Linguistic Typology
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The Syntactic and Semantic Relationship in Synthetic Languages
This is the published version of the bachelor thesis: Navarro Caparrós, Raquel; van Wijk Adan, Malou, dir. The Syntactic and Semantic Relationship in Synthetic Languagues : Linear Modification in Latin and Old English. 2016. 41 pag. (838 Grau en Estudis d’Anglès i de Clàssiques) This version is available at https://ddd.uab.cat/record/164293 under the terms of the license The Syntactic and Semantic Relationship in Synthetic Languages: Linear Modification in Latin and Old English TFG – Grau d’Estudis d’Anglès i Clàssiques Supervisor: Malou van Wijk Adan Raquel Navarro Caparrós June 2016 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Ms. Malou van Wijk Adan for her assistance and patience during the period of my research. This project would not have been possible without her guidance and valuable comments throughout. I would also like to thank all my teachers of Classical Studies and English Studies for sharing their knowledge with me throughout these four years. Finally, I wish to acknowledge my mum and my sister Ruth whose invaluable support helped me to overcome any obstacle, especially in the last two years. Without them, I am sure that I would have never been able to get where I am now. TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Abbreviations ...................................................................................................... ii List of Tables .................................................................................................................. iii Abstract .......................................................................................................................... -
Computational Challenges for Polysynthetic Languages
Computational Modeling of Polysynthetic Languages Judith L. Klavans, Ph.D. US Army Research Laboratory 2800 Powder Mill Road Adelphi, Maryland 20783 [email protected] [email protected] Abstract Given advances in computational linguistic analysis of complex languages using Machine Learning as well as standard Finite State Transducers, coupled with recent efforts in language revitalization, the time was right to organize a first workshop to bring together experts in language technology and linguists on the one hand with language practitioners and revitalization experts on the other. This one-day meeting provides a promising forum to discuss new research on polysynthetic languages in combination with the needs of linguistic communities where such languages are written and spoken. Finally, this overview article summarizes the papers to be presented, along with goals and purpose. Motivation Polysynthetic languages are characterized by words that are composed of multiple morphemes, often to the extent that one long word can express the meaning contained in a multi-word sentence in lan- guage like English. To illustrate, consider the following example from Inuktitut, one of the official languages of the Territory of Nunavut in Canada. The morpheme -tusaa- (shown in boldface below) is the root, and all the other morphemes are synthetically combined with it in one unit.1 (1) tusaa-tsia-runna-nngit-tu-alu-u-junga hear-well-be.able-NEG-DOER-very-BE-PART.1.S ‘I can't hear very well.’ Kabardian (Circassian), from the Northwest Caucasus, also shows this phenomenon, with the root -še- shown in boldface below: (2) wə-q’ə-d-ej-z-γe-še-ž’e-f-a-te-q’əm 2SG.OBJ-DIR-LOC-3SG.OBJ-1SG.SUBJ-CAUS-lead-COMPL-POTENTIAL-PAST-PRF-NEG ‘I would not let you bring him right back here.’ Polysynthetic languages are spoken all over the globe and are richly represented among Native North and South American families. -
Linguistics 203 - Languages of the World Language Study Guide
Linguistics 203 - Languages of the World Language Study Guide This exam may consist of anything discussed on or after October 20. Be sure to check out the slides on the class webpage for this date onward, as well as the syntax/morphology language notes. This guide discusses the aspects of specific languages we looked at, and you will want to look at the notes of specific languages in the ‘language notes: syntax/morphology’ section of the webpage for examples and basic explanations. This guide does not discuss the linguistic topics we discussed in a more general sense (i.e. where we didn’t focus on a specific language), but you are expected to understand these area as well. On the webpage, these areas are found in the ‘lecture notes/slides’ section. As you study, keep in mind that there are a number of ways I might pose a question to test your knowledge. If you understand the concept, you should be able to answer any of them. These include: Definitional If a language is considered an ergative-absolutive language, what does this mean? Contrastive (definitional) Explain how an ergative-absolutive language differs from a nominative- accusative language. Identificational (which may include a definitional question as well...) Looking at the example below, identify whether language A is an ergative- absolutive language or a nominative accusative language. How do you know? (example) Contrastive (identificational) Below are examples from two different languages. In terms of case marking, how is language A different from language B? (ex. of ergative-absolutive language) (ex. of nominative-accusative language) True / False question T F Basque is an ergative-absolutive language. -
What Are the Limits of Polysynthesis?
