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Basic Morphology
What is Morphology? Mark Aronoff and Kirsten Fudeman MORPHOLOGY AND MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS 1 1 Thinking about Morphology and Morphological Analysis 1.1 What is Morphology? 1 1.2 Morphemes 2 1.3 Morphology in Action 4 1.3.1 Novel words and word play 4 1.3.2 Abstract morphological facts 6 1.4 Background and Beliefs 9 1.5 Introduction to Morphological Analysis 12 1.5.1 Two basic approaches: analysis and synthesis 12 1.5.2 Analytic principles 14 1.5.3 Sample problems with solutions 17 1.6 Summary 21 Introduction to Kujamaat Jóola 22 mor·phol·o·gy: a study of the structure or form of something Merriam-Webster Unabridged n 1.1 What is Morphology? The term morphology is generally attributed to the German poet, novelist, playwright, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who coined it early in the nineteenth century in a biological context. Its etymology is Greek: morph- means ‘shape, form’, and morphology is the study of form or forms. In biology morphology refers to the study of the form and structure of organisms, and in geology it refers to the study of the configuration and evolution of land forms. In linguistics morphology refers to the mental system involved in word formation or to the branch 2 MORPHOLOGYMORPHOLOGY ANDAND MORPHOLOGICAL MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS ANALYSIS of linguistics that deals with words, their internal structure, and how they are formed. n 1.2 Morphemes A major way in which morphologists investigate words, their internal structure, and how they are formed is through the identification and study of morphemes, often defined as the smallest linguistic pieces with a gram- matical function. -
Chapter 1 Negation in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective
Chapter 1 Negation in a cross-linguistic perspective 0. Chapter summary This chapter introduces the empirical scope of our study on the expression and interpretation of negation in natural language. We start with some background notions on negation in logic and language, and continue with a discussion of more linguistic issues concerning negation at the syntax-semantics interface. We zoom in on cross- linguistic variation, both in a synchronic perspective (typology) and in a diachronic perspective (language change). Besides expressions of propositional negation, this book analyzes the form and interpretation of indefinites in the scope of negation. This raises the issue of negative polarity and its relation to negative concord. We present the main facts, criteria, and proposals developed in the literature on this topic. The chapter closes with an overview of the book. We use Optimality Theory to account for the syntax and semantics of negation in a cross-linguistic perspective. This theoretical framework is introduced in Chapter 2. 1 Negation in logic and language The main aim of this book is to provide an account of the patterns of negation we find in natural language. The expression and interpretation of negation in natural language has long fascinated philosophers, logicians, and linguists. Horn’s (1989) Natural history of negation opens with the following statement: “All human systems of communication contain a representation of negation. No animal communication system includes negative utterances, and consequently, none possesses a means for assigning truth value, for lying, for irony, or for coping with false or contradictory statements.” A bit further on the first page, Horn states: “Despite the simplicity of the one-place connective of propositional logic ( ¬p is true if and only if p is not true) and of the laws of inference in which it participate (e.g. -
1 Aspect Marking and Modality in Child Vietnamese
1 Aspect Marking and Modality in Child Vietnamese Jennie Tran and Kamil Deen University of Hawai‛i at Mānoa This paper examines the acquisition of aspect morphology in the naturalistic speech of a Vietnamese child, aged 1;9. It shows that while the omission of aspect markers is the predominant error, errors of commission are somewhat more frequent than expected (~20%). Errors of commission are thought to be exceedingly rare in child speech (<4%, Sano & Hyams, 1994), and thus it appears as if these errors in child Vietnamese are more common than in other languages. They occur exclusively with perfective markers in modal contexts, i.e., perfective markers occur with non-perfective, but modal interpretation. We propose, following Hyams (2002), that these errors are permitted by the child’s grammar since perfective features license mood. Additional evidence from the corpus shows that all the perfective-marked verbs in modal context are eventive verbs. We thus further propose that the corollary to RIs in Vietnamese is perfective verbs in modal contexts. 1. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND There has been considerable debate regarding the acquisition of tense and aspect by young children. Studies on the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology have either attempted to make a general distinction between tense and aspect, or the more specific distinction between grammatical and lexical aspect, or they have centered their analyses around Vendler’s (1967) four-way classification of the inherent semantics of verbs: achievement, accomplishment, activity, and state. The majority of the studies have concluded that the use of tense and aspect inflectional morphology is initially restricted to certain semantic classes of verbs (Bronkard and Sinclair 1973, Antinucci and Miller 1976, Bloom et al. -
