DOCSLIB.ORG

Rule Based Morphological Analyzer of Kazakh Language

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Rule Based Morphological Analyzer of Kazakh Language Rule Based Morphological Analyzer of Kazakh Language Gulshat Kessikbayeva Ilyas Cicekli Hacettepe University, Department of Hacettepe University, Department of Computer Engineering, Computer Engineering, Ankara,Turkey Ankara,Turkey [email protected] [email protected] Abstract Zaurbekov, 2013) and it only gives specific Having a morphological analyzer is a very alternation rules without generalized forms of critical issue especially for NLP related alternations. Here we present all generalized tasks on agglutinative languages. This paper forms of all alternation rules. Moreover, many presents a detailed computational analysis studies and researches have been done upon on of Kazakh language which is an morphological analysis of Turkic languages agglutinative language. With a detailed (Altintas and Cicekli, 2001; Oflazer, 1994; analysis of Kazakh language morphology, the formalization of rules over all Coltekin, 2010; Tantug et al., 2006; Orhun et al, morphotactics of Kazakh language is 2009). However there is no complete work worked out and a rule-based morphological which provides a detailed computational analyzer is developed for Kazakh language. analysis of Kazakh language morphology and The morphological analyzer is constructed this paper tries to do that. using two-level morphology approach with The organization of the rest of the paper is Xerox finite state tools and some as follows. Next section gives a brief implementation details of rule-based comparison of Kazakh language and Turkish morphological analyzer have been presented morphologies. Section 3 presents Kazakh vowel in this paper. and consonant harmony rules. Then, nouns with their inflections are presented in Section 4. 1 Introduction Section 4 also presents morphotactic rules for nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and Kazakh language is a Turkic language which numerals. The detailed morphological structure belongs to Kipchak branch of Ural-Altaic of verbs is introduced in Section 5. Results of language family and it is spoken approximately the performed tests are presented together with by 8 million people. It is the official language their analysis in Section 6. At last, conclusion of Kazakhstan and it has also speakers in and future work are described in Section 7. Russia, China, Mongolia, Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and Germany. It is closely related 2 Comparison of Closely Related to other Turkic languages and there exists Languages mutual intelligibility among them. Words in Kazakh language can be generated from root There are many studies and researches prior words recursively by adding proper suffixes. made on closely related languages by Thus, Kazakh language has agglutinative form comparing them for many purposes related with and has vowel harmony property except for NLP such as Turkish–Crimean Tatar (Altintas loan-words from other languages such as and Cicekli, 2001), Turkish–Azerbaijani Russian, Persian and Arabic. (Hamzaoğlu, 1993), Turkish–Turkmen (Tantuğ Having a morphological analyzer for an et al., 2007), Turkish-Uygur (Orhun et al, 2009) agglutinative language is a starting point for and Tatar-Kazakh (Salimzyanov et al, 2013). A Natural Language Processing (NLP) related deep comparison of Kazakh and Turkish researches. An analysis of inflectional affixes of languages from computational view is another Kazakh language is studied within the work of study which is in out of scope for this work. a Kazakh segmentation system (Altenbek and However, in this study, a brief grammatical Wang, 2010). A finite state approach for comparison of these languages is given in order Kazakh nominals is presented (Kairakbay and to give a better analysis of Kazakh language. 