Grammatical morphemes

This study sought to determine the sequence of L2 morpheme presentation, as well as to determine whether or not the sequence of morpheme presentations correspond with the recognized natural order of morpheme acquisition in English Language Teaching course books utilized with young adult learners at a public sector vocational education institution in Thailand. Qualitative analysis was employed in the scrutinizing of twelve beginner and elementary level ESL and EFL learners course books that have been utilized as the primary teaching material for over a decade by the general education department of the institute. This examination revealed that the morpheme presentation sequence within the selected ELT course books was not analogous with the conclusions in the supporting literature. The findings further indicated that the widely accepted viewpoint of natural order morpheme acquisition was likewise not substantially reflected within the analyzed texts. Albeit, earlier studies have found that an unnatural sequence of morpheme presentation in EFL course books may hamper communicative competence in English, further study is required to establish if this may be a contributing factor for the overall low English proficiency of adult L2 learners in Thailand.

The current paper discusses three types of synthetic verb forms (SVF) in the contemporary Bulgarian language: 1 st type – formed from one of the temporal stems (present, aorist AND imperfect stemps), 2 nd – formed from the aspect stem, 3 rd – formed from lexical stem without temporal suffix et without aspect suffix.

Представят се три типа синтетични глаголни словоформи в съвременния български език: І тип – образува се от темпорална основа (сегашна, имперфектна или аористна), която не съдържа видов суфикс; ІІ тип – образува се от видовата основа без наличие на темпорална гласна; ІІІ тип – образува се при липса и на темпорална гласна, и на видов суфикс. В тези типове могат да се открият 3 вида граматически показатели: сегментируеми морфеми, които изразяват едно граматическо значение, сегментируеми граматически морфеми, които кумулират няколко граматични значения, и граматически форманти, които съдържат псевдоморфеми и които кумулативно изразяват няколко граматични значения.

К читателю: данную серию очерков может читать любой желающий, однако написана она, прежде всего, для тех, кто уже имеет некоторое представление о тибетском языке, а также для лингвистов. Поэтому, если Вы — новичок в тибетологии и тибетском языкознании, Вы можете прочитать (пролистать) всю серию очерков, сначала пропуская непонятные и кажущиеся "слишком абстрактными" места, с тем, чтобы возвратиться к ним лишь тогда, когда столкнетесь на практике с соответствующими явлениями (поскольку не каждый параграф очерка снабжен простейшими примерами).

Chapter 6 (by Santazilia) is a study of the Basque noun morphology, which sets out the noun paradigm of historical Basque and the structure of its NP, and then goes on to list the explanations proposed so far for every aspect concerning the formation of that paradigm: first the number/definiteness axis, and then the individual cases, classifying these into primary cases (grammatical and local), secondary cases (those built upon the allative and the genitive), and pseudo-flectional morphemes or non-cases.

This paper deals with one of the oldest and most controversial problems in the historical morphology of the Germanic branch of Indo-European: the origin and historical development of the so-called ‘weak preterite’. In Germanic, the weak preterite is the only means of forming the preterite tense of a derived verb. In spite of two hundred years of research into the weak preterite and a large number of hypotheses concerning its origin, it is not even securely established how the inflectional endings of this formation should be reconstructed for the common prehistory of the attested Germanic languages. Traditionally the inflectional endings of the weak preterite are conceived of as reflecting free inflectional forms of the verb “do”, only recently having been grammaticalized as inflectional morphology for derived verbs. But it has never been possible to identify the inflectional forms in question satisfactorily within the paradigm of “do”. This paper reconsiders the evidence of the Germanic daughter languages by taking into account West Germanic irregularities previously neglected or viewed as irrelevant. It is shown that the West Germanic evidence provides a key to understanding the origin and the later developments of the weak preterite inflectional endings.

The present paper considers how prosodic analysis can assist in the investigation of the status of Tiberian Hebrew (TH) constituents  with respect to their position on the grammatical-lexical cline.  The introduction presents one area of research where such an  analysis is necessary, namely, the presentation of TH in a typological format. The first section summarizes such a format, presented in detail in Anstey (2005). The second section then demonstrates how the Masoretic diacritics, as encoded in the Westminster Hebrew Morphology Database 4.0 (Groves et al. 2003), can be interpreted as an indication of the degree of morphophonological fusion of constituents, which is one variable affecting diagnosis of grammaticalization vis-à-vis lexicalization. Constituents are divided into three ranges of fusion and candidates for grammatical constituents are suggested. Based on this analysis, suggestions are provided for a more fine-grained subdivision of TH parts-of-speech.  The conclusion suggests areas for further research.