Corpus Study of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Diglossic Speech in Cairene Arabic
CORPUS STUDY OF TENSE, ASPECT, AND MODALITY IN DIGLOSSIC SPEECH IN CAIRENE ARABIC BY OLA AHMED MOSHREF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2012 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Elabbas Benmamoun, Chair Professor Eyamba Bokamba Professor Rakesh M. Bhatt Assistant Professor Marina Terkourafi ABSTRACT Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and sports interviews on four Egyptian satellite TV channels. The computational analysis of the data shows that systematic and content morphemes from both varieties of Arabic combine in principled ways. Syntactic considerations play a critical role with regard to the frequency and direction of code-switching between the negative marker, subject, or complement on one hand and the verb on the other. Morph-syntactic constraints regulate different types of discourse but more formal topics may exhibit more mixing between Colloquial aspect or future markers and Standard verbs. ii To the One Arab Dream that will come true inshaa’ Allah! عربية أنا.. أميت دمها خري الدماء.. كما يقول أيب الشاعر العراقي: بدر شاكر السياب Arab I am.. My nation’s blood is the finest.. As my father says Iraqi Poet: Badr Shaker Elsayyab iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’m sincerely thankful to my advisor Prof. Elabbas Benmamoun, who during the six years of my study at UIUC was always kind, caring and supportive on the personal and academic levels. -
Markedness in Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition
Aug. 2006, Volume 3, No.8 (Serial No.21) US-China Education Review, ISSN1548-6613, USA Markedness in Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition JIANG Zhao-zi, SHAO Chang-zhong (Linyi Normal University, Linyi, Shandong 276005, P. R. China) Abstract: This paper focuses on the study of markedness theory in Universal Grammar (UG) and its implications in Second Language Acquisition (SLA), showing that the language learners should consciously compare and contrast the similarities and differences between his native language and target language, which will facilitate their learning. Key words: markedness; Universal Grammar; language learning 1. Introduction The term of “markedness” was first proposed by N.S.Trubetzkoy, a leading linguist in Prague School, in his book The Principles of Phonology. At first it was confined to phonetics: in a pair of opposite phonemes, one is characterized as marked, while the other one lacks such markedness. Now it has been widely applied to the researches on phonetics, grammars, semantics, pragmatics, psychological linguistics and applied injustices. The term markedness can be divided into three classes: formal markedness, distribution markedness and semantic markedness (WANG Ke-fei, 1991). 2. Theoretical Researches on Markedness The term “marked” has been defined in different ways. The most underlying one among the definitions is the notion that some linguistic features are “special” in relation to others, which are more “basic”. More technical definitions of “marked” can be found in different linguistics traditions. 2.1 Language-typology-based definition The identification of typological universals has been used to make claims about which features are marked and which one is unmarked. -
Vs. Object Marker /Ta
ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 3, No. 7, pp. 1081-1092, July 2013 © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/tpls.3.7.1081-1092 On the Usage of Sinhalese Differential Object Markers Object Marker /wa/ vs. Object Marker /ta/ Kanduboda A, B. Prabath Ritsumeikan University, Ritsumeikan International, Global Gateway Program, Japan Abstract—Previous studies (Aisen, 2003; Kanduboda, 2011) on Sinhalese language have suggested that direct objects (i.e., accusative marked nouns) in active sentences can be marked by two distinctive case markers. In some sentences, accusative nouns can be denoted by the accusative case marker /wa/. In other sentences, the same nouns can again be denoted by the dative case marker /ta/. However, the verbs required by these accusatives were not investigated in the previous studies. Thus, the present study further conducted an investigation to observe whether these two types of case markings can occur with the same verbs. A free productivity task was conducted with 100 Sinhalese native speakers living in Sri Lanka. A comparison study was carried out using sentences with the verbs accompanying /wa/ accusatives and /ta/ accusatives. The results showed that, verbs accompanied by /wa/ case marker and verbs accompanied by /ta/ case marker are incongruent. Thus, this study concluded that Sinhalese active sentences consisting of transitive verbs are broadly divided into two patterns; those which take only /wa/ accusatives and those which take only /ta/ accusatives. Index Terms—Sinhalese language, active sentences, transitive verbs, /wa/ accusatives, /ta/ accusatives I. INTRODUCTION Sinhalese (also referred to as Sinhala, Singhala and Singhalese, (Englebretson & Carol, 2005)) is one of the major languages spoken in Sri Lanka. -
Number Systems in Grammar Position Paper
