Verb Inflection Research Articles

Exploring the acquisition of verb inflections in Japanese: A probabilistic analysis of seven adult–child corpora

The acquisition of verb morphology is often studied using categorical criteria for determining the productivity of a morpheme. Applying this approach to Japanese, an agglutinative language, this study finds no consistent order for morpheme acquisition and that productivity could be explained by sampling effects. To examine morpheme acquisition using more graded measures of productivity, the authors compared various regression models for predicting the age of acquisition of 311 verb forms across a large combined corpus of seven Japanese-speaking children (aged 1;1–5;1). Complex forms were learned earlier than frequency-matched simple forms, and morpheme ending identity explained substantial variation. Both of these findings suggest that children have some segmented morphemes and have learned some of their semantic/pragmatic characteristics. Sampling would predict that verb form acquisition would be sensitive to lemma and ending frequency, but acquisition was also sensitive to aspects of input frequency that were independent of these factors, and this suggests that children are encoding whole verb forms in addition to creating forms with compositional morphological rules.

Morphological operations in French verbal inflection: Automatic, atomic, and obligatory

In this article, we examined how complex words are recognized as being mediated by their morphological operations and structure. French verbal inflection is a system where the stems provide the lexical meaning and the inflectional suffixes activate the functional information by the morphosyntactic features. We investigated the morphological decomposition and inflectional suffixes processing through visual lexical decision tasks. Experiment 1 accessed general differences in the number of morphological operations regarding low and high frequencies, and regular and irregular verbal forms (e.g., jou-ent/jou-ai-ent ‘they play/played’, prend-s/pren-ai-s ‘yousg take/took’). Experiment 2 tested specific differences in the tense and agreement inflectional suffixes (e.g., jou-ons/jou-i-ons/jou-ez/jou-i-ez ‘we/youpl play/played’). Our hypothesis is that words are automatically decomposed early for morphological processing and that morphemes are later hierarchically recombined for word recognition. We found significant differences between the number of morphological operations in regular and irregular verbs in low and high frequencies; we also found significant differences in tense and agreement suffix processing with longer responses for the past tense and first plural agreement verbal forms, suggesting additive effects. Our results are supported by single-mechanism pre-lexical decompositional models; we propose a model where stems and inflectional suffixes are processed differently for lexical access and word recognition.

Forms of address in interaction: Evidence from Chilean Spanish

This study reexamines the nature of forms of address in Chilean Spanish. Traditionally, survey-, ethnography- and interview-based methods have suggested that the address system of Chilean Spanish is rather static—in other words, that the choice between second person singular pronouns and their corresponding verbal inflections is uniquely determined by the relationship between speaker, interlocutor, and setting. Additionally, when variable usage has been documented, it has been observed in semi-staged and scripted settings, and interpreted as a random phenomenon in which shifts occur freely and unmarkedly. Using evidence from both unstaged everyday, ordinary talk settings and institutional contexts, this study demonstrates that address forms in Chilean Spanish are dynamic, and that speakers of this variety deploy them strategically to achieve their interactional goals. This locates my study within previous sociolinguistic research of the interactional strand, in which forms of address are interpreted as tools that speakers use to discursively construct relevant, time-specific aspects of their identities. Ultimately, it demonstrates that, far from being unequivocally constrained by socially conventionalized pragmatic norms, speakers are in control of their linguistic, discursive resources, and deploy different and varied address forms in ways that allow them to accomplish their immediate interactional goals.

The segmental and tonal structure of verb inflection in Babanki

In this study we provide a comprehensive phonological and morphological analysis of the complex tense-aspect-mood (TAM) system of Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. Our emphasis is on the competing inflectional tonal melodies that are assigned to the verb stem. These melodies are determined not only by the multiple past and future tenses, perfective vs. progressive aspect, and indicative vs. imperative, subjunctive, and conditional moods, but also affirmative vs. negative and “conjoint” (CJ) vs. “disjoint” (DJ) verbal marking, which we show to be more thorough going than the better known cases in Eastern and Southern Bantu. The paper concludes with a ranking of the six assigned tonal melodies and fourteen appendices providing all of the relevant tonal paradigms.