The study reported in this thesis investigates the grammatical and socio-pragmatic characteristics of the conversational code switching (CS) of three Afrikaans-English bilingual children. The study was conducted by analysing spontaneous conversational CS, elicited during multiple play sessions. Three eight year old Afrikaans-English bilingual boys from Paarl in the Western Cape, with varying language backgrounds, participated in the study. Unstructured play sessions were audio and video recorded and transcribed. All three participants took part in one triadic conversational play session and in two dyadic play sessions. The thesis differentiates between the phenomenon of CS and related sociolinguistic phenomena such as borrowing and interference in order to facilitate a clearer classification of the different types of CS. The identification of the matrix language under the asymmetry principle is done by means of a quantitative analysis, while the grammatical characteristics of the children’s CS are qualitatively evaluated under Myers-Scotton’s Matrix Language Frame and 4-M models. The socio-pragmatic characteristics of the children’s use of intersentential CS are qualitatively evaluated by means of Conversation Analysis, in which the emphasis falls on turn taking and adjacency pair sequences as well as the negotiation of power relations. The study also aims to contribute towards a better understanding of children’s CS, not only in terms of insights into how CS manifests on the surface level of language production, but also in terms of why CS occurs on a deeper language processing and competence level. The general reasons for which the different types of CS occur, and the examination of which grammatical and/or socio-pragmatic difficulties may drive children to use specific types of CS are investigated, while also considering whether the context and the hidden meaning of an utterance have an influence on how and why CS takes place, and where each type of CS occurs. The study reveals that, in terms of characterising the types of CS that occur in the data, all four conversations provided proof of extrasentential, intrasentential and intersentential CS. A preference was observed for intrasentential single code switched forms and for intersentential CS, which occurs due to the negotiation of context, topic and theme. Such negotiation primarily occurs due to combinations and sequences of talk, self-talk, interaction, conversation, narration and role play. Although all types of CS occurred within the data in both Afrikaans and English forms, Afrikaans was identified as the matrix language of the corpus and the majority of the conversations. The asymmetrical occurrence of different morpheme types provides evidence for the two-system hypothesis, namely that Afrikaans and English occur as two different systems within the children’s brains and that language processing occurs by means of the allocation of different morphemes from both languages at the lexical and formulator level to produce language.

In spite of the central position that the concept word has among the basic units of language structure, there is no consensus as to the definition of this concept (or network of related concepts). Many perspectives are needed in order to gain even a schematic idea of what words are, how words may be composed, and what relationships there might be between words. Many linguists have put forward frameworks for describing the domain of morphology, each framework proceeding from its author's assumptions, prioritizing distinct formal and functional dimensions, and therefore entering into de facto competition. This book addresses the needs of the language scholar/student who finds her/himself engaged in morphological analysis and theorizing. It offers a guide to existing approaches, revealing how they can either complement or compete with each other and ranks them on multiple continua.

В статье описывается новая концепция турецкой фонологии, архифонемики, морфонологии и морфологии на основе разрабатываемого автором варианта интегральной теории "Смысл <==> Текст". Словоформа по этой концепции строится на основе морфолого-синтаксического дерева его структуры, которое должно быть линеаризовано по специальным правилам упорядочения вначале морфологических блоков (корень, блок префиксов слева от корня, блок деривативных суффиксов справа от корня, затем блок грамматических морфов). Внутри блоков морфы упорядочиваются на основе синтаксических отношений между ними. По автоматическим правилам затем в цепочку полнозначных морфов вставляются пустые и тематические морфы (если они есть). После перехода от абстрактного представления морфем в виде их имен к их морфонологическому виду, проводятся архифонемные чередования и между морфами вставляются "метрические фонемы", назначение которых - устранение конфликтов между сигнификативным фонологическим составом морфов, обеспечивающим противопоставленность их по смыслу, и метрическим фонологическим составом акцентного слова, обеспечивающим удобство произнесения и предотвращающим слияние фонем, искажающее членение целого на морфы. Затем проводятся фонологические чередования.
Клитики наравне с аффиксами и корневыми морфами выделяются в отдельный конструктивный класс морфов. Наряду с корневыми морфемами они наделяются способностью быть основой отдельного грамматического слова. Объединение корневых и клитических грамматических слов могут приводить к образованию грамматически оформленного корнеклитического слова, не характерного, например, для русского языка, но вполне оформившегося в турецком языке. Таковы в нем формы сказуемого. Неоформленные падежными показателями словоформы трактуются как результат действия оператора опущения и добавления показателя синтаксической связи обозначающего в турецком языке дополнительное значение "определенности - неопределенности", "конкретности - абстрактности" обозначаемого объекта.