1 Language and Culture Research Centre: 2018 Workshop Number systems in grammar - position paper Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald I Introduction I 2 The meanings of nominal number 2 3 Special number distinctions in personal pronouns 8 4 Number on verbs 9 5 The realisation of number 12 5.1 The forms 12 5.2 The loci: where number is shown 12 5.3 Optional and obligatory number marking 14 5.4 The limits of number 15 5.4.1 Number and the meanings of nouns 15 5.4.2 'Minor' numbers 16 5.4.3 The limits of number: nouns with defective number values 16 6 Number and noun categorisation 17 7 Markedness 18 8 Split, or mixed, number systems 19 9 Number and social deixis 19 10 Expressing number through other means 20 11 Number systems in language history 20 12 Summary 21 Further readings 22 Abbreviations 23 References 23 1 Introduction Every language has some means of distinguishing reference to one individual from reference to more than one. Number reference can be coded through lexical modifiers (including quantifiers of various sorts or number words etc.), or through a grammatical system. Number is a referential property of an argument of the predicate. A grammatical system of number can be shown either • Overtly, on a noun, a pronoun, a verb, etc., directly referring to how many people or things are involved; or • Covertly, through agreement or other means. Number may be marked: • within an NP • on the head of an NP • by agreement process on a modifier (adjective, article, demonstrative, etc.) • through agreement on verbs, or special suppletive or semi-suppletive verb forms which may code the number of one or more verbal arguments, or additional marker on the verb. -
Plural Addressee Marker and Grammaticalization in Barayin
View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by SOAS Research Online Published as: Lovestrand, Joseph. 2018. Plural addressee marker and Pre-publication version grammaticalization in Barayin. Journal of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics 10(1) https://doi.org/10.1163/18776930-01001004 Accepted version downloaded from SOAS Research Online: http:// eprints.soas.ac.uk/32651 Plural addressee marker and grammaticalization in Barayin Joseph Lovestrand, University of Oxford Abstract This article describes two distinct but related grammaticalization paths in Barayin, an East Chadic lan- guage. One path is from a first-person plural pronoun to a first-person dual pronoun. Synchronically, the pronominal forms in Barayin with first-person dual number must now be combined with a plural addressee enclitic, nà, to create a first-person plural pronoun. This path is identical to what has been documented in Philippine-type languages. The other path is from a first-person dative suffix to a suffix dedicated to first-person hortative. This path of grammaticalization has not been discussed in the literature. It occurred in several related languages, and each in case results in a hortative form with a dual subject. Hortative forms with a plural subject are created by adding a plural addressee marker to the dual form. The plural addressee marker in Chadic languages is derived from a second-person pronominal. Keywords Chadic, Barayin, hortative, dual, pronouns, diachronic1 1 Introduction This paper describes two distinct but related grammaticalization paths in Barayin [bva] and other lan- guages of the Guera subbranch of East Chadic languages (East Chadic B). -
Markedness in Distributed Morphology
Markedness in Distributed Morphology Philipp Weisser [email protected] 08.03.2018 1 Introduction The concept of morphological markedness goes back at least to the works of Jakob- son and Trubetskoy in the 1930s and since then the term markedness has developed a wide range of possible senses.1 This is arguably due to the fact that the concept itself has proven helpful in a lot of different areas of linguistic research and has thus been adopted by different groups of researchers with different research foci. Unsurprisingly, a term with such a great number of possible interpretations can lead to confusion in a research community which strives for concreteness and sci- entific accuracy. This lead to a number of different attempts to define the concept of markedness in a scientific fashion or classify the different meanings of the term (see e.g. Moravcsik and Wirth 1986; Dixon 1994; Battistella 1990; Haspelmath 2006). In what follows, I will add one more paper to this list which has a much narrower focus than the ones above as it only addresses the notions of the term marked- ness relevant in the context of the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993, 1994; Halle 1997). The literature on Distributed Morphology is not an exception in that the term markedness is also used for a number of related but still fundamentally different concepts. One of the goals of this paper is thus to try to shed some light on the different uses of the term markedness, how they relate and what the general expec- tations of the theory are as to whether different notions of markedness are supposed to pattern together or not. -
Person Marking: Anna Siewierska
