Verbal Inflectional Morphology Research Articles

The Emergence and Development of Palestinian Arabic Lexicon and Morphosyntax From 18 to 36 Months: A Communicative Development Inventory Study.

This study presents a comprehensive exploration of lexical and grammatical development in Palestinian Arabic (PA). The study aims to test the validity of the Palestinian Arabic Communicative Development Inventory (PA-CDI) as well as generate growth curves for lexical and morphosyntactic development, examine the order of emergence of both lexical and morphosyntactic categories, and explore the contribution of demographic and developmental factors to language development. Data were collected from 1,399 parents of PA children aged 18-36 months using an online PA-CDI. The results show that as age increased, so did lexical and morphosyntactic production, along with considerable variability across individuals. While lexical development in PA resembles the order observed in other languages with nouns preceding verbs and adjectives, morphosyntactic development indicates early emergence of verbal inflectional morphology prior to noun pluralization or negation. Age of word combination and health problems are predictive of lexical and morphosyntactic development, and so are parental concerns. Our findings indicate the potential of the PA-CDI as an assessment tool for lexical and morphosyntactic development among PA-speaking children in Israel. Our developmental growth curves may also be used to identify children at risk for developmental language disorder, particularly those falling below the 10th percentile, thus allowing for early identification and early intervention. The use of background variables, specifically parental concerns, health issues, and word combinations, along with the PA-CDI, could potentially enhance the precision of language delay assessment. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.26026777.

Central Siberian Yupik Influence on Sirenikski Verbal Inflection

AbstractLanguage contact is pervasive in the history of all Eskaleut languages of the Pacific Rim, and the languages show contact effect regardless of typological similarity or degree of relatedness. Moreover, the degree of contact has allowed for the borrowing of features that are generally thought of as relatively impervious to borrowing, including verb inflection. In particular, Sirenikski has been in close contact with the closely related language Central Siberian Yupik, and contact effects on the phonology, prosodic system and lexicon have been well described, however, the verbal inflectional morphology has largely been assumed to be cognate. In this article, I present evidence that some elements of the inflectional paradigm have been borrowed from Central Siberian Yupik.

Early grammar-building in French-speaking deaf children with cochlear implants: A follow-up corpus study.

One of the most consistent findings reported in the paediatric cochlear implant (CI) literature is the heterogeneity of language performance observed more in grammatical morphology than in lexicon or pragmatics. As most of the corpus studies addressing these issues have been conducted in English, it is unclear whether their results can be generalized to other languages. In particular, little is known about languages known for their grammatical complexity, such as French. The aim of this corpus study was to compare the productive use of function words (FWs) and some agreement features (AGRs) in children with CIs and children with typical development (TD) matched for mean length of utterance in words (MLUwords ), a general index of grammatical complexity, and auditory experience, as measured by hearing age (HA) and chronological age (CA), respectively. Natural speech samples from 116 monolingual French-speaking children, including 40 children with CIs followed longitudinally and 76 TD children, were collected. FWs and AGRs were analysed using a Part of Speech Tagger (POS-T) from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). The two groups differed by 3 years for HA and CA. No effect of family socio-economic status (SES) was found in the CI group. Stepwise regression analyses showed that the two groups did not share the same predictors of MLUwords : plurals and determiners predicted MLUwords in children with CIs, at 2 and 3 years of HA, whereas feminine markers and subject-pronouns were found to best predict MLUwords in TD children at 2 and 3 years of CA. Structural equation models (SEMs), a combination of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and path analysis, yielded a different hierarchical structure of grammatical relations (GRs). Selective difficulties affecting verbal clitics and other pronominal forms were found specifically in the CI group (object-pronouns, reflexive, relative and past participles). Dependency grammar analysis confirmed these contrasting developmental profiles in multiword utterances, such as preposition/nouns, subject/verbs, and verb/determiner/nouns. Atypical grammatical patterns in children with CIs reflect a specific architecture of syntactic dependencies of FWs underpinning morphological complexity and syntactic connectivity. Clinical implications are discussed for assessment and intervention planning. What is already known on this subject The productive use of FWs has been identified as a particular area of weakness in children with CIs compared with TD children. In addition, heterogenous grammatical performance has often been found after 1-3 years of CI use, regardless of demographic factors such as age at implantation, duration of deafness or SES. What this paper adds to existing knowledge Assessing the early building of FWs and AGRs in children with CIs helps to understand the syntactic complexity and hierarchical structure of their language. Since most corpus studies on grammatical morphology have been conducted in English, it is not clear whether their difficulties can be generalized to other languages. The French language has a system of FWs and inflections that determine the morphophonological properties of nominal and verbal forms. Early grammar learning in children with CIs born with profound deafness were compared with the two groups of TD children matched both for duration of auditory experience (i.e., HA of CI children, CA of TD children) and for MLUwords . We found a similar profile between groups at 2 years but not at 3 years for HA and CA. The two groups do not share the same predictors of MLUwords : namely, plurals and determiners for CI children versus feminine markers and subject pronouns for TD children. They show a different syntactic organization of GRs. Children with CIs struggle with selective difficulties affecting verbal clitics and pronominal forms (object-pronouns, reflexive, relative and past participles). Consistent with theories of morphophonological richness and syntactic connectivity, our results support the distributional learning hypothesis of language acquisition that infants and toddlers are sensitive to FWs and AGRs at an early age. Specific components of syntactic organization are disrupted in children with CIs. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? This work has potential clinical implications because it unravels the limitations of morphophonological processing in children with CIs. Its results highlight a specific difficulty in learning FWs and AGRs in a verbal inflectional morphology context.

