DOCSLIB.ORG

Inflection), the Bad (Derivation) and the Ugly (Compounding)

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Inflection), the Bad (Derivation) and the Ugly (Compounding) View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Central Archive at the University of Reading Morphological processing in the brain: the good (inflection), the bad (derivation) and the ugly (compounding) Article Published Version Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) Open Access Leminen, A., Smolka, E., Duñabeitia, J. A. and Pliatsikas, C. (2019) Morphological processing in the brain: the good (inflection), the bad (derivation) and the ugly (compounding). Cortex, 116. pp. 4-44. ISSN 0010-9452 doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.08.016 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/78769/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.08.016 Publisher: Elsevier All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading's research outputs online cortex 116 (2019) 4e44 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex Special issue: Review Morphological processing in the brain: The good (inflection), the bad (derivation) and the ugly (compounding) Alina Leminen a,b,*,1, Eva Smolka c,1, Jon A. Dunabeitia~ d,e and Christos Pliatsikas f a Cognitive Science, Department of Digital Humanities, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Finland b Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology and Logopedics, Faculty of Medicine, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland c Department of Linguistics, University of Konstanz, Germany d Facultad de Lenguas y Educacion, Universidad Nebrija, Madrid, Spain e Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), Donostia, Spain f School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom article info abstract Article history: There is considerable behavioral evidence that morphologically complex words such as Received 8 January 2018 ‘tax-able’ and ‘kiss-es’ are processed and represented combinatorially. In other words, they Reviewed: 2 May 2018 are decomposed into their constituents ‘tax’ and ‘-able’ during comprehension (reading or Revised 1 July 2018 listening), and producing them might also involve onetheespot combination of these Accepted 22 August 2018 constituents (especially for inflections). However, despite increasing amount of neuro- Published online 1 September 2018 cognitive research, the neural mechanisms underlying these processes are still not fully understood. The purpose of this critical review is to offer a comprehensive overview on the Keywords: state-of-the-art of the research on the neural mechanisms of morphological processing. In Morphology order to take into account all types of complex words, we include findings on inflected, Compounding derived, and compound words presented both visually and aurally. More specifically, we Derivation cover a wide range of electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG and MEG, respectively) Inflection as well as structural/functional magnetic resonance imaging (s/fMRI) studies that focus on Neuroimaging morphological processing. We present the findings with respect to the temporal course and localization of morphologically complex word processing. We summarize the observed findings, their interpretations with respect to current psycholinguistic models, and discuss methodological approaches as well as their possible limitations. © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). * Corresponding author. Cognitive Science, Department of Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki, Finland. E-mail address: alina.leminen@helsinki.fi (A. Leminen). 1 The authors have contributed equally to this work. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.08.016 0010-9452/© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/). cortex 116 (2019) 4e44 5 detailed theoretical discussion of the morphological opera- 1. Introduction tions or processes at stake, we believe that a short description and overview of the (psycho-)linguistic models that have been A significant portion of the psycholinguistic literature in the proposed to describe each morphological operation could be past several decades has been concerned with the processing beneficial to correctly frame the studies discussed below. For of morphologically complex words. Despite an increasing this reason, we start each of the three main sections of this number of studies on the neural underpinnings of morpho- review by briefly summarizing our current theoretical logical processing, its time-course and the underlying brain knowledge in the field. networks are still far from being clearly identified. In this paper, we present a much needed comprehensive review of the studies which have used some of the main neuroimaging 2. Inflectional morphology methods, in order to grasp the state-of-the-art in the cognitive neuroscience of morphological processing. Thus, the main Borrowing an illustrative term previously used in the litera- aim of this methodological review is to provide cognitive ture (cf. Janda, 2010), inflectional morphemes could be defined (neuro-) scientists interested in conducting neuroimaging as the “glue” of linguistic constructions, systematically research on morphological processing with a comprehensive materializing in morphemic units the relationships between summary of the most relevant neuroimaging research on this the different slots that constitute an expression. There are matter. This review mainly focuses and pivots on the experi- multiple definitions of what inflectional