46 Proceedings of the 2014 Joint Meeting of SIGMORPHON and SIGFSM, pages 46–54, Baltimore, Maryland USA, June 27 2014. c 2014 Association for Computational Linguistics Kazakh and Turkish languages have many In Kazakh language there are 8 types of common parts due to being in same language personal possessive agreement morphemes as family. Possible differences are mostly given in Table 2. Kazakh language has two morpheme based rather than deep grammar additional possessive agreements for second differences. Distinct morphemes can be added person. in order to get same meaning. There exist some There are some identical tenses and moods differences in their alphabets, their vowel and of verbs in both language such as definite past consonant harmony rules, their possessive tense, present tense, imperative mood, optative forms of nouns, and inflections of verbs as mood and conditional mood. They have nearly given in Table 1. There are extra 9 letters in same morphemes for tenses. On the other hand Kazakh alphabet, and Kazakh alphabet also has there are some tenses of verbs which are 4 additional letters for Russian loan words. identical according to meaning and usage, but Both Kazakh language and Turkish employ different morphemes are used. Moreover, in vowel harmony rules when morphemes are Kazakh language there are some tenses such as added. Vowel harmony is defined according to goal oriented future and present tenses which last morpheme containing back or front vowel. do not exist in Turkish language. In Kazakh language, if the last morpheme contains a back vowel then the vowel of next Possessive Examples for Representation coming suffix is a or ı. If the last morpheme Pronoun Eke, “father” None contains one of front vowels then the vowel of Pnon Eke father next coming suffix is e or i. In Turkish, suffixes Possessive my with vowels a, ı, u follow morphemes with My P1Sg 1 Eke-m vowels a, o, u, ı and suffixes with vowels e, i, ü father your follow morphemes with vowels e, i, ü, ö Your P2Sg 2 Eke-N father depending on being rounded and unrounded Your Eke- your P2PSg 2 vowels. Consonant harmony rule related with (Polite) Niz father voiceless letters is similar in both languages. his His/Her P3Sg 3 Eke-si father Turkish Kazakh Eke- our Our P1Pl 1 Language miz father Alphabet Latin Cyril Eke- your Your Plural P2Pl 2 29 letters 42 letters leriN father ( 8 Vowels, ( 10 Vowels, Your Plural Eke- your P2PPl 2 21 Consonant ) 25 Consonants, (Polite) leriNiz father 3 Compound Eke- their Their P3Pl 3 Letters, leri father 4 Russian Loan Word Table 2. Possessive Agreement of Nouns. Letters ) Vowel & Synharmonism Synharmonism Consonant according to according to 3 Vowel and Consonant Harmony Harmony back, front, back and front unrounded and vowels rounded Kazakh is officially written in the Cyrillic vowels alphabet. In its history, it was represented by Possessive 6 types of 8 types of Arabic, Latin and Cyrillic letters. Nowadays Forms of possessive possessive switching back to Latin alphabets in 20 years is Nouns agreements agreements planned by the Kazakh government. In the Case 7 Case Forms 7 Case Forms beginning stage of study, Latin transcription of Forms of Cyril version is used for convenience. Nouns Two main issues of language such as Verbs Similar Tenses Similar Tenses morphotactics and alternations can be dealt with Xerox tools. First of all, morphotactic Table 1. Comparison of Kazakh and Turkish. rules are represented by encoding a finite-state network. Then, a finite-state transducer for alternations is constructed. Then, the formed network and the transducer are composed into a 47 single final network which cover all invisible by user. These representations are morphological aspects of the language such as used for substitution such as A is for a and e morphemes, derivations, inflections, and J is for I and i. So if suffix dA should be alternations and geminations (Beesley and added according to morphotactic rules, it means Karttunen, 2003). suffixes da or de should be considered. In Table Vowel harmony of Kazakh language obeys 3, there are group of letters defined according to a rule such that vowels in each syllable should their sounds and these groups are used in match according to being front or back vowel. alternation rules (Valyaeva, 2007). It is called synharmonism and it is basic Consonant harmony rules are varied linguistic structure of nearly all Turkic according to the last letter of a word with in languages (Demirci, 2006). For example, a morphotactic rules. As in Table 3, different word qa-la-lar-dIN, “of cities” has a stem qa- patterns are presented in order to visualize the la, “city” and two syllables of containing back relation between common valid rules and to vowels according to the vowel harmony rule. generalize morphotactic rules. Thus, in each Here –lar