International Symposium on Polysynthesis in the World's Languages February 20-21, 2014 NINJAL, Tokyo What are the limits of Polysynthesis? Michael Fortescue, Marianne Mithun, and Nicholas Evans Of the various labels for morphological types currently in use by typologists ‘polysynthesis’ has proved to be the most difficult to pin down. For some it just represents an extreme on the dimension of synthesis (one of Sapir’s two major typological axes) while for others it is an independent category or parameter with far- reaching morphosyntactic ramifications. A recent characterization (Evans & Sasse 2002: 3f.) is the following: ‘Essentially, then, a prototypical polysynthetic language is one in which it is possible, in a single word, to use processes of morphological composition to encode information about both the predicate and all its arguments, for all major clause types [....] to a level of specificity, allowing this word to serve alone as a free-standing utterance without reliance on context.’ If the nub of polysynthesis is the packing of a lot of material into single verb forms that would be expressed as independent words in less synthetic languages, what exactly is the nature of and limitations on this ‘material’? The present paper investigates the limits – both upwards and downwards – of what the term is generally understood to cover. Reference Evans, N. & H.-J. Sasse (eds.). (2002). Problems of Polysynthesis. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 1 2014-01-08 International Symposium on Polysynthesis in the World's Languages February 20-21, 2014 NINJAL, Tokyo Polysynthesis in Ainu Anna Bugaeva (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics) Ainu is a typical polysynthetic language in the sense that a single complex verb can express what takes a whole sentence in most other languages. -
II Levels of Language
II Levels of language 1 Phonetics and phonology 1.1 Characterising articulations 1.1.1 Consonants 1.1.2 Vowels 1.2 Phonotactics 1.3 Syllable structure 1.4 Prosody 1.5 Writing and sound 2 Morphology 2.1 Word, morpheme and allomorph 2.1.1 Various types of morphemes 2.2 Word classes 2.3 Inflectional morphology 2.3.1 Other types of inflection 2.3.2 Status of inflectional morphology 2.4 Derivational morphology 2.4.1 Types of word formation 2.4.2 Further issues in word formation 2.4.3 The mixed lexicon 2.4.4 Phonological processes in word formation 3 Lexicology 3.1 Awareness of the lexicon 3.2 Terms and distinctions 3.3 Word fields 3.4 Lexicological processes in English 3.5 Questions of style 4 Syntax 4.1 The nature of linguistic theory 4.2 Why analyse sentence structure? 4.2.1 Acquisition of syntax 4.2.2 Sentence production 4.3 The structure of clauses and sentences 4.3.1 Form and function 4.3.2 Arguments and complements 4.3.3 Thematic roles in sentences 4.3.4 Traces 4.3.5 Empty categories 4.3.6 Similarities in patterning Raymond Hickey Levels of language Page 2 of 115 4.4 Sentence analysis 4.4.1 Phrase structure grammar 4.4.2 The concept of ‘generation’ 4.4.3 Surface ambiguity 4.4.4 Impossible sentences 4.5 The study of syntax 4.5.1 The early model of generative grammar 4.5.2 The standard theory 4.5.3 EST and REST 4.5.4 X-bar theory 4.5.5 Government and binding theory 4.5.6 Universal grammar 4.5.7 Modular organisation of language 4.5.8 The minimalist program 5 Semantics 5.1 The meaning of ‘meaning’ 5.1.1 Presupposition and entailment 5.2 -
Grammatical Analyticity Versus Syntheticity in Varieties of English
Language Variation and Change, 00 (2009), 1–35. © Cambridge University Press, 2009 0954-3945/09 $16.00 doi:10.1017/S0954394509990123 1 2 3 4 Typological parameters of intralingual variability: 5 Grammatical analyticity versus syntheticity in varieties 6 7 of English 8 B ENEDIKT S ZMRECSANYI 9 Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies 10 11 12 ABSTRACT 13 Drawing on terminology, concepts, and ideas developed in quantitative morphological 14 typology, the present study takes an exclusive interest in the coding of grammatical 15 information. It offers a sweeping overview of intralingual variability in terms of 16 overt grammatical analyticity (the text frequency of free grammatical markers), 17 grammatical syntheticity (the text frequency of bound grammatical markers), and 18 grammaticity (the text frequency of grammatical markers, bound or free) in English. 19 The variational dimensions investigated include geography, text types, and real time. 20 Empirically, the study taps into a number of publicly accessible text corpora that 21 comprise a large number of different varieties of English. Results are interpreted in 22 terms of how speakers and writers seek to achieve communicative goals while 23 minimizing different types of complexity. 24 25 This study surveys language-internal variability and short-term diachronic change, 26 along dimensions that are familiar from the cross-linguistic typology of languages. 27 The terms analytic and synthetic have a long and venerable tradition in linguistics, 28 going back to the 19th century and August Wilhelm von Schlegel, who is usually 29 credited for coining the opposition (Schlegel, 1818). This is, alas, not the place to 30 even attempt to review the rich history of thought in this area (but see Schwegler, “ 31 1990:chapter 1 for an excellent overview). -
“Today's Morphology Is Yeatyerday's Syntax”
