Subclasses Of Nouns Research Articles

Differential place marking and differential object marking

AbstractThis paper gives an overview of differential place marking phenomena and formulates a number of universals that seem to be well supported. Differential place marking is a situation in which the coding of locative, allative or ablative roles depends on subclasses of nouns, in particular place names (toponyms), inanimate common nouns and human nouns. When languages show asymmetric coding differences depending on such subclasses, they show shorter (and often zero) coding of place roles with toponyms, and longer (often adpositional rather than affixal) coding of place roles with human nouns. Like differential object marking, differential place marking can be explained by frequency asymmetries, expectations derived from frequencies, and the general preference for efficient coding. I also argue that differential place marking patterns provide an argument against the need to appeal to ambiguity avoidance to explain differential object marking.

How to copy your neighbors’ ways: A cross-generational perspective on nominalizations in Tariana

AbstractTariana, an endangered Arawak language of north-western Amazonia (Brazil), has a number of strategies for nominalizing verbs. These include noun classifiers as word-class changing derivational markers, in addition a number of nominalizing suffixes. Nominalizations are a subclass of nouns, with their own set of special properties. As a consequence of areal diffusion from the neighboring and unrelated East-Tucanoan languages, Tariana nominalizations come to be used as complementation and relativization strategies. This is especially so for innovative speakers of Tariana who use Tucano on a daily basis, and whose language bears a strong imprint of Tucano, the main language of the region.

Noun Countability; Count Nouns and Non-count Nouns, What are the Syntactic Differences Between them?

Words that function as the subjects of verbs, objects of verbs or prepositions and which can have a plural form and possessive ending are known as nouns. They are described as referring to persons, places, things, states, or qualities and might also be used as an attributive modifier. In this paper, classes and subclasses of nouns shall be presented, then, noun countability branching into count and non-count nous shall be discussed. A number of present examples illustrating differences between count and non-count nouns and this includes determiner-head-co-occurrence restrictions of number, subject-verb agreement, in addition to some exceptions to this agreement rule shall be discussed. Also, the lexically inherent number in nouns and how inherently plural nouns are classified in terms of (+/- count) are illustrated. This research will discuss partitive construction of count and non-count nouns, nouns as attributive modifier and, finally, conclude with the fact that there are syntactic difference between count and non-count in the English Language.

Body, mind, and spirit

In many languages, terms denoting the human body and its parts constitute a closed subclass of nouns with special grammatical properties. Many if not all parts of the human body may acquire dimensions of meanings with ethnographic importance. I focus on a tri-partite division of visible and invisible parts of a human and their attributes in Manambu, a Ndu language spoken in the East Sepik province of Papua New Guinea. The trichotomy of ‘body’ (səp), ‘mind’ (mawul) and ‘spirit’ (kayik) in Manambu reflects a culturally embedded conceptualization of what a human is. Each of the three taxonomic units has specific grammatical properties. The physical and mental profile of a human being in Manambu (as in many other languages) cannot be appreciated without understanding the grammar. Conversely, a structural analysis of a language is incomplete unless it makes reference to the system of belief and concepts encoded in it.

Derivational gender in Moroccan Berber: examples from Ayt Seghrushen

Abstract Berber languages have a two-term gender opposition. Most nouns are allowed to appear in both genders, expressing meaning differences such as natural gender and size. Nouns have a neutral gender value, which is lexically determined, and a derivation which is marked by the opposite gender. In the case of size differences, this leads to a ternary opposition (diminutive – neutral – augmentative), expressed by only two genders. The grammatical constraint on the number of values is sometimes circumvened by using different allomorphs of gender morphemes. With a number of sub-classes of nouns a ternary opposition is made possible by a change in morphological sub-class.

A cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian

This article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2 ; 6-4 ; 0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children rely on certain morphosyntactic micro-cues in the course of acquisition of semantic agreement. A discrepancy is observed in the acquisition of semantic agreement across the different noun classes, and this suggests that children are highly sensitive to fine distinctions in syntax and morphology and use detailed input information to make specific inferences concerning the gender of different noun classes. Furthermore, we argue that acquisition data may provide a more accurate account of how gender assignment proceeds in the mind of a speaker than has been traditionally assumed by gender assignment theories.

ERPs to subclasses of nouns and verbs.