is an affix of Plural form and –dIN is case according to morphotactic rules there are an affix of Genitive case. However, as stated proper alternation rules for morphemes. before, there are a lot of loan words from Persian and generally they do not obey vowel GROUP 1 harmony rules. For example, a word mu-Ga- Ablative Case Locative case Dative Case lim, “teacher” has first two syllables have back dAn dA TA vowels and the last one has a front vowel. So tAn tA TA suffixes to be added are defined according to nAn 3 ndA 3 nA 3 the last syllable. For example, a word muGalim- A 1/2 der-diN, “of teachers” has suffixes with front vowels. On the other hand, there are GROUP 2 Genitive Case Accusative Case Poss. Affix-2 morphemes with static front vowels which are diki independently from the type of last syllable can dJN dJ tJ tiki be added to all words such as Instrumental tJN suffix –men. In this case, all suffixes added nJN 3 nJ niki after that should contain front vowels. n 3 GROUP 3 Name XFST Type 1 Type 2 Plural Form of Negative Form A1Pl Sonorous Noun SCons l r y w m n N Consonant dAr l bA bJz Voiced tAr pA pJz VCons z Z b v g d Consonant lAr r y w mA mJz Voiceless VLCons p f q k t s S C x c GROUP 4 Consonant Instrumental A1Sg b p t c x d r z Z s S Case ben bJn Consonant Cons C G f q k g N l m n h w y v pen pJn Vowel Vowel a e E i I O o u U j men 3 mJn Front FVowel e E i O U j Vowel Table 4.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Trilingual of Preschool Education in Kazakhstan
    Available online at http://www.journalijdr.com ISSN: 2230-9926 International Journal of Development Research Vol. 07, Issue, 09, pp.15379-15384, September, 2017 ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE OPEN ACCESS TRILINGUAL OF PRESCHOOL EDUCATION IN KAZAKHSTAN *,1Aigul Medeshova and 2Gulnar Bakytzhanova 1 Department of Computer Science,2 Makhambet Utemisov West Kazakhstan State University, Uralsk, Kazakhstan ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACTNazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan Article History: In the article the problem of trilingual in preschool organization is considered. Trilingual is the Received 24th June, 2017 development of time. The teaching of trilingual is, to date, an urgent need and an opportunity for Received in revised form the young generation to learn about their abilities for free entry into the world educational spaces. 08th July, 2017 The study of trilingual from preschool age becomes a requirement of today. Accepted 29th August, 2017 Published online 30th September, 2017 Keywords: “preschool education in Kazakhstan”, “early childhood education in Kazakhstan”, “trilingual policy in Kazakhstan”, “language policy in Kazakhstan”, “multilingual in Kazakhstan”, “early childhood education and care”. *Corresponding author Copyright ©2017, Aigul Medeshova and Gulnar Bakytzhanova. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Citation: Aigul Medeshova and
    [Show full text]
  • Selected Works of Chokan Valikhanov Selected Works of Chokan Valikhanov
    SELECTED WORKS OF CHOKAN VALIKHANOV CHOKAN OF WORKS SELECTED SELECTED WORKS OF CHOKAN VALIKHANOV Pioneering Ethnographer and Historian of the Great Steppe When Chokan Valikhanov died of tuberculosis in 1865, aged only 29, the Russian academician Nikolai Veselovsky described his short life as ‘a meteor flashing across the field of oriental studies’. Set against his remarkable output of official reports, articles and research into the history, culture and ethnology of Central Asia, and more important, his Kazakh people, it remains an entirely appropriate accolade. Born in 1835 into a wealthy and powerful Kazakh clan, he was one of the first ‘people of the steppe’ to receive a Russian education and military training. Soon after graduating from Siberian Cadet Corps at Omsk, he was taking part in reconnaissance missions deep into regions of Central Asia that had seldom been visited by outsiders. His famous mission to Kashgar in Chinese Turkestan, which began in June 1858 and lasted for more than a year, saw him in disguise as a Tashkent mer- chant, risking his life to gather vital information not just on current events, but also on the ethnic make-up, geography, flora and fauna of this unknown region. Journeys to Kuldzha, to Issyk-Kol and to other remote and unmapped places quickly established his reputation, even though he al- ways remained inorodets – an outsider to the Russian establishment. Nonetheless, he was elected to membership of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society and spent time in St Petersburg, where he was given a private audience by the Tsar. Wherever he went he made his mark, striking up strong and lasting friendships with the likes of the great Russian explorer and geographer Pyotr Petrovich Semyonov-Tian-Shansky and the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