The Innovative North – the Morphosyntactic Makeup of Northern English Features

The purpose of the article is to show the Northern English dialect as a complex creation dependent on various geographical, cultural and social factors responsible for its fluidity and changeable nature. Its strong tendencies towards developing new linguistic solutions are considerably manifested in the morphological and syntactic system which since the very beginning has been subject to alternations, sometimes affecting even other English dialects. The analysis of such areas as nominal and verbal inflection, pronouns, definite articles, auxiliaries, and irregular verbs, makes it tempting to notice certain regular patterns aimed at introducing modern, more economical and thus improved linguistic models. The character and motivation of these novel creations is at times perplexing and calls for arguments not only from historical linguistics, but also geographical and perceptual dialectology as well as functional and evolutionary theories. What is beyond any doubt, however, is that as a result of those new solutions the Northern dialect has become a special sociolinguistic construct whose specific morphosyntactic makeup reveals a unique and innovative dimension defining the North both of the past and of today.

Alignment of forms in Spanish verbal inflection: the gang poner, tener, venir, salir, valer as a window into the nature of paradigmatic analogy and predictability

The future and conditional forms of venir ‘come’, tener ‘have’ and poner ‘put’ were characterized in Old Spanish by various alternatives (e.g. verné, vendré, verré, venré in the case of come.1SG.FUT) which originated through different sound changes taking place in different varieties. The victory of vendré in contemporary Spanish could be seen simply as an inconsequential resolution of this competition of forms. Here I argue against such an interpretation. I will provide quantitative geographical and diachronic evidence which suggests that the adoption of the variant vendré is related to other apparently unconnected analogical changes (most notably valo>valgo ‘be worth.1SG.PRES.IND’) in the history of the language. These two changes have conspired to align different morphological operations in a way that inflectional predictability is achieved from scratch. This development shows that predictability can be a major force in morphological change even between formally dissimilar morphological units and outside of the usual suspects the ‘morphomes’. The emergence of predictability networks like this one has important implications, touching on vital issues like segmentation, analogical change, the status of No-Blur, among others.

The inflection of Tigre weak-final and strong verbs

AbstractThis paper provides a complete, exclusively phonological account of the alternations in the paradigms of the two largest verbal types in the Ethio-Semitic language Tigre. It is proposed that “weakfinal” verbs are constructed using the same templates and vocalizations as “strong” verbs. All of the differences between the two inflectional paradigms follow from weak-final verbs involving a vowel /e/ where strong verbs position a consonant. The analysis, conducted with the tools of Strict CV Phonology and Element Theory, is the first of its kind for Tigre.

The concept of regularization: Resolving the problem of surface dyslexia in semantic variant primary progressive aphasia across different languages.

We predicted that, analogous to surface dyslexia in English, German patients with svPPA would regularize irregular verbs, especially those of lower frequency and in the less frequently used preterite tense. Regularization was investigated in German through past-tense verb inflectional morphology in N = 10 svPPA, N = 5 PPA related to Alzheimer pathology (Aß+PPA), N = 5 patients with nonfluent variant PPA (nfvPPA), N = 12 typical (amnestic presentation) Alzheimer's disease (AD), and N = 32 healthy controls. The task involved perfect- and preterite-tense inflection of regular and irregular verbs of high and low frequency. Errors in svPPA particularly involved regularization (e.g., I swim → I swimmed, I have swimmed), whereas Aß+PPA made a wide range of other errors (e.g., verb agreement or tense errors). Regularization was rare in AD and controls, whereas the expected frequency effects (low worse than high) were found in svPPA. nfvPPA had profound difficulties in inflecting verbs in general. The study illustrates how tests tailored to a specific language can reveal the regularization effect of svPPA. For more universal diagnostic recommendations, future revisions for svPPA should consider substituting the criterion of surface dyslexia for that of a general criterion of regularization of language rules, the former being an example of the latter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Non-sound’ verb Inflection in Arabic: Allomorphic variation and paradigmatic uniformity