Inhibitory control and verb inflection in Italian preschool children.

The study investigates whether Italian verbal inflectional morphology is associated with inhibitory control skills after controlling for receptive vocabulary and verbal working memory. A sample of Italian preschoolers aged 4;0 to 6;0 was assessed using a standardized inhibitory control task tapping two different inhibitory skills (response inhibition and interference suppression), and a morphological task requiring simple and complex inflections of verbs. The hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that working memory and the interference suppression scores were significantly associated with complex inflections but not with simple inflections of the verbs.

Direct copying of inflectional paradigms: Evidence from Lamunkhin Even

Language contact studies have shown that, cross-linguistically, the transfer of morphology from one language to another, where it is then used with inherited roots, is relatively rare (Grant 2012, Matras 2015); copying of verbal inflectional morphology is particularly infrequent (Seifart 2017). Copied morphemes are frequently assumed to enter the recipient language via “indirect affix borrowing”, whereby complex lexemes are copied and subsequently analysed into their component parts in the recipient language, thus enabling the use of the copied affixes with native roots (Grant 2012, Seifart 2015, Evans 2016). Although “direct affix borrowing”, in which speakers of the recipient language identify the meaning of affixes in the model language and transfer them directly for use with native roots, is known to occur, this has up to date been identified only for derivational morphemes (Seifart 2015). In contrast, in this article I provide evidence that four Sakha (Yakut) TAM markers plus associated subject agreement paradigms found in the Lamunkhin dialect of Even were copied directly by fully bilingual speakers of the recipient language. This argument is based on the absence of Sakha verbal roots found with these paradigms in a corpus of Lamunkhin Even recordings, as well as on patterns of co-occurrence of these morphemes in clauses with Even grammatical morphology.

English

Using examples of tape recorded conversational data from fifty educated adult Igbo-English bilinguals resident in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, this paper demonstrates that lone English verbs are typically inserted into otherwise Igbo utterances by means of Igbo verbal inflectional morphology. Other verbs are adjoined to a helping verb from Igbo, specifically involving an adapted form. Yet, a few English verbs are inserted into a position corresponding to an Igbo verb without any adaptations. To answer the question as to why the verbal inflectional morphology of Igbo rather than that of English should be used, we show that this is predicted by the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model, according to which integration into the bound morphology of the base language is expected. Also, the paper identifies that the un-adapted English verbs occur in Igbo serial verb constructions (SVCs). The only type of structure where a full Igbo verb may occur without verbal morphology. Consequently, this paper concludes by arguing that the un-adapted English verbs in Igbo SVCs do not occur in codeswitching (CS) because of the activation of a ‘CS-specific’ compromise strategy, rather they, like the English verbs bearing Igbo verbal inflectional morphology occur in clause structure with restrictions imposed by the base language grammar. Key words: Igbo, codeswitching, grammar, insertion, verbs, Matrix Language Frame model.