    [Show full text]
  • On the Influence of Turkic Languages on Kalmyk Vocabulary
    Asian Social Science; Vol. 11, No. 6; 2015 ISSN 1911-2017 E-ISSN 1911-2025 Published by Canadian Center of Science and Education On the Influence of Turkic Languages on Kalmyk Vocabulary Valentin Ivanovich Rassadin1 & Svetlana Menkenovna Trofimova1 1 Kalmyk state University, Department of Russian language and General linguistics, Elista, Republic of Kalmykia, Russian Federation Correspondence: Valentin Ivanovich Rassadin, Kalmyk state University, Department of Russian language and General linguistics, Pushkin street, 11, Elista, 358000, Republic of Kalmykia, Russian Federation. E-mail: [email protected] Received: October 30, 2014 Accepted: December 1, 2014 Online Published: February 25, 2015 doi:10.5539/ass.v11n6p192 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/ass.v11n6p192 Abstract The article covers the development and enrichment of vocabulary in the Kalmyk language and its dialects influenced by Turkic languages from ancient times when there were a hypothetical so called Altaic linguistic community in the period of general Mongolian linguistic condition and general Oirat condition. After Kalmyks moved to Volga, they already had an independent Kalmyk language. The research showed how the Kalmyk language was influenced by the ancient Turkic language, the Uigur language and the Kirghiz language, and also by the Kazakh language and the Nogai language (the Qypchaq group). Keywords: Kalmyk language vocabulary, vocabulary development, Altaic linguistic community, general Mongolian vocabulary, ancient Turkic loanwords, general Kalmyk vocabulary, Turkic loanwords in Derbet dialect, Turkic loanwords in Torgut dialect, Turkic loanwords in the Sart-Kalmyk language 1. Introduction As it is known, Turkic and Mongolian languages together with Tungus-Manchurian languages have long been considered kindred and united into one so called group of “Altaic languages”.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ongoing Eclipse of Possessive Suffixes in North Saami
    Te ongoing eclipse of possessive sufxes in North Saami A case study in reduction of morphological complexity Laura A. Janda & Lene Antonsen UiT Te Arctic University of Norway North Saami is replacing the use of possessive sufxes on nouns with a morphologically simpler analytic construction. Our data (>2K examples culled from >.5M words) track this change through three generations, covering parameters of semantics, syntax and geography. Intense contact pressure on this minority language probably promotes morphological simplifcation, yielding an advantage for the innovative construction. Te innovative construction is additionally advantaged because it has a wider syntactic and semantic range and is indispensable, whereas its competitor can always be replaced. Te one environment where the possessive sufx is most strongly retained even in the youngest generation is in the Nominative singular case, and here we fnd evidence that the possessive sufx is being reinterpreted as a Vocative case marker. Keywords: North Saami; possessive sufx; morphological simplifcation; vocative; language contact; minority language 1. Te linguistic landscape of North Saami1 North Saami is a Uralic language spoken by approximately 20,000 people spread across a large area in northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland. North Saami is in a unique situation as the only minority language in Europe under intense pressure from majority languages from two diferent language families, namely Finnish (Uralic) in the east and Norwegian and Swedish (Indo-European 1. Tis research was supported in part by grant 22506 from the Norwegian Research Council. Te authors would also like to thank their employer, UiT Te Arctic University of Norway, for support of their research.
