DOCSLIB.ORG

Morphological Complexity in English Prefixed Words: an Experimental Investigation

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Morphological Complexity in English Prefixed Words: an Experimental Investigation Morphological Complexity in English Prefixed Words: An Experimental Investigation by Alissa Melinger A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of State University of New York at Buffalo In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Linguistics Acknowledgments .....................................................................................................................vi Abstract ...................................................................................................................................viii Chapter 1 ....................................................................................................................................1 INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................1 1.1 The Morpheme..............................................................................................................3 1.2 Definitions....................................................................................................................4 1.3 Morphological Theories..............................................................................................13 1.4 Psychological Models.................................................................................................21 1.5 Goals and Focus .........................................................................................................25 1.5.1 Why prefixes .......................................................................................................26 1.5.2 Free stem words in English..................................................................................27 1.5.3 Bound root words in English................................................................................28 1.5.4 The role of form and meaning..............................................................................29 1.6 Organization...............................................................................................................30 Chapter 2 ..................................................................................................................................32 EXPERIMENTAL BACKGROUND....................................................................................32 2.1 Early Evidence for Morphemes ...................................................................................33 2.2 The Role of Semantic Overlap....................................................................................37 2.3 The Role of Phonological Overlap..............................................................................42 2.4 The Representations of Affixes...................................................................................44 2.5 Evidence for Morpheme Boundaries...........................................................................47 2.6 Morphemes as an Organizing Principle in the Lexicon ...............................................51 Chapter 3 ..................................................................................................................................53 EXPERIMENTAL METHODOLOGY.................................................................................53 3.1 Criteria for Morphological Classifications ..................................................................55 3.1.1 Distinguishing complex words from simple words...............................................55 3.1.2 Distinguishing bound root words from free stem words. ......................................57 3.2 The Segment Shifting Task.........................................................................................60 3.2.1 The locus of the effect .........................................................................................62 3.2.2 Evidence from English suffixes ...........................................................................66 3.3 Experiment 1..............................................................................................................68 3.3.1 Method .................................................................................................................68 3.3.2 Results.................................................................................................................70 3.3.3 Discussion ...........................................................................................................71 3.4 Segment Shifting and Prefixes.....................................................................................72 Chapter 4 ..................................................................................................................................74 BOUND ROOTS AND FREE STEMS .................................................................................74 4.1 Experiment 2: Prefix Shifting ......................................................................................74 4.1.1 Method ................................................................................................................75 4.1.2 Results.................................................................................................................79 4.1.2.1 Performance on the memory task ...............................................................81 4.1.3 Discussion ...........................................................................................................82 4.1.3.1 Why the free stem condition was faster than the simple condition. .................83 4.1.3.2 Phonological mismatch between conditions ..................................................84 4.1.3.3 The bound root condition’s behavior.............................................................86 4.1.3.4 Types of bound root words............................................................................87 4.2 Subanalyses of the Bound Root Words .......................................................................87 4.2.1 Post hoc analysis 1: Phonological alternations .....................................................88 ii 4.3 Semantics of the Prefix...............................................................................................92 4.3.1 Semantic rating study 1........................................................................................92 4.3.1.1 Method ..........................................................................................................93 4.3.1.2 Results...........................................................................................................94 4.3.2 Post Hoc analysis 2: Semantic transparency.........................................................94 4.3.3 Results.................................................................................................................95 Chapter 5 ..................................................................................................................................98 THE ROLE OF FORM .........................................................................................................98 5.1 Experiment 3: Phonological Alternations....................................................................99 5.1.1 Method ...............................................................................................................100 5.1.2 Results...............................................................................................................102 