morphology is (see mental methods, and especially on three neuroimaging Bybee, 1985), but they all tend to consistently refer to the techniques that are of great relevance for the field, summa- broad concept of grammar, closely relating inflectional mor- rizing evidence from studies using Electroencephalography phemes with syntactic structures. And that is precisely the (EEG), Magnetoencephalography (MEG) and structural and common denominator of most descriptive approaches to the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). The review is bound morphemes that constitute the core of inflectional organized in three main sections corresponding to the three morphology, depicting the rules and principles that govern main morphological operations: inflection, derivation, and the relations between the elements of a linguistic expression compounding. In each of the sections, the evidence provided that ultimately yield the selection of the appropriated closed- by neuroimaging studies using the three main techniques class bound morphemic “glue” for each slot. mentioned above is discussed. We selected only studies that But if that is indeed the case, and if inflectional morphemes were conducted with a) adult, b) healthy, c) native speakers of are used to fuse together different parts of speech respecting the test language d) without reading difficulties. In most cases, the grammatical rules and principles of a given language, then the participants of the reviewed studies are students at uni- it may be worth investigating the cognitive representations of versities (whose reading skills are usually not assessed). We the individual inflectional morphemes that underlie such thus have not included studies on language acquisition or on dynamic blending mechanisms. And this is precisely what the special populations, even if they report a comparison to a field has been doing for several decades, trying to elucidate control group (i.e. healthy, adult, native speakers with unim- when an inflected polymorphemic word is decomposed and paired reading skills), with the exception of a handful of its stem accessed, and to what extent this morphological studies that (a) report native and nonnative speakers together decomposition process depends on the saliency and regularity in the absence of between group differences, (b) tested of the inflectional morphemes (e.g., Caramazza, Laudanna, & simultaneous bilinguals (2 L1s) in both their languages and (c) Romani, 1988; Stump, 2001). link brain structure to morphological processing, which we Most notably, the “English past tense” debate constitutes consider relevant and timely. To this end, the review of the hallmark of this issue, given the obvious saliency differ- functional MRI studies includes 22 studies on inflections, 18 ences between a regular past tense like walked and an irreg- on derivations (note that studies that looked at both inflection ular one like ran (see Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 1998). Regular and derivation are counted twice) and three on compounding, inflected forms of the past tense provide a transparent cue to plus three structural MRI studies; the review of MEG studies the root, given that the physical form of the stem is usually includes 7 studies on inflections, 10 on derivations, and two on fully contained in the affixed representation (e.g., walk in compounding, and the review of EEG studies provides a se- walked). In contrast, irregular forms do not always provide a lection of 28 papers on inflections, 19 on derivations, and 13 on cue to the stem, since it
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Why Is Language Typology Possible?
    Why is language typology possible? Martin Haspelmath 1 Languages are incomparable Each language has its own system. Each language has its own categories. Each language is a world of its own. 2 Or are all languages like Latin? nominative the book genitive of the book dative to the book accusative the book ablative from the book 3 Or are all languages like English? 4 How could languages be compared? If languages are so different: What could be possible tertia comparationis (= entities that are identical across comparanda and thus permit comparison)? 5 Three approaches • Indeed, language typology is impossible (non- aprioristic structuralism) • Typology is possible based on cross-linguistic categories (aprioristic generativism) • Typology is possible without cross-linguistic categories (non-aprioristic typology) 6 Non-aprioristic structuralism: Franz Boas (1858-1942) The categories chosen for description in the Handbook “depend entirely on the inner form of each language...” Boas, Franz. 1911. Introduction to The Handbook of American Indian Languages. 7 Non-aprioristic structuralism: Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) “dans la langue il n’y a que des différences...” (In a language there are only differences) i.e. all categories are determined by the ways in which they differ from other categories, and each language has different ways of cutting up the sound space and the meaning space de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1915. Cours de linguistique générale. 8 Example: Datives across languages cf. Haspelmath, Martin. 2003. The geometry of grammatical meaning: semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison 9 Example: Datives across languages 10 Example: Datives across languages 11 Non-aprioristic structuralism: Peter H. Matthews (University of Cambridge) Matthews 1997:199: "To ask whether a language 'has' some category is...to ask a fairly sophisticated question..
