, of the derivational morphemes, noun suffix {-ing} has the highest position, namely 57 frequencies, then followed by adjective with 28 frequencies, adverb with15 frequencies and verb with 1 frequency. Based on the data analysis, it can be concluded that the easiest morphemes are the most produced by the students, and then followed by the most difficult morphemes. This is in line with the language learning theory which says that the learners will grasp the easiest parts first, then gradually move to the more difficult.

Unsupervised learning of allomorphs in Turkish

One morpheme may have several surface forms that correspond to allomorphs. In English, ed and $d$ are surface forms of the past tense morpheme, and $s$, es, and ies are surface forms of the plural or present tense morpheme. Turkish has a large number of allomorphs due to its morphophonemic processes. One morpheme can have tens of different surface forms in Turkish. This leads to a sparsity problem in natural language processing tasks in Turkish. Detection of allomorphs has not been studied much because of its difficulty. For example, tü and di are Turkish allomorphs (i.e. past tense morpheme), but all of their letters are different. This paper presents an unsupervised model to extract the allomorphs in Turkish. We are able to obtain an F-measure of 73.71% in the detection of allomorphs, and our model outperforms previous unsupervised models on morpheme clustering.