How strong is the ban on non-finite verbs in V2? Evidence from early second language learners of German with and without SLI

Abstract Using the standardized test LiSe-DaZ across four test rounds, we collected elicited production data from 22 typically developing early second language learners (eL2 TD) of German (mean age at T1: 3;7) and 11 older eL2 children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (mean age at T1: 7;1). Focusing on the relation between verb placement and verbal inflectional morphology two questions were addressed: Do eL2 children obey the ban on non-finite verbs in verb-second position (V2) in German, and do eL2 SLI children differ from their eL2 TD peers in their morpho-syntactic behavior? This is the first study on this issue to systematically differentiate between V2 and verb-final position (Vf) and between bare verb forms and infinitives, based on a large sample of elicited production data. Results show that from the first test round onwards verbal inflectional morphology and verb placement were strongly related in the TD and the SLI group. Bare verb forms occurred in V2 only and are argued to be finite; en-infinitives were restricted to Vf. We conclude that a) the restrictions for morphological markings are inextricably tied to specific syntactic positions, b) that this knowledge is still accessible when L2 acquisition starts around age 3, and c) that the ban on non-finite verbs in V2 is invulnerable in eL2 TD and in SLI, indicating that SLI is matter of severe delay.

Verbal inflectional morphology and modality in compound clause-linkage markers in Japanese

Japanese has many compound clause-linkage markers (hereafter “CLMs”). Some of them consist of a verbal inflectional suffix and (up to three) particles. They include eleven compound CLMs that have the Concessive conditional meaning (‘even if’) and/or the Concessive meaning (‘even though, although’). In these eleven compound CLMs, different inflectional categories of verbs (i.e. conjugational categories) combined with different particles indicate different degrees of the speaker’s belief or confidence regarding the likelihood of the existence or occurrence of a situation. That is, verbal inflectional morphology plays a crucial role in expressing modal meanings. Such a phenomenon does not seem to have been recognized for Japanese or any other language.

Processing verbal morphology in patients with congenital left-hemispheric brain lesions

The goal of this study was to test whether children, teenagers and adults with congenital left-hemispheric brain lesions master the regularities of German verbal inflectional morphology. Thirteen patients and 35 controls without brain damage participated in three experiments. A grammaticality judgment task, a participle inflection task and a nonce-verb inflection task revealed significant differences between patients and controls. In addition, a main effect of verb type could be observed as patients and controls made more mistakes with irregular than with regular verbs. The findings indicate that the congenitally damaged brain not only has difficulties with complex syntactic structures during language development, as reported by earlier studies, but also has persistent deficits on the morphological level. These observations suggest that the plasticity of the developing brain cannot fully compensate for congenital brain damage which affects regions associated with language functions.

Overt and Null Subject Pronouns in Jordanian Arabic

The paper aims at examining the role that morphology plays in allowing and/or motivating sentences in Jordanian Arabic (hereafter JA) to be formed with or without subject pronouns. It also aims at giving a comprehensive and descriptive presentation of the distribution of overt and null subject pronouns in JA, and tries to determine to what extent there is optionality in its system. Keywords: null subject pronouns, overt subjects, pro-drop languages, verbal inflectional morphology

Morpho-syntactic reading comprehension in children with early and late cochlear implants.

This study explores morpho-syntactic reading comprehension in 19 Spanish children who received a cochlear implant (CI) before 24 months of age (early CI [e-CI]) and 19 Spanish children who received a CI after 24 months (late CI [l-CI]). They all were in primary school and were compared to a hearing control (HC) group of 19 children. Tests of perceptual reasoning, working memory, receptive vocabulary, and morpho-syntactic comprehension were used in the assessment. It was observed that while children with l-CI showed a delay, those with e-CI reached a level close to that which was obtained by their control peers in morpho-syntactic comprehension. Thus, results confirm a positive effect of early implantation on morpho-syntactic reading comprehension. Inflectional morphology and simple sentence comprehension were noted to be better in the e-CI group than in the l-CI group. The most important factor in distinguishing between the HC and l-CI groups or the e-CI and l-CI groups was verbal inflectional morphology.