    [Show full text]
  • Modeling Language Variation and Universals: a Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing
    Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing Edoardo Ponti, Helen O ’Horan, Yevgeni Berzak, Ivan Vulic, Roi Reichart, Thierry Poibeau, Ekaterina Shutova, Anna Korhonen To cite this version: Edoardo Ponti, Helen O ’Horan, Yevgeni Berzak, Ivan Vulic, Roi Reichart, et al.. Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing. 2018. hal-01856176 HAL Id: hal-01856176 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01856176 Preprint submitted on 9 Aug 2018 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing Edoardo Maria Ponti∗ Helen O’Horan∗∗ LTL, University of Cambridge LTL, University of Cambridge Yevgeni Berzaky Ivan Vuli´cz Department of Brain and Cognitive LTL, University of Cambridge Sciences, MIT Roi Reichart§ Thierry Poibeau# Faculty of Industrial Engineering and LATTICE Lab, CNRS and ENS/PSL and Management, Technion - IIT Univ. Sorbonne nouvelle/USPC Ekaterina Shutova** Anna Korhonenyy ILLC, University of Amsterdam LTL, University of Cambridge Understanding cross-lingual variation is essential for the development of effective multilingual natural language processing (NLP) applications.
    [Show full text]
  • Urdu Treebank
    Sci.Int.(Lahore),28(4),3581-3585, 2016 ISSN 1013-5316;CODEN: SINTE 8 3581 URDU TREEBANK Muddassira Arshad, Aasim Ali Punjab University College of Information Technology (PUCIT), University of the Punjab, Lahore [email protected], [email protected] (Presented at the 5th International. Multidisciplinary Conference, 29-31 Oct., at, ICBS, Lahore) ABSTRACT: Treebank is a parsed corpus of text annotated with the syntactic information in the form of tags that yield the phrasal information within the corpus. The first outcome of this study is to design a phrasal and functional tag set for Urdu by minimal changes in the tag set of Penn Treebank, that has become a de-facto standard. Our tag set comprises of 22 phrasal tags and 20 functional tags. Second outcome of this work is the development of initial Treebank for Urdu, which remains publically available to the research and development community. There are 500 sentences of Urdu translation of religious text with an average length of 12 words. Context free grammar containing 109 rules and 313 lexical entries, for Urdu has been extracted from this Treebank. An online parser is used to verify the coverage of grammar on 50 test sentences with 80% recall. However, multiple parse trees are generated against each test sentence. 1 INTRODUCTION grammars for parsing[5], where statistical models are used The term "Treebank" was introduced in 2003. It is defined as for broad-coverage parsing [6]. "linguistically annotated corpus that includes some In literature, various techniques have been applied for grammatical analysis beyond the part of speech level" [1].
    [Show full text]
  • Linguistic Profiles: a Quantitative Approach to Theoretical Questions
    Laura A. Janda USA – Norway, Th e University of Tromsø – Th e Arctic University of Norway Linguistic profi les: A quantitative approach to theoretical questions Key words: cognitive linguistics, linguistic profi les, statistical analysis, theoretical linguistics Ключевые слова: когнитивная лингвистика, лингвистические профили, статисти- ческий анализ, теоретическая лингвистика Abstract A major challenge in linguistics today is to take advantage of the data and sophisticated analytical tools available to us in the service of questions that are both theoretically inter- esting and practically useful. I offer linguistic profi les as one way to join theoretical insight to empirical research. Linguistic profi les are a more narrowly targeted type of behavioral profi ling, focusing on a specifi c factor and how it is distributed across language forms. I present case studies using Russian data and illustrating three types of linguistic profi ling analyses: grammatical profi les, semantic profi les, and constructional profi les. In connection with each case study I identify theoretical issues and show how they can be operationalized by means of profi les. The fi ndings represent real gains in our understanding of Russian grammar that can also be utilized in both pedagogical and computational applications. 1. Th e quantitative turn in linguistics and the theoretical challenge I recently conducted a study of articles published since the inauguration of the journal Cognitive Linguistics in 1990. At the year 2008, Cognitive Linguistics took a quanti- tative turn; since that point over 50% of the scholarly articles that journal publishes have involved quantitative analysis of linguistic data [Janda 2013: 4–6]. Though my sample was limited to only one journal, this trend is endemic in linguistics, and it is motivated by a confl uence of historic factors.