Perfect is a retrospective aspect that encodes the current relevance of an anterior eventuality in speech time. In this work, we propose a semantic and grammatical category named antiperfect, which, in contrast with perfect, encodes the non validity of an anterior eventuality in speech time. Since antiperfect, as perfect, is sensitive to the current relevance of an anterior situation, we propose that it is a retrospective aspect too. After reviewing the descriptions of perfect by Comrie (1976), Dik (1997) and  Nishiyama & Koënig (2010), and the description of continuous past by Plungian & van der Auwera (2006), we analyze the antiperfect in Mapudungun, which is grammatically encoded by the morpheme –fu. We focus the analysis in the semantic-pragmatic description of the category, its relations to aktionsart, and the role of context in its interpretation.

A recurrent theme in the literature on trilingual language use is the question of whether there is a specific “trilingual competence.” In this paper we consider this question in the light of codeswitching patterns in two dyadic trilingual conversations between a mother and daughter conducted in (Lebanese) Arabic, French, and English. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of codeswitching in both conversants shows that, despite the fact that both subjects are fluent in all three languages, uses of switching are significantly different for mother and daughter across a number of features, including relative frequency of different switch types, and the incidence of hybrid constructions involving items from two or more languages. The subjects appear to display qualitatively distinct profiles of competence in the trilingual mode. This in turn leads to the conclusion that the facts of trilingual language use are best characterized in terms of “multicompetence” (Cook, 1991). The paper concludes with some further reflections on the uniqueness of trilingual language use (an “old chestnut” in trilingualism research, cf. Klein, 1995).

Cross-linguistic studies show that languages follow clear tendencies in the ordering of morphemes inside a word that have been variously accounted for in the scholarly literature. Morphological structures, however, are not immune to change and the order of morphemes
can be altered in the history of a language due to various kinds of processes, thus leading to an unusual order inside the word. The expected order of morphemes can be restored in different ways, one of which is the externalization of inflection. There are interesting
examples of this type of processes in the pronominal inflection of the ancient Indo-European languages, which provide relevant information about this type of change.
After revising those processes, we focus on the analysis of the *-sm-enlargement –apparently devoid of any semantic content– that appears in the oblique cases of certain Indo-European demonstrative pronouns (such as Skt. tásmai, Goth. Þamma, OPrus. stesmu, etc.) and in some
cases of the 1st and 2nd plural personal pronouns (Skt. asmā́n and yuṣmā́n, Gk. hēmeîs and hūmeîs, etc.). We carry out a thorough survey of those forms and provide evidence to support the idea that this -sm-enlargement was originally an emphatic particle that has been ‘trapped’
between the pronominal stem and the nominal endings and we interpret the data in the light of the processes mentioned above.

Дается обзор морфологических описаний структуры турецкого слова. Тщательно анализируется турецкая фонология и морфонология. Далее в работе на основе достаточно строгих определений конструктивных классов морфем (корней, клитик и аффиксов) дается совершенно новая трактовка турецкой морфологии. Дается определение грамматического слова в турецком языке, описывается классификация и грамматическая структура корневого и клитического грамматического слова, выявляется новый тип грамматических слов - корнеклитическое слово. На основе введения понятия оператора дается новая трактовка неоформленных грамматических слов. Разрабатывается и применяется к турецкому материалу аппарат описания синтаксических связей между морфемами в грамматическом слове

The concept of the morphome (i.e. a morphological unit at odds with syntax and semantics) is notoriously uncomfortable for many formal models of morphology. Many discussions have thus centred on whether morphomes exist and whether individual cases are morphomic or not. When one gets rid of theoretically-driven assumptions, however, there is little evidence for a dichotomic taxonomization of the morphological minimal signs into morphemes and morphomes. Cross-linguistic variation suggests that morphological units can be arranged on a scale from the most simple to the most complex morphosyntactic distributions. The properties of ones vs the others are, however, not substantially different. I argue, therefore, that we should avoid this arbitrary taxonomy and explore instead the diversity of form-meaning mappings objectively by developing adequate and cross-linguistically applicable quantitative measures.