Agency and Intentional Action in Kathmandu Newar

Author(s): Hargreaves, David | Abstract: The paradigm of verbal morphology in Kathmandu Newar involves a binary opposition of two sets of forms, the so-called conjunct/disjunct system. However, in its distributional properties, the system indexes a complex functional interaction between semantic representations and pragmatic principles:1) The construal of intentional action as a force dynamic with an appropriate mental representation,2) The deictic properties of speech acts and speech participant roles,3) An evidential principle requiring privileged access to internal states.In addition, related concepts of agency and causation are indexed via the system of ergative/absolutive nominal case marking and causative morphology. Although there is a fair degree of semantic overlap between notions of causation, agency and intentional action, the formal and functional properties of the three domains (verbal inflectional morphology, causative morphology and the ergative/absolutive case marking) exhibit significant degrees of formal and functional autonomy.

Fake indexicals in Dutch: a counterexample to Kratzer 2009

We argue that Dutch does not behave according to Kratzer’s theory of fake indexicality. The crucial observation is that Dutch allows English-style sloppy readings in non-agreeing only complements, but has a rich, German-style verbal and pronominal inflectional morphology.

Language deficits in pre-symptomatic Huntington’s disease: Evidence from Hungarian

A limited number of studies have investigated language in Huntington’s disease (HD). These have generally reported abnormalities in rule-governed (grammatical) aspects of language, in both syntax and morphology. Several studies of verbal inflectional morphology in English and French have reported evidence of over-active rule processing, such as over-suffixation errors (e.g., walkeded) and over-regularizations (e.g., digged). Here we extend the investigation to noun inflection in Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric agglutinative language with complex morphology, and to genetically proven pre-symptomatic Huntington’s disease (pre-HD). Although individuals with pre-HD have no clinical, motor or cognitive symptoms, the underlying pathology may already have begun, and thus sensitive behavioral measures might reveal already-present impairments. Indeed, in a Hungarian morphology production task, pre-HD patients made both over-suffixation and over-regularization errors. The findings suggest the generality of over-active rule processing in both HD and pre-HD, across languages from different families with different morphological systems, and for both verbal and noun inflection. Because the neuropathology in pre-HD appears to be largely restricted to the caudate nucleus and related structures, the findings further implicate these structures in language, and in rule-processing in particular. Finally, the need for effective treatments in HD, which will likely depend in part on the ability to sensitively measure early changes in the disease, suggests the possibility that inflectional morphology, and perhaps other language measures, may provide useful diagnostic, tracking, and therapeutic tools for assessing and treating early degeneration in pre-HD and HD.

Categorial hybrids in Kambaata

The paper discusses three categorial hybrids in the East Cushitic language Kambaata, viz. negative participles, agent adjectives and verbal nouns, all of which are shown to combine properties of two word classes (lexical categories) systematically. Unlike their affirmative counterparts, Kambaata negative relative verbs qualify as verbal adjectives (participles), because, apart from having verbal inflectional morphology and a completely verbal argument structure, they have also acquired adjectival morphology to indicate case/gender agreement with their head nouns. The combination of verbal and adjectival features is less balanced for agent adjectives, which retain fewer properties of the verbs they are based on; however, they are still able to govern objects and be modified by adverbial clauses. Kambaata verbal nouns behave almost entirely like verbs in relation to their dependents but as nouns with respect to the clause where they feature as arguments. I argue that the negative participle formation and the verbal noun formation are inflectional processes which change the word form word class from verb to adjective and verb to noun, respectively, but which preserve the properties of the lexeme word class (Verb). In contrast, the agent adjective formation is analysed as a derivational process with a greater impact on the lexeme word class.

The Acquisition of English be Auxiliary and Thematic Verb Constructions by Adult Arab ESL Learners

This study investigates the acquisition of English be auxiliary and thematic verb constructions in non-past contexts by adult Arab learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). It is well known that second language (L2) learners show variability in the L2 production of verbal inflectional morphology by either omitting inflections or marking inappropriate substitution of one kind of inflection for another. The Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) (Prévost and White, 2000) proposes that L2 learners have knowledge of functional categories and features underlying tense and agreement although sometimes they fail to produce the corresponding overt forms. In order to examine the nature of the adult Arab ESL learners’ interlanguage (IL) grammar at the L2 ultimate attainment level as well as the extent to which the learners can acquire English be auxiliary and thematic verb constructions in non-past contexts, an oral production task (ORPT) was conducted with 77 adult Arab ESL learners subdivided into three proficiency levels (lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate and advanced). An analysis of the ORPT show that the L2 learners omit and wrongly use the be auxiliary verbal inflection (am, is, are) more frequently than the thematic verb inflection (-s) in their production. The results reveal that the adult Arab ESL learners, even at ultimate attainment level, are more sensitive to the thematic verb contractions than to the be auxiliary constructions. These results suggest that variability in the production of verbal inflectional morphology is due to problems with the realization of surface morphology in accordance with the MSIH.