    [Show full text]
  • Language Education Issues in the Kazakh Community of Mongolia
    LANGUAGE EDUCATION ISSUES IN THE KAZAKH COMMUNITY OF MONGOLIA Dr. Mira Namsrai, Dr. Tuya Ukhnaa, Ouyntsetseg Shagdar, Institute of Education, Mongolia Outline of the Presentation • Kazakh community as an ethnic minority • Legal framework • Current situation and main challenges • Bilingual education model • Mongolian language instructions • Teaching and learning materials • Learning Cycle • Innovative methodology • Conclusion Kazakh Community as an Ethnic Minority Main Features of the Kazakh Community Legal Framework: Constitution of Mongolia • “The Mongolian language is the official language of the state.” (8.1); • “Paragraph 1 does not affect the right of the national minorities of other tongues to use their native language in education and communication, and pursuit of cultural, artistic and scientific activities.” (8.2); • “No person may be discriminated on the basis of ethnic origin, language, race, age, sex, social origin or status, property, occupation or post, religion, opinion, or education.” (14.2) Legal Framework: Law on Official Language Use • “The Mongolian language is considered the official language to be used for official purposes all around the country (in both spoken and written modes)” • “The Mongolian language is used as medium of instruction at all levels of educational institutions” • “The Kazakh people as a national minority can use their own language as a medium of instruction in schools, and are to be assisted in learning the Mongolian language” Legal Framework • Law on Culture of Mongolia states: “inheritance,
    [Show full text]
  • LCA LANG 331-332 Elementary Kazakh
    LCA LANG 331-332 Elementary Kazakh Summer Intensive Course Meetings all face-to-face M-F at 8:30 am -1:00 pm, 574 Van Hise Credits: 8 (4 credits for each section) The credit standard for this course is met by an expectation of a total of 180 hours of student engagement with the course learning activities (at least 45 hours per credit) for each section, which include regularly scheduled instructor:student meeting times (8:30 AM-1 PM MTWThF) reading, writing, listening, speaking, problem sets, speaking portfolio, quizzes, role plays, exams, and other student work as described in the syllabus. Instructor: Gulnara Glowacki Office: 1369 Van Hise Hall E-mail: [email protected] Office Hours: 2:00 pm-3:00 pm Monday-Wednesday I. COURSE DESCRIPTION (Сипаттама): This intensive summer Kazakh course is an Elementary level Kazakh language program. Kazakh is a Turkic language and the official language of Kazakhstan. It has about 12 million native speakers, and it is spoken not only by Kazakhs in Kazakhstan, but by many other nationalities living in Kazakhstan and Kazakhs who live in Russia, Mongolia, China and Central Asia. Kazakh is a part of Kipchak (Qypshaq) branch of Turkic languages, which also includes Tatars, Bashkirs, Nogays, and Karakalpaks. In Kazakhstan the Kazakh language is currently written in a version of the Cyrillic alphabet, and this is the script which will be used in this course. The modern Kazakh language has many elements of word formation and grammatical categories which differ from the other Kipchak Turkic languages. This course provides students with a general knowledge of the current spoken and written Kazakh Language.
    [Show full text]
  • Possessive Constructions in Najdi Arabic
    Possessive Constructions in Najdi Arabic Eisa Sneitan Alrasheedi A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Theoretical Linguistics School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics Newcastle University July, 2019 ii Abstract This thesis investigates the syntax of possession and agreement in Najdi Arabic (NA, henceforth) with a particular focus on the possession expressed at the level of the DP (Determiner Phrase). Using the main assumptions of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995, and subsequent work) and adopting Abney’s (1987) DP-hypothesis, this thesis shows that the various agreement patterns within the NA DP can be accounted for with the use of a probe/goal agreement operation (Chomsky 2000, 2001). Chapter two discusses the syntax of ‘synthetic’ possession in NA. Possession in NA, like other Arabic varieties, can be expressed synthetically using a Construct State (CS), e.g. kitaab al- walad (book the-boy) ‘the boy’s book’. Drawing on the (extensive) literature on the CS, I summarise its main characteristics and the different proposals for its derivation. However, the main focus of this chapter is on a lesser-investigated aspect of synthetic possession – that is, possessive suffixes, the so-called pronominal possessors, as in kitaab-ah (book-his) ‘his book’. Building on a previous analysis put forward by Shlonsky (1997), this study argues (contra Fassi Fehri 1993), that possessive suffixes should not be analysed as bound pronouns but rather as an agreement inflectional suffix (à la Shlonsky 1997), where the latter is derived by Agree between the Poss(essive) head and the null pronoun within NP.