In this paper we discuss the difficulties in processing the Malayalam texts for Statistical Machine Translation (SMT), especially the verb forms. Mostly the agglutinative nature of Malayalam is the main issue with the processing of text. We mainly focus on the verbs and its contribution in adding the difficulty in processing. The verb plays a crucial role in defining the sentence structure. We illustrate the issues with the existing google translation system and the trained MOSES system using limited set of English-Malayalam parallel corpus. Our reference for analysis is English-Malayalam language pair.

The aim of this article is to give a descriptive analysis of noun-modifying clauses in Atong, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the South Garo Hills district of Meghalaya state in Northeast India. When I set out to describe the phenomenon of noun-modifying clauses in Atong, I felt that neither the general typological literature nor the Tibeto-Burman literature on this subject provided a perfect framework for its analysis. In both the typological and the Tibeto-Burman literature the analysis of noun-modifying clauses is guided by syntax, whereas in Atong we will have to take semantics and pragmatics into account to understand the relationship between the attributive clause and the noun it modifies.

The paper discusses three types of grammatical markers in Bulgarian synthetic verb forms: segmentable grammatical morphemes which additively express one grammatical feature; segmentable grammatical morphemes which cumulatively express a number of grammatical features; grammatical formants that contain pseudo-morphemes and that cumulatively express more than one grammatical feature. Some cases of super-cumulation (or over-cumulation) are also presented and reviewed.

В тази публикация се задълбочава изследването на кумулацията в синтетичната глаголна словоформа в съвременния български език, която произтича от асиметрията между двата плана на езиковия знак при флективните езици. Съпоставят се понятията кумулация (струпване на граматични значения в плана на значението) и синкретизъм (липсата на сегментируемост в плана на израза при наличието на разчлененост в съдържанието). В отделни подчасти се анализират: сегментируемите граматически морфеми в синтетичната глаголна словоформа в съвременния български език, при които липсва кумулативност на граматически значения, а също така сегментируемите граматически морфеми, изразяващи кумулативно граматически значения. Тук се поставя г въпросът за наличието в синтетичната глаголна словоформа в съвременния български език на случаи на суперкумулативност.

Out of context, a sequence of Italian such as 'dei professori' (of.the teachers) is ambiguous. It can: (a) mean 'some teachers' (e.g. 'Dei professori intervennero' (Some teachers intervened)); (b) carry the value of a Saxon genitive [e.g. 'i libri dei professori' (the teachers' books); (c) be a genitive, as in 'Parla dei professori' (He's speaking about the teachers)]. The part of speech to which 'dei' belongs cannot be identified at a glance: 'dei' could be a partitive article in a NOUN phrase or a preposition in a PREPOSITIONAL phrase. This key difference raises a problem in the area of Word Sense Disambiguation. Despite its relevance for NLP, this case of homonymy has so far been disregarded in the literature. The paper distinguishes the functions of function morphemes such as 'dei' and proposes an algorithm that can automatically discriminate between the two uses mentioned above, but also identify others that make the picture more complex.