Focusing on the Levantine Arabic variety, this paper investigates the paradigmatic asymmetry observed in the inflection of sound verbs whose stems contain three or four consonants and non-sound verbs whose stems contain only two consonantal realizations. It provides a unified account of verb inflection within Optimality Theory and the theory of paradigms. The target of investigation is the allomorphic variation in the non-third person markers which appear in their basic allomorph in inflected sound verbs, but appear in their augmented eeC form in the paradigms of non-sound (weak and geminate) verbs. Previous analyses have viewed this paradigmatic inconsistency as arbitrary exceptions requiring highly specific rules or allomorphic postulates, thus treating the sound and non-sound verb systems as two distinct types. This paper shows that the interaction of independently-motivated markedness constraints with paradigmatic uniformity constraints is capable of producing these allomorphic effects without recourse to ad-hoc rules or arbitrary allomorphic statements. The two verbal types are therefore treated as a unified system. The Optimality-theoretic account of affix allomorphy accords a prime role to the markedness constraint optimizing binarity of prosodic constituents, and rhythmic and prosodic uniformity within and across inflectional subparadigms the interaction of which explains the emergence of the augmented allomorph of the affix. The paper advocates an expanded definition of paradigms allowing grammatical categories such as gender, person, case, etc. to form subparadigms subject to what I refer to as paradigm-to-paradigm faithfulness requiring paradigmatic identity within a grammatical category regardless of verb type. Hollow verbs which present an interesting challenge to the analysis are discussed and accounted for by highlighting the role of Anchor in differentiating between hollow verbs and other non-sound verbs. The paper ends with a comparison with the contrast analysis of Broselow (2008) demonstrating on empirical grounds the superiority of the uniformity against the contrast account.

Who are you talking to? The role of addressee identity in utterance comprehension

Experimental evidence suggests that speaker and addressee quickly adapt to each other from the earliest moments of sentence processing, and that interlocutor-related information is rapidly integrated with other sources of nonpragmatic information (e.g., semantic, morphosyntactic, etc.). These findings have been taken as support for one-step models of sentence comprehension. The results from the present event-related potential study challenge this theoretical framework providing a case where discourse level information is integrated only at a late stage of processing, when morphosyntactic analysis has been already initiated. We considered the case of Basque allocutive agreement, where information about addressee gender is encoded in verbal inflection. Two different types of Basque grammatical violations were presented together with the corresponding control conditions: one could be detected based on a morphosyntactic mismatch (person agreement violation), while the other could be detected only if the addressee's gender was considered (allocutive violation). Morphosyntactic violations elicited greater N400 effects followed by P600 effects, while allocutive violations elicited only P600 effects. These results provide new constraints to one-step accounts as they represent a case where speakers do not immediately adjust to the addressee's perspective. We propose that the relevance of discourse-level information might be a crucial variable to reconcile the dichotomy between one- and two-step models.

The Production of Pronouns and Verb Inflections by Italian Children with ASD: A New Dataset in a Null Subject Language.

The language of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is often characterized by difficulties with pronouns. The underlying reasons for such difficulties are still unclear. This study is the first to test the abilities of children with ASD who speak Italian, a language in which overt subject pronouns are optional but verbs obligatorily feature person-referencing morphology. We found that Italian children with ASD were less accurate than typically-developing (TD) Italian children in the production of first-, second-, and third-person singular pronouns, avoiding pronouns in favor of nouns or names more often than controls. Moreover, children with ASD produced more overt pronouns than null pronouns in marked contexts, compared to TD children. These phenomena can be accounted for by difficulties with pragmatics.