5.1.3 Discussion .........................................................................................................105 5.1.3.1 Investigating other contributing factors .......................................................106 5.1.3.2 Summary ....................................................................................................107 Chapter 6 ................................................................................................................................109 THE ROLE OF MEANING................................................................................................109 6.1 Semantic Rating Study 2 ..........................................................................................109 6.1.1 Method ...............................................................................................................109 6.1.2 Results................................................................................................................111 6.2 Experiment 4............................................................................................................112 6.2.1 Method ..............................................................................................................113 6.2.2 Results...............................................................................................................114 6.2.3 Discussion .........................................................................................................116 6.2.3.1 Free stem words with opaque prefixes.........................................................116 iii 6.3 Experiment 5............................................................................................................118 6.3.1 Method ..............................................................................................................120 6.3.2 Results...............................................................................................................121 6.3.3 Discussion ..........................................................................................................123
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Malayalam Noun and Verb Morphological Analyzer: a Simple Approach
    Malayalam Noun and Verb Morphological Analyzer: A Simple Approach Nimal J Valath1, Narsheedha Beegum2 M.Tech Student1, M.Tech Student2 ABSTRACT Malayalam is a language of the Dravidian family and is one of This paper discusses the methods involved in the the four major languages of this family with a rich literary development of a Simple Malayalam Verb and Noun tradition. It is very close to Tamil, one of the major languages of Morphological Analyzer. Since in Malayalam, words can be the same family. This was due to the extensive cultural derived from a root word, a purely dictionary based approach synthesis that took place between the speakers of the two for Morphological analysis is not practical. Hence, a ‘Rule-cum- languages. The origin of Malayalam as a distinct language may Dictionary’ based approach is followed along with the Suffix be traced to the last quarter of 9th Century A.D. Throughout its Stripping concept. The grammatical behavior of the language, gradual evolution Malayalam has been influenced by the the formation of words with multiple suffixes and the various circumstances prevailed on different periods. preparation of the language are dealt with here, with examples of noun and verb forms in detail. Mainly Malayalam was influenced by Sanskrit and Prakrit brought into Kerala by Brahmins. After the 11th century a unique mixture of the native languages of Kerala and Sanskrit Keywords known as Manipravalam served as the medium of literary Morphological Analyzer, Malayalam, Suffix stripping, expression. Malayalam absorbed a lot from Sanskrit, not only in Transliteration, Retransliteration, Verb and Noun, Sandhi rules, the lexical level, but also in the phonemic, morphemic and Word Formation, Noun Cases, Algorithm.
    [Show full text]
  • Unsupervised Separation of Transliterable and Native Words For
    Unsupervised Separation of Transliterable and Native Words for Malayalam Deepak P Queen’s University Belfast, UK [email protected] Abstract names that need to be transliterated than translated to correlate with English text. On a manual analy- Differentiating intrinsic language words sis of a news article dataset, we found that translit- from transliterable words is a key step erated words and proper nouns each form 10-12% aiding text processing tasks involving dif- of all distinct words. It is useful to transliterate ferent natural languages. We consider such words for scenarios that involve processing the problem of unsupervised separation of Malayalam text in the company of English text; transliterable words from native words for this will avoid them being treated as separate index text in Malayalam language. Outlining a terms (wrt their transliteration) in a multi-lingual key observation on the diversity of char- retrieval engine, and help a statistical translation acters beyond the word stem, we develop system to make use of the link to improve effec- an optimization method to score words tiveness. In this context, it ia notable that there has based on their nativeness. Our method re- been recent interest in devising specialized meth- lies on the usage of probability distribu- ods to translate words that fall outside the core vo- tions over character n-grams that are re- cabulary (Tsvetkov and Dyer, 2015). fined in step with the nativeness scorings In this paper, we consider the problem of sepa- in an iterative optimization formulation. rating out such transliterable words from the other Using an empirical evaluation, we illus- words within an unlabeled dataset; we refer to trate that our method, DTIM, provides sig- the latter as “native” words.
    [Show full text]
  • Children's Possessive Structures
    Ling 404 Lecture Notes No.4 Synchronic Clines in Morphology Productivity Clines: Japanese, Navajo, Mohawk, Eskimo, vs. Spanish, Italian, English One of the questions will be asking throughout is where do the above languages fall on the productivity cline and why (providing data and analyses.) One question to ask is to what degree is the lexicon ‘morpheme-based’ or ‘word-based’ (Chapters 3-4)? ‘Working Memory’ is implicated in the choice. For instance, are speakers all equally productive with their morpheme-units as tucked within word, a [-Fusion] language, or do some languages rather require morphemes within words to be memorized and incorporated as part of the lexical item, a [+Fusion] language? In addition to labeling languages as [+]Synthetic (as in Turkish, Hungarian, Spanish, English, Mohawk) or [-]Synthetic (as in Chinese, Vietnamese), the following data provide an additional exercise in teasing out what might be going on in languages which carry such a large number of embedded morphemes. Question leading to mid-term: How might such morphemes in Polysynthetic-type languages be stored and processed? The notion of [+/-Fusion] will be the central question here as we move to our mid-term material of this class. Typically, agglutinative morphemes are considered to be ‘loosely’ structured in that one morpheme has a one-to-one meaning. But the question might rather be how productive are the morphemes in isolation—viz., do they allow for movement? The question of movement, both at the word-level and at the morpheme-level will allow us to determine the nature of +/- productivity and +/- fusion. Regarding Movement.