    [Show full text]
  • A Free Kazakh Speech Database and a Speech Recognition Baseline
    Proceedings of APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference 2017 12 - 15 December 2017, Malaysia A Free Kazakh Speech Database and a Speech Recognition Baseline Ying Shi∗, Askar Hamdulla†, Zhiyuan Tang∗, Dong Wang∗‡, Thomas Fang Zheng∗ ∗ Center for Speech and Language Technologies, Research Institute of Information Technology, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, China † Key Laboratory of Signal and Information Processing, Xinjiang University ‡ Corresponding Author E-mail: [email protected] Abstract—Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has gained is to construct speech recognition systems for five minor significant improvement for major languages such as English languages in China (Tibetan, Mongolia, Uyghur, Kazakh and and Chinese, partly due to the emergence of deep neural Kirgiz). However, our ambition is beyond that scope: we hope networks (DNN) and large amount of training data. For minority languages, however, the progress is largely behind the main to construct a full set of linguistic and speech resources for stream. A particularly obstacle is that there are almost no large- the 5 languages, and make them open and free for research scale speech databases for minority languages, and the only few purposes. We call this the M2ASR Free Data Program. All the databases are held by some institutes as private properties, far data resources, including the ones published in this paper, are from open and standard, and very few are free. Besides the released through the website of the project1. speech database, phonetic and linguistic resources are also scarce, including phone set, lexicon, and language model. In this paper, we report our progress on Kazakh resource In this paper, we publish a speech database in Kazakh, a construction.
    [Show full text]
  • Labial Harmony in Kazakh: Descriptive and Theoretical Issues
    LABIAL HARMONY IN KAZAKH: DESCRIPTIVE AND THEORETICAL ISSUES By ADAM G. MCCOLLUM A THESIS PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2015 © 2015 Adam G. McCollum To Mara-Diana, who has been patient and exceedingly merciful during this process ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank my beautiful wife and rambunctious son, who make writing all of this worthwhile. Without their love and care, I would surely be wandering lost amidst some herd of yaks somewhere. In addition to their support, I’ve been so fortunate to have a group of inspiring, encouraging, and kind professors a balding young linguist could hope for. Caroline Wiltshire was instrumental in the formation of this idea from the very beginning, and throughout the process of research and writing she has been a diligent reader, wise mentor, and a wellspring of constructive suggestions and ideas. Brent Henderson was patient enough with me to introduce me to formal linguistics, and more than that, to offer counsel whenever the struggles of balancing family life with school were most challenging. Many thanks also go out to Ratree Wayland for helping me to understand something of phonetics, and for suggesting relevant reading along the way. Additionally, I’ve really appreciated and benefited from conversations with Todd Hughes, Bryan Gelles, Liz Bossley, Majid Al-Homidan, Marc Matthews, and Mohammed Al-Meqdad over the last couple of years. Many thanks also go out to the admissions committee and the entire Linguistics Department at UF for being willing to take a mighty risk on an old fogey like me.
    [Show full text]
  • An Investigation of Possession in Moroccan Arabic
    Family Agreement: An Investigation of Possession in Moroccan Arabic Aidan Kaplan Advisor: Jim Wood Submitted to the faculty of the Department of Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts Yale University May 2017 Abstract This essay takes up the phenomenon of apparently redundant possession in Moroccan Arabic.In particular, kinship terms are often marked with possessive pronominal suffixes in constructions which would not require this in other languages, including Modern Standard Arabic. In the following example ‘sister’ is marked with the possessive suffix hā ‘her,’ even though the person in question has no sister. ﻣﺎ ﻋﻨﺪﻫﺎش ُﺧﺘﻬﺎ (1) mā ʿend-hā-sh khut-hā not at-her-neg sister-her ‘She doesn’t have a sister’ This phenomenon shows both intra- and inter-speaker variation. For some speakers, thepos- sessive suffix is obligatory in clausal possession expressing kinship relations, while forother speakers it is optional. Accounting for the presence of the ‘extra’ pronoun in (1) will lead to an account of possessive suffixes as the spell-out of agreement between aPoss◦ head and a higher element that contains phi features, using Reverse Agree (Wurmbrand, 2014, 2017). In regular pronominal possessive constructions, Poss◦ agrees with a silent possessor pro, while in sentences like (1), Poss◦ agrees with the PP at the beginning of the sentence that expresses clausal posses- sion. The obligatoriness of the possessive suffix for some speakers and its optionality forothers is explained by positing that the selectional properties of the D◦ head differ between speakers. In building up an analysis, this essay draws on the proposal for the construct state in Fassi Fehri (1993), the proposal that clitics are really agreement markers in Shlonsky (1997), and the account of clausal possession in Boneh & Sichel (2010).