Nominalization, verbalization or both? Insights from the directionality of noun-verb conversion in French

Nominalization in French can be done by means of conversion, which is characterized by the identity between the base and the derived lexeme. Since both noun→verb and verb→noun conversions exist, this property raises directionality issues, and sometimes leads to contradictory analyses of the same examples. The paper presents two approaches of conversion: derivational and non-derivational ones. Then it discusses various criteria used in derivational approaches to determine the direction of conversion: diachronic ones, such as dates of first attestation or etymology; and synchronic ones, such as semantic relations, noun gender or verb inflection. All criteria are evaluated on a corpus of 3,241 French noun~verb pairs. It is shown that none of them enables to identify the direction of conversion in French. Finally, the consequences for the theory of morphology are discussed. Dieser Beitrag ist ursprünglich im Peter-Lang-Verlag erschienen (https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/plg/jwf/2020/00000004/00000002/art00010)

Converging Tonosyntactic Supercategories: Crossing the Noun-Verb Barrier in Jamsay

Dogon NPs divide modifiers into two opposing supercategories defined by convergent semantic and tonosyntactic properties. Dogon verbs undergo various tonal overlays controlled by tense-aspect-mood-polarity suffixes. One Dogon language, Jamsay, similarly systematized tonal patterns in verbal inflection. The tonosyntactically active elements are reference restrictors in NPs and negative suffixes in verbs; these combine to constitute a language-specific “superdupercategory,” for which a set-theoretic semantics is proposed. “Super-dupercategories” appear also in the neighboring isolate Bangime and parallels to the diachrony of supercategories in Wubuy (Australia). Binary supercategories are simultaneously systematic and language-specific, hence cultural, but index or affect nothing outside of language. They fit into no contemporary theory of language, but recall early and mid-twentieth century ideas about the enchantment of formal patterns.

The relative effects of processing instruction and output-based instruction on the comprehension and production of Japanese simple and complex verb inflections

The relative effects of processing instruction and output-based instruction on the comprehension and production of Japanese simple and complex verb inflections

ERP Evidence on Processing Adverbs and Verb Inflections by the Korean EFL Learners

Our study is to investigate whether or not the Korean EFL learners rely more on adverbs than verb inflections in collateralness to the previous studies when they process English sentences with verbs and adverbs. As we checked their responses on an ERP experiment, we found some significant results that N400 appeared at the verb position either preceding the adverbs or following when both incongruent and congruent constructions are compared and P600 slightly at the verb position when the verb-adverb constructions are congruent and incongruent. It revealed that even though the Korean EFL learners seem to rely on the lexical meaning in determining the verb inflections, they try to process them syntactically and are affected by L1 of Korean. Along with a result of this aspect, we claim that there should be some universal operating properties in processing adverbs and verb inflections in languages.

The Derivation of ‘Verbless’ Sentences in Arabic: A Probe-Goal-Agree Approach

In this paper, I provide an analysis of ‘verbless’ sentences in Arabic (mainly, the Standard variety, SA) in light of the claims of the feature-based probe-goal-Agree system of Chomsky (2001, 2004) and such assumptions as held by Biberauer et al. (2010) about probe-goal Agree relations being parameterized according to the feature-structure of functional elements derived in sentence structure. This analysis is essentially different from previous analyses in the literature relating to ‘verbless’ sentences in Arabic, such as Benmamoun’s (2008). In the present analysis, verbal inflection is the product of the valuation of a T-feature of verbs – i.e., [uT], as the unvalued uninterpretable counterpart of [iT] of tense (T as a node in sentence structure) in the syntax of languages. Using this framework of assumptions, I subsequently extend on Halila’s (1992) analysis of the famma-construction in Tunisian Arabic. In such constructions, famma-raising is the result of the verb-like nature of famma as an auxiliary or copula, which ultimately enters a probe-goal-Agree relation with T for tense interpretation at Logical Form (LF) in the syntax.

Inflection in a bilingual child. A case study

In the article, the author presents the mutual impacts of Polish and Slovenian on one another in terms of nominal inflection (mainly of nouns and adjectives) and verb inflection in the speech of a bilingual child in his early development, specifically: positive transfer and interferences. She discusses the parallel children’s bilingualism of a boy living in a mixed family, where various strategies of addressing the child were used, mainly the rule “one parent, one language” (mother – Polish, father – Slovenian). The presence of interference in the child’s speech also caused by the language of the environment in which the boy lived, i.e. the Slovenian language, which could become the dominant one. Some of the examples of Marko’s speech presented in the article indicate special linguistic phenomena which existed in his early linguistic development, e.g., code mixing, switching from one language to the other, and translation.