    [Show full text]
  • Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society — Volume 13 — November 2008 49Th Annual Meeting — November 13–16, 2008 — Chicago, Illinois
    Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society — Volume 13 — November 2008 49th Annual Meeting — November 13–16, 2008 — Chicago, Illinois Papers 1–7 Friday Morning Motion and Attention motion is mixed. In the present study, target stimuli were associated with Grand Ballroom, Friday Morning, 8:00–9:40 objects that loomed, receded or remained static in arrays of varying size. Results showed that both motion types received equal prioritization, as Chaired by Gary Chon-Wen Shyi, National Chung Cheng University evidenced by their parallel search slopes, yet looming targets benefited from an overall reduction in reaction time (RT). Further investigation 8:00–8:15 (1) ruled out possible confounding explanations for this RT advantage, Differential Distribution of Visuospatial Attention in Tracking Mul- while a perceptual measure of performance confirmed the attentional tiple Moving Objects. GARY C.-W. SHYI & SUNG-EN CHIEN, Na- equivalence of the two motion types. Taken together, these results in- tional Chung Cheng University—Paying attention to a relatively com- dicate that looming and receding objects receive equal prioritization plex object has shown evidence for differential distribution within the during attentional selection. However, it may be that postattentional pro- object. Here, we explored differential distribution of attention when mul- cesses, possibly those involved in motor preparation, facilitate responses tiple moving objects were visually tracked. In Experiments 1 and 2, we to looming motion. not only replicated the findings reported by Alvarez and Scholl (2005), demonstrating both attentional concentration and attentional amplifica- 9:20–9:35 (5) tion, but also generalized the effects to uniformed circular shapes. In Individual Differences in Voluntary Visual Attention.
    [Show full text]
  • WORD ORDER and W O R D ORDER Chatjge
    Linguistics WORD ORDER AND WORD ORDER CHAtjGE The University of Texas Press Austin 1975 REVIEWED BY JAMES M. DUNN Princeton Unlversi ty This is a collection of twelve of the thirteen papers pre- sented at the Conference on Word Order and dord Order Change that was held at tne University of California, Santa Barbara, on January 26 - 27, 1974. The first eight deal with the diachk'onic aspect of word order, while the other four represent a synchronic treatment of the subject. In the preface the editor acknowledges the influence of Joseph Greenberg on these proceedings. Bis 1961 paper, Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements' , is seen as ' the starting point* for mos't of the papers in this volume. The papers in this collection appeal to a great diversity of interests r sign language, languages of the Niger-Congo group, Chinese, Indo-European, drift, discourse grammar, rnetatheory, the evaluation me-tric, and, of course, language typology. Obviously, their common purpose is to move toward a clearer ex- planation of the causal relationships between the surface con- stituents of a sentence both synch~onicdllyand diachronically. 54 But many of the papers actually share more than the commom denom- inator of interest in word order. At several points where other mutual interests overlap, the discussions assume the nature of a dialog (or, more often, a debate), and the reader finds transi- tion from paper to paper relatively smooth. I shall withhold further comment on the merits of this book as a whole until the conclusion of this review.
    [Show full text]
  • A Tutorial on Lexical Classes
    A tutorial on lexical classes Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero University of Manchester INTRODUCTION Goals of the tutorial §1 Our brief: L to address the key issues arising from exponence phenomena in which the lexicon is divided into arbitrary subsets, notably (a) inflectional classes and (b) cophonologies. §2 Our focus: L to explore the advantages and drawbacks of theories that model such phenomena by means of diacritic features. Overview §3 The discussion will touch upon the following questions: • Architectural issues How must the grammar be organized in order to guarantee the syntactic inertness of inflectional class features? Can syntactic features like gender be sensitive to inflectional class membership, and can inflectional class membership be determined by phonological properties? • Perspectives on inflectional class features (1): denial To what extent can inflectional class features be eliminated by (a) storing complex items in the lexicon and (b) invoking replacive mechanisms of exponence (‘overwriting’)? • Perspectives on inflectional class features (2): strengthening Instead of eliminating inflectional class features, do we rather need a more elaborate theory (e.g. one based on feature decomposition) capable of accounting for a wider range of phenomena (e.g. cross-class syncretism)? • Class features in phonology: cophonologies Can patterns of overlap between cophonologies be captured through the decomposition of cophonology diacritics, just like syncretisms between inflectional classes? Can derived environment effects in phonology be analysed in terms of the percolation of cophonology diacritics within morphological structures? http://www.bermudez-otero.com/WOTM4.pdf Workshop on Theoretical Morphology 4, Großbothen, 20 June 2008 2 ARCHITECTURAL ISSUES Basic properties of inflectional classes §4 Inflectional classes are traditionally defined by two properties: • arbitrariness and • syntactic inertness.