    [Show full text]
  • Spanish and Nahuatl Convergence: the Case of Pre- and Post-Positions *
    SPANISH AND NAHUATL CONVERGENCE: THE CASE OF PRE- AND POST-POSITIONS * Alma P. Ramírez-Trujillo The University of Western Ontario This paper discusses the possible effects of Spanish on the structure of Nahuatl due to contact. In particular, I focus on adpositions (pre and postpositions). According to the Nahuatl classic grammars Nahuatl is a postpositional language and since Spanish is a prepositional language I predicted that a change from postpositions to prepositions could have taken place in Nahuatl because of its extreme contact with Spanish. The prediction was confirmed with the results. However, I also found evidence that showed that Nahuatl allowed prepositions even before this language started to be in contact with Spanish, even though modern Nahuatl prepositions are more frequent and in most cases the use of postpositions is ungrammatical. This research was carried out in two towns where Nahuatl and Spanish are spoken. In the first town (Cuetzalan), the traditional linguistic method of eliciting particular structures from a small number of informants (n=2) was applied. For the second town (San Isidro Buen Suceso) a production task was designed and then applied to the participants (n=6). I argue that the change from postpositions to prepositions in modern Nahuatl is due to convergence (between Spanish and Nahuatl) and not to transference. That is, Spanish did not introduce prepositions into Nahuatl; rather, it increased the preference for prepositions. This paper contributes evidence in favor to the Functional Convergence Hypothesis (FCH) proposed by Sanchez (2003). 1. Introduction: Socio-historical background of the contact between Spanish and Nahuatl Mexico before the arrival of the Spanish was a place where many indigenous languages were spoken.
    [Show full text]
  • Possessive Predicate Constructions in Indonesian
    Possessive Predicate Constructions in Indonesian David Moeljadi Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters The University of Tokyo 2010 1 2 Preface This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics at the University of Tokyo. This graduation thesis has profited greatly from the help, support, advice and comments of linguistics professors, Austronesian experts, and a number of friends. Most of all, my gratitude is due to my supervisor, Professor Hayasi, for lots of ideas and comments. I feel I should also direct my gratitude towards Professor Tsunoda, for giving me the inspiration to write about ‘possession’. If I did not take his class in summer 2009, I would not have realized that Indonesian has many possessive predicate constructions. Furthermore, my gratitude is due to the members of Austronesian workshop at the University of Tokyo, in particular to Professor Utsumi for priceless comments during my presentation in October last year, Professor Shiohara, who provided insightful comments on Christmas Day last month, Naonori Nagaya for wonderful ideas and support, Kazuhiro Imanishi and Kanae Iwasaki for critical comments and advice. I also wish to thank Professor Hull for advice and comments during the winter holiday, Mark Rosa, Sami Petteri Honkasalo and Chityee Chang for substantive comments on my English. Finally, I wish to thank my Indonesian friends: Yuliana Lukamto, Fuad Indra Alzakia, Reza Aryaditya Setyagraha, Adeline Muliandi, Candraningratri Ekaputri Widodo, Raffles Senjaya and Michael Nathanel Maramis for their cooperation and comments on examples of Indonesian phrases and sentences, and Mariko Kamba for precious comments on this thesis.
    [Show full text]