The present findings show the existence of significant differences in latency and amplitude of some waves of ERPs to three subclasses of nouns or verbs. Latency LP3 of ERPs to action verbs was shorter than latency of the same wave to abstract verbs. In nouns the relation was a similar (manipulable objects versus abstract ones). The amplitude of early positive components (P1, P2) and BN3 wave also depended on semantic attributes of nouns and verbs. Some waves of ERPs to motion verbs in our experiment had significantly higher amplitude than the same waves of ERPs to nonmanipulable objects. Also revealed was interaction between some ERP features and the subject's gender. It was primarily the amplitude of BP2, the size of which depended on gender in all cases--BP2 amplitude was significantly higher in females then in males. In the other components (BP1, BP4, BN2 and BN4) there were fewer significant differences and if they do occurred, then their amplitude was higher in males than in females. In some cases, gender also affected latency of waves LP2, LN1 and LN4 of ERPs to the same noun or verb subclass--latencies of these waves were shorter in females.

Lexical Categories and The Status of Descriptives in Apinajé

The category membership of words expressing adjectival meanings (Descriptives) in Macro‐Je languages has been a topic of recent interest and dispute among researchers. While there is agreement about the absence of Adjective as a word class, there is disagreement on whether Descriptives should be analyzed as a subclass of Nouns or Verbs, since Descriptives share features with both. This study devises a set of internal criteria for establishing the category membership of Descriptives in Apinaje (Je family). Morphosyntactic properties common to Nouns, Verbs, and Descriptives are explored first, showing that valid arguments can be made in favor of alternative analyses of Descriptives, or against a categorical distinction between Nouns and Verbs. Against this background, further syntactic constructions, such as relativization and imperatives, are introduced; these support a categorical distinction between Nouns and Verbs, and lead to the conclusion that Descriptives do constitute a subclass of Verbs.

The contextological dictionary: Use in programmed language teaching

According to the theory of determinants put forward by the present author and described first in , every meaning (translation) of a polysemantic word differing from the most general one (the general procedure of the translation algorithm) is determined in the context by other words with which it forms combinations, or by some grammatical distinguishers. In other words, it is believed that in most cases the differentiation of meanings is possible on the basis of formal characteristics of the word itself and its context; the cases when such differentiation is impossible are rare enough. The ACD, being a collection of algorithms, is based on certain grammars of English and Russian and presupposes some special features of the general and auxiliary algorithms with which that dictionary works. The grammar of English is defined mainly as follows: -all English words have been divided into grammatical classes (corresponding in general to traditional parts of speech: noun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, punctuation mark; the last is considered as forming a grammatical class because of the role it plays in syntactic analysis-for example, a comma-and besides, a punctuation mark also receives a translation equivalent). In the automatic language processing, pronouns and numerals are divided according to their functions, into subclasses of nouns and adjectives. Figures form a special subclass.4 In the classes of nouns and adjectives, special distributional semantic subclasses are singled out. These consist of nouns: conjunctive (which, who), pronominal (I, he, it), numerals (one, two), nouns of time and duration, geographical names, periodicals, names of organizations

Sur la confection d'un lexique pour l'analyse automatique

The goodness of the results to be obtained from a system for syntactic analysis of a natural language by computer (with French as an example) depends crucially on the way the lexicon is constructed. To avoid incorrect parses of a correct sentence, verbal selection rules are required. These rules are just the acceptability constraints observed between verb and subject and between verb and object in sentences of the formN1tV N2 andN1tV N2P N3. It is well known that not every noun subclass is an acceptable subject (or object) for every verb in such sentences; those that are constitute the selection of the verb. By a careful definition of each subclass of nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., these rules can be incorporated into Harris' string grammar, which is used here. The definitions should, insofar as possible, be based on formal distributional criteria, so that the classification will be independent of intuitive judgments. The main conclusions are that both the lexicon and the grammar must be very detailed if one wishes to eliminate all incorrect parses; that no automatic word classification is possible, for example, via a dialogue with the computer; and finally, that the computer can be used fruitfully to investigate distributional phenomena in as-yet-unexplored subdomains, for example, by analyzing scientific text.

The morphophonemics of gender in Spanish nouns

It is suggested that there are no monomorphemic nouns in Spanish, i.e., gender functions as a morpheme with all nouns. Gender morphemes can be determined in several ways: through paradigmatic opposition in the variable nouns and through segmentation and syntagmatic alternation in the invariable nouns. Gender morphemes are represented by various allomorphs which correspond to particular sub-classes of nouns in the short form, and are always the last element in the noun, maintaining this position even when the diminutive and augmentative suffixes are added. After diminutive and augmentative suffixes, however, the gender morpheme is represented by the basic form of the allomorph / and /-a/. Appendix B describes in terms of formulas the eleven classes of variables and the eight classes of invariable nouns.