    [Show full text]
  • CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This Chapter Presents Background of The
    CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This chapter presents background of the research, statement of problem, research objective, research significance, and definition of key terms. 1.1 Background Morphology is a branch of linguistics which deals with the study of a word and its internal structure which affects the change of meaning. Moreover, Geert (2005: 7) states that morphology term refers to a study of the structure of the word, systematic word, the formation of word that has a relationship with its meaning. Morphology also covers how users of a particular language understand complex words, and find lexical items. Thus, Morphological studies in this research are used to analyze the word and how the word is formed that the word has a form and a meaning. Morphological process is the formation of a word in the form and meaning according to need in a single act of substitutions. Moreover, morphological process is a process of word formation by connecting one morpheme to other morphemes. The definition of morphological process according to Chaer (2012: 25) is the formation of a word from a base form of words through affixation and reduplication process. The formation of words will undergo another one of two processes, inflection and derivation. Derivation in particular is a process of forming a word that produces new lexeme. According to Ba’dulu and Herman (2006:12) 1 2 morphological derivation takes one word and turns it into another word. In other words, derivation is creating a new lexical word or creating a word from another syntactic category. Derivation is uses lexical meaning to make (or derive) new words and to change a word from grammatical class to another.
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter One Introduction
    CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 0 Chapter One Introduction 1.0 Background :- In spite of the fact that English morphology studies have been incepted lately in linguistics; these studies have acquired an overwhelming importance in the field of English language learning and acquisition. According to Leiber (2009) ‘morphology is the study of word formation, including the ways new words are coined in the languages of the world and the way forms of words are varied depending on how they are used in sentence’. Thus morphology studies the formation of words in English language and how this formation is largely dependent on sentence structure in which the word is deployed. Forming words in English language takes two main ways; deriving new lexemes from other words by adding a prefix or a suffix, e.g. “happy”, “unhappy” and “happiness”. This process happens to be called derivational morphology which is concerned with creating a new word though a related one. The other way is forming words using inflectional processes, which result in a modified version of a word (Delahunty & Garvey: 76). These processes are often applied to words in sentences in order to meet the grammatical needs of the sentences such as tense, gender or number. For instance the variant forms of the verb ‘to walk’ ‘walk’ and ‘walks’ are used for the present simple whereas “walked” is used for the past simple. 1 As stated above, words may be constructed of more than one morpheme, a morpheme is the smallest form (i.e, spoken or written units) that has meaning or grammatical function (Delahunty & Garvey:2010 ; p 76).
    [Show full text]
  • Abstracts (PDF)
    Abstracts of the Psychonomic Society — Volume 12 — November 2007 48th Annual Meeting — November 15–18, 2007 — Long Beach, California Papers 1–7 Friday Morning Implicit Memory is a widely used experimental procedure that has been modeled in Regency ABC, Friday Morning, 8:00–9:20 order to obtain ostensibly separate measures for explicit memory and implicit memory. Existing models are critiqued here and a new con- Chaired by Neil W. Mulligan fidence process-dissociation (CPD) model is developed for a modi- University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill fied process-dissociation task that uses confidence ratings in con- junction with the usual old/new recognition response. With the new 8:00–8:15 (1) model there are several direct tests for the key assumptions of the stan- Attention and Auditory Implicit Memory. NEIL W. MULLIGAN, dard models for this task. Experimental results are reported here that University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill—Traditional theorizing are contrary to the critical assumptions of the earlier models for the stresses the importance of attentional state during encoding for later process-dissociation task. These results cast doubt on the suitability memory, based primarily on research with explicit memory. Recent re- of the process-dissociation procedure itself for obtaining separate search has investigated the role of attention in implicit memory in the measures for implicit and explicit memory. visual modality. The present experiments examined the effect of divided attention on auditory implicit memory, using auditory perceptual iden- Attentional Selection and Priming tification, word-stem completion, and word-fragment completion. Par- Regency DEFH, Friday Morning, 8:00–10:00 ticipants heard study words under full attention conditions or while si- multaneously carrying out a distractor task.