MOTHER TONGUE Journal of the Association for the Study of Language in Prehistory • Issue XXI • 2016 From North to North West: How North-West Caucasian Evolved from North Caucasian Viacheslav A. Chirikba Abkhaz State University, Sukhum, Republic of Abkhazia The comparison of (North-)West Caucasian with (North-)East Caucasian languages suggests that early Proto-West Caucasian underwent a fundamental reshaping of its phonological, morphological and syntactic structures, as a result of which it became analytical, with elementary inflection and main grammatical roles being expressed by lexical means, word order and probably also by tones. The subsequent development of compounding and incorporation resulted in a prefixing polypersonal polysynthetic agglutinative language type typical for modern West Caucasian languages. The main evolutionary line from a North Caucasian dialect close to East Caucasian to modern West Caucasian languages was thus from agglutinative to the analytical language-type, due to a near complete loss of inflection, and then to the agglutinative polysynthetic type. Although these changes blurred the genetic relationship between West Caucasian and East Caucasian languages, however, this can be proven by applying standard procedures of comparative-historical linguistics. 1. The West Caucasian languages.1 The West Caucasian (WC), or Abkhazo-Adyghean languages constitute a branch of the North Caucasian (NC) linguistic family, which consists of five languages: Abkhaz and Abaza (the Abkhaz sub-group), Adyghe and Kabardian (the Circassian sub-group), and Ubykh. The traditional habitat of these languages is the Western Caucasus, where they are still spoken, with the exception of the extinct Ubykh. Typologically, the WC languages represent a rather idiosyncratic linguistic type not occurring elsewhere in Eurasia. -
Stress Chapter
Word stress in the languages of the Caucasus1 Lena Borise 1. Introduction Languages of the Caucasus exhibit impressive diversity when it comes to word stress. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the stress systems in North-West Caucasian (henceforth NWC), Nakh-Dagestanian (ND), and Kartvelian languages, as well as the larger Indo-European (IE) languages of the area, Ossetic and (Eastern) Armenian. For most of these languages, stress facts have only been partially described and analyzed, which raises the question about whether the available data can be used in more theoretically-oriented studies; cf. de Lacy (2014). Instrumental studies are not numerous either. Therefore, the current chapter relies mainly on impressionistic observations, and reflects the state of the art in the study of stress in these languages: there are still more questions than answers. The hope is that the present summary of the existing research can serve as a starting point for future investigations. This chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 describes languages that have free stress placement – i.e., languages in which stress placement is not predicted by phonological or morphological factors. Section 3 describes languages with fixed stress. These categories are not mutually exclusive, however. The classification of stress systems is best thought of as a continuum, with fixed stress and free stress languages as the two extremes, and most languages falling in the space between them. Many languages with fixed stress allow for exceptions based on certain phonological and/or morphological factors, so that often no firm line can be drawn between, e.g., languages with fixed stress that contain numerous morphologically conditioned exceptions (cf. -
The Dative-Ergative Connection Miriam Butt
Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 6 O. Bonami & P.Cabredo Hofherr (eds.) 2006, pp. 69–92 The Dative-Ergative Connection Miriam Butt 1 Introduction The classic division between structural vs. inherent/ lexical case proposed within Gov- ernment-Binding (Chomsky 1981) remains a very popular one, despite evidence to the contrary that the inner workings of case systems are far more complex than this simple division would suggest and that individual case markers generally make a systematic structural and semantic contribution that interacts in a generalizable manner with the lexical semantics of a predicate (see Butt 2006 for a survey of theories and data, Butt 2006:125 and Woolford 2006 for a proposed disctinction between inherent (general- izable) and lexical (idiosyncratic) case.).1 That is, the semantic contribution of case cannot (and should not) be relegated to the realm of lexical stipulation because there are systematic semantic generalizations to be captured. This fact has been recognized in more and more recent work. One prominent ex- ample is the work engaged in understanding the semantic generalizations underlying so-called object alternations, perhaps the most famous of which is the Finnish parti- tive alternation shown in (1)–(2). In Finnish, the accusative alternates with the parti- tive on objects. This alternation gives rise to readings of partitivity (1) and aspectual (un)boundedness (2).2 (1) a. Ostin leivän bought.1.Sg bread.Acc ‘I bought the bread.’ Finnish 1I would like to thank the organizers of the CSSP 2005 for inviting me to participate in the conference. I enjoyed the conference tremendously and the comments I received at the conference were extremely constructive, particularly those by Manfred Krifka. -
Modeling Infant Segmentation of Two Morphologically Diverse Languages