Ismert, hogy a kölcsönelemek meghonosodásában az átvevő nyelv morfológiai struktúrája meghatározó szerepet játszik abban az értelemben, hogy megszabja az átvételek meghonosodási módjait a paradigmatikus rendszer különböző szintjein, és értelmezési keretként szolgál a grammatikalizáció folyamatában (Heine-Kuteva 2005: 79-120, Field 2002: 25-48, Thomason 2001, Johanson 2008). Az erdélyi magyar nyelvjárások román hatásának és a román nyelvváltozatok magyar eredetű kontaktus jelenségeinek vizsgálatakor figyeltünk fel arra, hogy a népetimológia és a belehallás jelensége nemcsak a fogalomjelölő szavaknál, azaz lexikai jelenségeknél mutatható ki, hanem a kötött morfémák szintjén is. Ez a folyamat megerősíti azt a felismerést, hogy a nyelvi kontaktusokban az átvevő nyelv morfológiai viszonyai meghatározzák a kölcsönelemek integrálódásának irányát (a román-magyar kontaktus szempontjából l. Benő 2004: 51-58; 2008: 91-103). A jelenségkörnek számos pszicholingvisztikai vonatkozása van, és a kétnyelvű beszédmód rendszerjellegű interferenciáinak szabályszerűségeire is utal. 2. Népetimológia és belehallás A népetimológiáról (szóértelmesítésről) főleg a lexikai átvételek meghonosodásával járó hangalaki adaptáció keretében szoktak beszélni.

Ninety French-speaking children aged 2 to 4 years were presented with short utterances
containing homophonous or nonce words whose object or action meaning
was identifiable on the sole basis of the preceding grammatical morpheme.
Items in noun and verb contexts were presented to the same children in order
to assess their ability to provide appropriate contrastive interpretations. Results
show that, at all ages, items were correctly identified beyond chance, with 4-yearolds
outperforming the 2- and 3-year-olds. Individually, however, only part of
the children, even in the older group, performed beyond chance level, suggesting
substantial interindividual variability and difficulties, still present at these ages, to
tackle situations offering minimal information. A case study of the developmental
relation between production and comprehension is also presented.

This article proposes a two-component model of the Russian Aspect, an alternative one to the traditional (word)classifying model. The first component of the model is a morphological mechanism of the imperfectivizing suffixation of prefixed verbs that is inflectional (ras-kry-t’PFV – ras-kry-va-t’IPFV ‘disclose, reveal’), but has a narrowed scope of action. The second component of the model is the actionality (lexical aspect) with a maximal scope, equal to the whole verb class. Actionality (in interaction with significant elements of the external context) enables the functioning and perfective/imperfective characterization of mono- and biaspectives, which remain outside of the inflectional grammatical Aspect. In addition, some generalizations and predictions arising from the two-component model are formulated, and their verification based on literature data is proposed.
Keywords: Russian, Aspect, grammatical category, theoretic model, inflection, actionality, monoaspective, biaspective, prefixal perfective, secondary imperfective

Résumé : L’allemand du Moyen Âge a connu un large emploi du préfixe ge-, dans la préfixation des noms, des adjectifs, des verbes, et les formes ainsi composées coexistaient la plupart du temps avec la forme simple. Si la valeur du composé est repérable pour le nom, il n’en est pas de même pour le verbe. Quelle était la fonction de ce ge- préfixe verbal ? Est-il possible de relier ce ge- non nominal à son double nominal, et de chercher si la valeur de totalité unifiante repérée dans le nom s’applique au verbe ?
Abstract: During the Middle Ages, the prefix ge-  was widely used in German, appearing in nouns, adjectives and verbs. These composed forms usually existed alongside their simple, unprefixed counterparts. Yet although the various compositional values are not difficult to determine for nouns, the same is not true of verbs. What was the function of ge- when used as a verbal prefix? Is it possible to link this non-nominal ge- to its nominal double, and to examine if the “unifying-and-totalizing” value of ge- (in nouns) also applies to verbs?