Verbal Inflectional Morphology in L1 and L2 Spanish: A Frequency Effects Study Examining Storage Versus Composition

This study examines the storage vs. composition of Spanish inflected verbal forms in L1 and L2 speakers of Spanish. L2 participants were selected to have mid-to-advanced proficiency, high classroom experience, and low immersion experience, typical of medium-to-advanced foreign language learners. Participants were shown the infinitival forms of verbs from either Class I (the default class, which takes new verbs) or Classes II and III (non-default classes), and were asked to produce either first-person singular present-tense or imperfect forms, in separate tasks. In the present tense, the L1 speakers showed inflected-form frequency effects (i.e., higher frequency forms were produced faster, which is taken as a reflection of storage) for stem-changing (irregular) verb-forms from both Class I (e.g., pensar-pienso) and Classes II and III (e.g., perder-pierdo), as well as for non-stem-changing (regular) forms in Classes II/III (e.g., vender-vendo), in which the regular transformation does not appear to constitute a default. In contrast, Class I regulars (e.g., pescar-pesco), whose non-stem-changing transformation constitutes a default (e.g., it is applied to new verbs), showed no frequency effects. L2 speakers showed frequency effects for all four conditions (Classes I and II/III, regulars and irregulars). In the imperfect tense, the L1 speakers showed frequency effects for Class II/III (-ía-suffixed) but not Class I (-aba-suffixed) forms, even though both involve non-stem-change (regular) default transformations. The L2 speakers showed frequency effects for both types of forms. The pattern of results was not explained by a wide range of potentially confounding experimental and statistical factors, and does not appear to be compatible with single-mechanism models, which argue that all linguistic forms are learned and processed in associative memory. The findings are consistent with a dual-system view in which both verb class and regularity influence the storage vs. composition of inflected forms. Specifically, the data suggest that in L1, inflected verbal forms are stored (as evidenced by frequency effects) unless they are both from Class I and undergo non-stem-changing default transformations. In contrast the findings suggest that at least these L2 participants may store all inflected verb-forms. Taken together, the results support dual-system models of L1 and L2 processing in which, at least at mid-to-advanced L2 proficiency and lower levels of immersion experience, the processing of rule-governed forms may depend not on L1 combinatorial processes, but instead on memorized representations.

Events in Space

No abstract.

Contact-Induced Change and the Openness of 'Closed' Morphological Systems: Some Cases from Native America

AbstractThis paper examines the effects of contact-induced language change on the nominal and verbal inflectional morphology of several Native American languages, most of which have also replaced large amounts of their basic vocabulary with loans from other language. It shows that although there are few if any limitations on the kinds of concepts which may be expressed by borrowed items, borrowing as a source of morphological renewal is an infrequently-employed process in these languages, and even those languages which have borrowed heavily have not always borrowed the same types of morphemes from other languages. Information derived from diachronic inspection of inflectional morphology remains the most reliable means of classifying languages genealogically with accuracy.

Cortical Mechanisms Involved in the Processing of Verbs: An fMRI Study

In this study, we investigated two aspects of verb processing: first, whether verbs are processed differently from nouns; and second, how verbal morphology is processed. For this purpose, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare three types of lexical processing in Japanese: the processing of nouns, unmarked active verbs, and inflected passive verbs. Twenty-eight healthy subjects were shown a lexical item and asked to judge whether the presented item was a legal word. Although all three conditions activated the bilateral inferior frontal, occipital, the left middle, and inferior temporal cortices, we found differences in the degree of activation for each condition. Verbs elicited greater activation in the left middle temporal gyrus than nouns, and inflected verbs showed greater activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus than unmarked verbs. This study demonstrates that although verbs are basically processed in the same cortical network as nouns, nouns and verbs elicit different degrees of activation due to the cognitive demands involved in lexical semantic processing. Furthermore, this study also shows that the left inferior frontal cortex is related to the processing of verbal inflectional morphology.