Modeling infant segmentation of two morphologically diverse languages Georgia Rengina Loukatou1 Sabine Stoll 2 Damian Blasi2 Alejandrina Cristia1 (1) LSCP, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL Research University, Paris, France (2) University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland [email protected] RÉSUMÉ Les nourrissons doivent trouver des limites de mots dans le flux continu de la parole. De nombreuses études computationnelles étudient de tels mécanismes. Cependant, la majorité d’entre elles se sont concentrées sur l’anglais, une langue morphologiquement simple et qui rend la tâche de segmen- tation aisée. Les langues polysynthétiques - pour lesquelles chaque mot est composé de plusieurs morphèmes - peuvent présenter des difficultés supplémentaires lors de la segmentation. De plus, le mot est considéré comme la cible de la segmentation, mais il est possible que les nourrissons segmentent des morphèmes et non pas des mots. Notre étude se concentre sur deux langues ayant des structures morphologiques différentes, le chintang et le japonais. Trois algorithmes de segmentation conceptuellement variés sont évalués sur des représentations de mots et de morphèmes. L’évaluation de ces algorithmes nous mène à tirer plusieurs conclusions. Le modèle lexical est le plus performant, notamment lorsqu’on considère les morphèmes et non pas les mots. De plus, en faisant varier leur évaluation en fonction de la langue, le japonais nous apporte de meilleurs résultats. ABSTRACT A rich literature explores unsupervised segmentation algorithms infants could use to parse their input, mainly focusing on English, an analytic language where word, morpheme, and syllable boundaries often coincide. Synthetic languages, where words are multi-morphemic, may present unique diffi- culties for segmentation. -
٧٠٩ Morphological Typology
جامعة واسط العـــــــــــــــدد السابع والثﻻثون مجلــــــــة كليــــــــة التربيــــــة الجزء اﻷول / تشرين الثاني / 2019 Morphological Typology: A Comparative Study of Some Selected Languages Bushra Farhood Khudheyier AlA'amiri Prof. Dr. Abdulkareem Fadhil Jameel, Ph.D. Department of English, College of Education/ Ibn Rushud for Humanities Baghdad University, Baghdad, Iraq Abstract Morphology is a main part of English linguistics which deals with forms of words. Morphological typology organizes languages on the basis of these word forms. This organization of languages depends on structural features to mould morphological, patterns, typologising languages, assigning them to analytic, or synthetic types on the base of words segmentability and invariance, or measuring the number of morphemes per word. Morphological typology studies the universals in languages, the differences and similarities between languages in the structural patterns found in different languages, which occur within a restricted range. This paper aims at distinguishing the various types of several universal languages and comparing them with English. The comparison of languages are set according to the number of morphemes, the degree of being analytic ,or synthetic languages by given examples of each type. Accordingly, it is hypothesed that languages are either to be analytic, or synthetic according to the syntactic and morphological form of morphemes and their meaning relation. The analytical procedures consist of expressing the morphological types with some selected examples, then making the comparison between each type and English. The conclusions reached at to the point of the existence of similarity between these morphological types . English is Analytic , but it has some synythetic aspects, so it validated the first hypothesis and not entirely refuted the second one. -
Morphosyntactic Development of Bangla-Speaking Preschool Children
1 Morphosyntactic development of Bangla-speaking preschool children Morphosyntactic development of Bangla-speaking preschool children Asifa Sultana BRAC University, Bangladesh Stephanie Stokes and Thomas Klee The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Paul Fletcher University College Cork, Ireland Abstract This study examines the morphosyntactic development, specifically verb morphology, of typically-developing Bangla-speaking children between the ages of two and four. Three verb forms were studied: the Present Simple, the Present Progressive, and the Past Progressive. The study was motivated by the observations that reliable language-specific developmental information is not available in Bangla (which affects research in the areas of speech and language therapy and computational linguistics) and that properties of these verb forms render them suitable for exploring how language typology contributes to the learnability of verb morphology in emerging child language. Children’s performance on these forms was assessed through form-specific language elicitation tasks and spontaneous language samples. Three stages of development of verb morphology were identified by consideration of accuracy of production and error types. 2 Morphosyntactic development of Bangla-speaking preschool children Keywords Language acquisition, language typology, verb morphology, Bengali, Bangla Introduction Typological characteristics of languages have often been found to regulate the patterns of language development in children. Crosslinguistic investigations have revealed that, depending on the morphological character of the language investigated, young typically- developing (TD) children’s productions of verbal inflections is characterised by omission of obligatory tense markers on verbs, failure to mark agreement correctly on verbs, or substitution of incorrect verb forms for target verb forms (e.g. Leonard, Caselli, & Devescovi, 2002; Wexler, 1994).