The Narrative Past Inflection in Sesotho Child and Child-Directed Speech

This study investigates a low-frequency verbal inflection called the ‘narrative past’ in child and child-directed speech in the Bantu language Sesotho. Since the function of the Sesotho narrative past is not well-described, this study aimed to illuminate both function and acquisition trends in the Demuth Sesotho Corpus (Demuth, 1992). This construction has been assumed to be under-specified for tense, comparable in function to the better-known Swahili -ka- inflection. The Swahili form, in turn, has been said to function in ‘clause chains’ that are functionally and structurally similar to such chains in Papuan and other languages. We expected that if the Sesotho narrative past is indeed functionally similar to Swahili -ka-, its distribution in child-directed speech and acquisition by children may pattern similarly to tense-less verb forms in non-Bantu clause chaining languages such as the Papuan language Nungon, where such verb forms can comprise over 20% of all verb tokens in child-directed and child speech at age 3;3. This study thus examined the conversational interactions of four children acquiring Sesotho in a village setting, aged 2;1 to 4;7. All 492 tokens of the narrative past form were coded for syntactic and discourse categories. Results show that the Sesotho narrative past generally occurs in much ‘looser’ discourse chains than in the clause chains of languages like Nungon; for Sesotho, other turns or elements can intervene between narrative past-framed mentions of previously-introduced topics. Further, the Sesotho narrative past has very low frequency in both child and child-directed speech, representing less than 3% of all verb tokens for both registers. There is possible evidence that one of the target children uses the Sesotho narrative past in increasing proportions as his linguistic sophistication increases, though there is no proportional increase in child-directed speech. Thus, in function and distribution, in both child-directed and child speech, the Sesotho narrative past form differs greatly from tense-less forms in more canonical clause chaining languages.

Time reference, morphology and prototypicality: tense production in stroke aphasia and semantic dementia in Greek

ABSTRACT The present study aims at investigating verb inflection in aphasia and semantic dementia. In particular, it addresses the contribution of time reference and morphological complexity. Moreover, it investigates whether the lexical properties of the verb, such as argument structure and lexical aspect interact with the production of tense. Ten individuals with (different types of) stroke aphasia and five individuals with semantic dementia and their respective control groups conducted a sentence completion task. Three tenses were tested: past perfective, past imperfective and present. All tenses had to be produced with three different verb classes, which differed with respect to syntactic and semantic properties: unergative, unaccusative and transitive verbs. The findings imply problems with marking aspect and an interaction between inflection and lexical aspect but no effect of morphological complexity or across the board difficulties with reference to the past in aphasia. Moreover, the results suggest problems with inflection in semantic dementia, an interaction between inflection and lexical aspect and a selective difficulty with imperfective tenses. The study contributes to a better understanding of inflection problems in aphasia and it provides evidence for inflection problems in semantic dementia.

Verb morphology in German-speaking children with developmental language disorder and phonological impairment

ABSTRACT The verb inflections of matched groups of German-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and phonological impairment (PI) were evaluated, and performance compared with age-matched and language-matched typically developing (TD) children (66 participants in total). An elicitation task for second- and third-person singular present tense inflections was used and spontaneous language samples were also analysed for present tense inflections. Errors resulting from the children’s speech difficulties were excluded from the analysis. Evidence was found in the elicited data for delayed development in the DLD children, but no differences were found between this group and the TD group matched on language development. Both clinical groups made errors consistent with bare stem- and prosodic factors described in the literature. The children with PI, although scoring within normal limits on standardised tests of language, displayed difficulties with tense inflections that went beyond limitations imposed by their speech. This suggests there may be underlying difficulties in both phonological and grammatical domains for both clinical groups, and potential interaction between these domains. It is recommended that clinicians take account of this possibility when assessing and identifying children with DLD and with PI, and that they avoid reliance on standardised language tests or assessment of grammatical morphology alone when assessing for DLD.