    [Show full text]
  • Between Inflection and Derivation Paradigmatic Lexical Functions in Morphological Databases
    Between Inflection and Derivation Paradigmatic Lexical Functions in Morphological Databases Maarten Janssen ILTEC, Lisboa, Portugal [email protected] Abstract This article shows the use of lexical functions in the MorDebe lexical database system. Lexical functions are used in MorDebe to bridge the gap between derivation and inflection – to model relations between word-forms that are derivational from one perspective but inflectional from another. However, lexical functions in MorDebe range over lemmas rather than word-meanings and are hence significantly different from the normal lexical function. Абст‡кт В этой ст‡тье обсужд‡етсfl использние лексических функций ‚ лексической б‡зе д‡нных MorDebe. Лексические функции используютсfl ‚ MorDebe длfl того, чтобы сок‡тить ‡зы‚ между сло‚ооб‡знием и сло‚оизменением – длfl моделиниfl отношений между сло‚офом‡ми, котоые можно ‡ссм‡т肇ть с одной точки зениfl к‡к де肇ционные, ‡ с дугой - к‡к сло‚оизменительные. Одн‡ко, лексические функции ‚ MorDebe опеделflютсfl скоее длfl лексем, т.е. слных ‚ходо‚, ‡ не длfl смысло‚ых единиц и, следтельно, отлич‡ютсfl от лексических функций ‚ обычном поним‡нии. 1. Introduction Despite its central role in linguistics, the distinction between inflection and derivation is far from clear-cut. Modern day morphological theories often posit in-between cases - behaving partly like inflections, but partly like derivations. However, the introduction of marginal cases is problematic from the perspective of morphological database: an actual database which lists inflections and/or derivations, either has to treat them on a par, or model any individual form either as derivational or inflectional. This article will show how this problem manifests itself in the MorDebe morphological database, and how lexical functions are used to (partially) overcome the problem.
    [Show full text]
  • Processing Distinctions Between Stems and Affixes: Evidence from a Non-Fluent Aphasic Patient*
    cognition, 36 (1990) 129-153 Processing distinctions between stems and affixes: Evidence from a non-fluent aphasic patient* LORRAINE K. NLER SUSANBEHRENS HOWARD COBB University of Cambridge WlLLlAM MARSLEN-WILSON MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge Received June 2, 1989, final revision accepted February 19, 1990 Abstract Tyler, L.K., Behrens, S., Cobb, H., and Marsten-Witson, W., 1990. Processing distinctions between stems and affixes: Evidence from a non-fluent aphasic patient. Cognition, 36: 129-153. In this paper, we study the ability of a non-fluent aphasic patient, BX, to comprehend morphologically complex words when they appear in utterance contexts. Wefirst establish that he is insensitive to the contextual appropriateness of both derived and inflected words. In a further experiment we show that he has no difficulty processing the stems of complex words and conclude th-zt his problem is with the bound morphemes themselves. We then ask whether this problem is due to his inability to access either the phonological form of a morphologically complex word or its semantic andlor syntactic content. We find that only the access of semantic and syntactic content is impaired. We conclude from these six studies that: (a) BN presents a counter-example to the claim that non-fluent patients have particular dificulty with those aspects of morphology which have a syntactic function; (b) BN processes both derived and inflected words by mapping the sensory input onto the entire full-form of a complex word, but the semantic and syntactic content of the stem alone is accessed and integrated into the context. The semantic and syntactic implica- tions of the suffix are never evaluated.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 on Agent Nominalizations and Why They Are Not Like Event
    On agent nominalizations and why they are not like event nominalizations1 Mark C. Baker and Nadya Vinokurova Rutgers University and Research Institute of Humanities -Yakutsk Abstract: This paper focuses on agent-denoting nominalizations in various languages (e.g. the finder of the wallet), contrasting them with the much better studied action/event- denoting nominalizations. In particular, we show that in Sakha, Mapudungun, and English, agent-denoting nominalizations have none of the verbal features that event- denoting nominalizations sometimes have: they cannot contain adverbs, voice markers, expressions of aspect or mood, or verbal negation. An apparent exception to this generalization is that Sakha allows accusative-case marked objects in agentive nominalizations. We show that in fact the structure of agentive nominalizations in Sakha is as purely nominal as in other languages, and the difference is attributable to the rule of accusative case assignment. We explain these restrictions by arguing that agentive nominalizers have a semantics very much like the one proposed by Kratzer (1996) for Voice heads. Given this, the natural order of semantic composition implies that agentive nominalizers must combine directly with VP, just as Voice heads must. As a preliminary to testing this idea typologically, we show how a true agentive nominalization can be distinguished from a headless subject relative clause, illustrating with data from Mapudungun. We then present the results of a 34-language survey, showing that indeed none of these languages allow clause-like syntax inside a true agentive nominalization. We conclude that a generative-style investigation into the details of particular languages can be a productive source of things to look for in typological surveys.
    [Show full text]