Person Marking: Anna Siewierska 1. Introduction Traditionally, the grammatical category of person embraces the discourse role of speaker, referred to as the first person, the discourse role of hearer, referred to as the second person and the other, i.e. the non-speaker and non-hearer, referred to as the third person. The vast majority of the languages of the world have a closed set of expressions for the identification of these three discourse roles. The expressions in question, which are commonly called personal pronouns, will be referred to here as person markers or person forms. The person markers found in languages differ widely in regard to their morpho- phonological realization, syntactic function, discourse function, internal semantic structure and referential potential. With respect to morpho-phonological realization, they may appear as independent words, so called weak forms, clitics, affixes or even only covertly as zero forms. As far as syntactic function is concerned, they may be available for all argument and adjunct functions, for just some subtype of argument functions or even only as single word responses to questions. In terms of discourse function, they may be unrestricted or restricted to say topics or alternatively only to constituents bearing special discourse prominence or emphasis. As for internal semantic structure, they may encode person alone or, more commonly person and number or both of these as well as some subset of the grammatical categories of case, inclusivity, gender and honorificity and less often tense, aspect, mood and polarity. Finally, with regard to referential potential, some person forms are rather unrestricted and can be used even non- specifically, generically and be construed as bound variables, others are necessarily human and/or definite, while yet others have only limited or even no referential potential at all. -
"Structural Markedness in Formal Features: Deriving Interpretability"
Article "Structural Markedness in Formal Features: Deriving Interpretability" Susana Bejar Revue québécoise de linguistique, vol. 28, n° 1, 2000, p. 47-72. Pour citer cet article, utiliser l'information suivante : URI: http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/603186ar DOI: 10.7202/603186ar Note : les règles d'écriture des références bibliographiques peuvent varier selon les différents domaines du savoir. Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter à l'URI https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l'Université de Montréal, l'Université Laval et l'Université du Québec à Montréal. Il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. Érudit offre des services d'édition numérique de documents scientifiques depuis 1998. Pour communiquer avec les responsables d'Érudit : [email protected] Document téléchargé le 12 février 2017 04:27 Revue québécoise de linguistique, vol. 28, n° 1,2000, © RQL (UQAM), Montréal Reproduction interdite sans autorisation de Féditeur STRUCTURAL MARKEDNESS IN FORMAL FEATURES: DERIVING INTERPRETABILITY* Susana Bejar University of Toronto 1. Introduction n this paper I propose a new approach to the morphology-syntax interface, Iwhich incorporates into minimalist checking theory (Chomsky 1995,1998) the hierarchical representations of morphological features developed in Harley 1994, Ritter 1997 and Harley and Ritter 1998. Looking at data from Georgian and Standard Arabic (SA), I account for problematic agreement facts by analyzing them as markedness effects in the morphology-syntax interface, where markedness is taken to correlate directly with the presence or absence of structure in the geometric representation of a formal feature (FF). -
Morphosyntactic Alignment, Pattern Replication, and the Classical Armenian Periphrastic Perfect
1 Morphosyntactic Alignment, Pattern Replication, * 2 and the Classical Armenian Periphrastic Perfect 3 ROBIN MEYER 4 University of Oxford 5 1. Introduction 6 The Classical Armenian periphrastic perfect and its unusual construction have 7 posed difficulties for historical linguists since their first detailed discussion in the 8 1903 edition of Meillet’s Esquisse d’une grammaire comparée de l’arménien 9 classique (see the revised edition, Meillet 1936). While the communis opinio still 10 favors an explanation proffered by Benveniste (1952), which likens the Armenian 11 pattern to the Old Persian taya manā kr̥ tam construction, this model cannot ac- 12 count for several problems in the Armenian data; a new model, informed by the 13 shortcomings of its predecessors and taking into account typological and compar- 14 ative data, is therefore necessary. 15 In this paper it will be argued that the most consistent analysis of the Arme- 16 nian perfect construction must interpret it as a synchronically tripartite alignment 17 pattern, resulting from extensive language contact with the Middle Iranian lan- 18 guages; typological irregularities and synchronically deviant patterns are manifes- 19 tations of alignment change under pressure from the non-perfect tenses. 20 After a brief exposition of the Armenian data and the issues associated with it 21 (§2), previous attempts at an explanation of the phenomenon will be summarized 22 and their weaknesses discussed (§3). The Armenian situation will then be com- 23 pared to that in Middle Iranian, especially Parthian, and their differences and 24 commonalities will be set out (§4). FinallY, a new model will detail why a tripar- 25 tite analysis of the periphrastic perfect is synchronically and typologically appro- 26 priate (§5), how far Iranian influence is the likely origin of this pattern, and what 27 other expressions of such influence can be found in Classical Armenian (§6).