In a language some lexical units may lose their meanings or functions and change their structure in time. Thus they become grammatical units and they gain new meanings and functions to be suffixes. This situation is called “grammaticalization”. Personal pronouns, particles, auxiliary verbs, the verb i- (< er-) and some nouns can be shown as examples for grammaticalization in Turkish.
An outstanding example in “Dialect Dictionary of Turkish in Turkey” is the word “name”. In some occasions the word “name” can also be grammaticalized like {-mAç}, {+lAç}, {+GAç} suffixes. And also in some words that end with /lAmA/ this usage can be seen. Occasionally the word “nağme” generates some examples of this usage.
In this proceeding firstly based on the usages of the words “name” and “nağme” in “Dialect Dictionary of Turkish in Turkey”, the grammaticalization process of these words is presented. So the questions about in which circumstances and how they evolve to be grammaticalized are answered. Afterwards the proceeding discusses the questions why the usages haven’t been prevailed and why they can’t be formed with the suffixes {+lA-} and {-mA}. According to this study the first question can be explained with indexes of frequency and the second one can be explained with grammaticalization process.
**
Bir dildeki bazı leksik birimler zaman içinde anlamını veya işlevini kaybederek mevcut yapılarını değiştirirler ve böylece gramer birimleri haline gelip, yeni anlam veya işlevler kazanarak ekleşirler. Bu duruma gramatikalleşme, dilbilgiselleşme gibi adlar verilir. Bir terim olarak, kaynaklarda çeşitli şekillerde tanımlanan gramatikalleşmenin Türkçedeki tipik örnekleri arasında şahıs zamirleri, edatlar, yardımcı fiiller, i- (< er-) fiili ve diğer kimi isimler gösterilebilir.
Türkiye Türkçesi Ağızları Sözlüğü’nde göze çarpan bir örnek ise “name” kelimesidir. Name kelimesi de aynen {-mAç}, {+lAç}, {+GAç} yapım eklerinde olduğu gibi, kimi örneklerde gramatikalleşebilmektedir. Sonu /lAmA/ ses grubuyla biten bazı kelimelerde rastlanılan bu duruma, zaman zaman nağme kelimesinin kullanımları da örnek olabilmektedir.
Bu çalışmada öncelikle name ve nağme kelimelerinin Türkiye Türkçesi Ağızları Sözlüğü’ndeki kullanımları ele alınarak, söz konusu kelimelerin hangi durumlarda ve hangi yollardan geçerek gramatikalleştiği ortaya konacak; sonra da ilgili kullanımların neden yaygınlaşmadığının ve neden {+lA-} ve {-mA} eklerinden oluşamayacağının cevapları verilmeye çalışılacaktır. Bize göre ilk sorunun cevabı sıklık dizinleriyle, ikinci sorunun cevabı ise gramatikalleşme olayıyla açıklanabilir.

This paper examines whether the morpheme of plurality has shifted from word-final to word-initial syllable in Eastern Andalusian Spanish. This would be explained by word-medial vowel lowering caused by vowel harmony, which extends leftwards from the vowel preceding deleted /-s/ up to the stressed vowel. Two experiments are performed: (1) Eastern Andalusian speakers have to decide if each item is singular or plural by listening to the first syllable of paroxytone disyllabic words; (2) Paroxytone disyllabic words are manipulated and the first syllable is taken from a singular word and the second syllable from its plural, and vice versa; the participants have to categorise each item as singular or plural. An analysis of 4503 answers shows that these speakers can identify singular /ˈCV.CV/ words by listening to the first syllable only when the first syllable contains /e/ or /o/ and plural only when the first syllable contains /o/; they can identify singular /ˈCVC.CV/ words when the first syllable contains /o/, /i/ or /u/ and plurals when they contain /e/ or /o/. The morpheme of plurality has not shifted completely to word-initial syllable but it is hypothesised that there is a shift currently underway and that this is more advanced for /e/ and /o/.

My extraordinary discovery is the Bömic System. The Böms (monophonemic morphemes) are sub-morphemic particles (monophonemes). The word Böm (“indivisible”) which is derived from the Turkish word böl- (“to divide”) and -m (“cannot”). The Böms of some languages: 1. Turkic 2. Eskimo 3. Uralic 4. Sumerian 5. Korean 6. Etruscan 7. Hattic 8. Hurro-Urartian 9. Elamite 10. Dravidian 11. South Caucasian/Kartvelian 12. Northwest Caucasian/Circassian 13. Northeast Caucasian/Nakh-Daghestan 14. Indo-European 15. Basque 16. Semitic 17. Yukaghir 18. Ainu 19. Sino-Tibetan 20. Austronesian 21. Athabaskan 22. Algonquian 23. Siouan 24. Mayan 25. Quechuan 26. Shipibo-Konibo 27. Arawakan 28. Tupi-Guarani 29. Maasai 30. Platoid Mada 31. Khoekhoe Böms

En el artículo se defiende la noción de morfema como signo con significante no-fónico. Lo que permite revalorizar la Morfología a la par de la Sintaxis en el conjunto de la Gramática: también la Morfología estudia signos en el plano sintagmático, que son señales de las relaciones sintácticas entre constituyentes.