    [Show full text]
  • Morphological Processing in the Brain: the Good (Inflection), the Bad (Derivation) and the Ugly (Compounding)
    Morphological processing in the brain: the good (inflection), the bad (derivation) and the ugly (compounding) Article Published Version Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) Open Access Leminen, A., Smolka, E., Duñabeitia, J. A. and Pliatsikas, C. (2019) Morphological processing in the brain: the good (inflection), the bad (derivation) and the ugly (compounding). Cortex, 116. pp. 4-44. ISSN 0010-9452 doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.08.016 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/78769/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . To link to this article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2018.08.016 Publisher: Elsevier All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online cortex 116 (2019) 4e44 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex Special issue: Review Morphological processing in the brain: The good (inflection), the bad (derivation) and the ugly (compounding) Alina Leminen a,b,*,1, Eva Smolka c,1, Jon A. Dunabeitia~ d,e and Christos Pliatsikas f a Cognitive Science, Department of Digital Humanities, Faculty of Arts, University of Helsinki, Finland b Cognitive Brain Research
    [Show full text]
  • Parsing the SYNTAGRUS Treebank of Russian
    Parsing the SYNTAGRUS Treebank of Russian Joakim Nivre Igor M. Boguslavsky Leonid L. Iomdin Vaxj¨ o¨ University and Universidad Politecnica´ Russian Academy Uppsala University de Madrid of Sciences [email protected] Departamento de Institute for Information Inteligencia Artificial Transmission Problems [email protected] [email protected] Abstract example, Nivre et al. (2007a) observe that the lan- guages included in the 2007 CoNLL shared task We present the first results on parsing the can be divided into three distinct groups with re- SYNTAGRUS treebank of Russian with a spect to top accuracy scores, with relatively low data-driven dependency parser, achieving accuracy for richly inflected languages like Arabic a labeled attachment score of over 82% and Basque, medium accuracy for agglutinating and an unlabeled attachment score of 89%. languages like Hungarian and Turkish, and high A feature analysis shows that high parsing accuracy for more configurational languages like accuracy is crucially dependent on the use English and Chinese. A complicating factor in this of both lexical and morphological features. kind of comparison is the fact that the syntactic an- We conjecture that the latter result can be notation in treebanks varies across languages, in generalized to richly inflected languages in such a way that it is very difficult to tease apart the general, provided that sufficient amounts impact on parsing accuracy of linguistic structure, of training data are available. on the one hand, and linguistic annotation, on the other. It is also worth noting that the majority of 1 Introduction the data sets used in the CoNLL shared tasks are Dependency-based syntactic parsing has become not derived from treebanks with genuine depen- increasingly popular in computational linguistics dency annotation, but have been obtained through in recent years.
    [Show full text]
  • A Crosslinguistic Verb-Sensitive Approach to Dative Verbs
    LING 7800-009 CU Boulder Levin & Rappaport Hovav Summer 2011 Conceptual Categories and Linguistic Categories VI: A Crosslinguistic Verb-sensitive Approach to Dative Verbs 1 Revisiting possession • Lecture I briefly explored possession as a grammatically relevant component of meaning, • However, the approaches to event conceptualization examined so far have had little to say about this notion, with the exception of the localist approach: it takes possession to be a type of location. However, as we show here, the relation between the two notions with respect to argument realization is more complex than the localist approach suggests. • Key points about the nature of possession from Lecture I: — Possession is a relation between a possessor and a possessum—an entity over which the possessor exerts some form of control (e.g., Tham 2004). — The grammatically relevant notion of possession is quite broad (e.g., Heine 1997, Tham 2004): it encompasses instances of both alienable and inalienable possession, both abstract and concrete possessums, including types of information, but is insensitive to certain real life types of possession, such as legal possession. • The dative alternation was used to diagnose the presence of lexicalized possession: (1) a. Kim gave a ticket to tonight’s concert to Jill. (to variant) b. Kim gave Jill a ticket to tonight’s concert. (Double object variant) — give, a verb which lexicalizes nothing more than the causation of possession (e.g., Goldberg 1995, Jackendoff 1990, Pinker 1989), is perhaps THE canonical dative alternation verb. — The double object construction, which is specifically associated with the dative alternation, has an entailment which involves the (noncausative) verbs of possession have or get: (1b) entails (2).
    [Show full text]
  • Chaining and the Growth of Linguistic Categories
    Chaining and the growth of linguistic categories Amir Ahmad Habibia, Charles Kempb, Yang Xuc,∗ aDepartment of Computing Science, University of Alberta bSchool of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne cDepartment of Computer Science, Cognitive Science Program, University of Toronto Abstract We explore how linguistic categories extend over time as novel items are assigned to existing categories. As a case study we consider how Chinese numeral classifiers were extended to emerging nouns over the past half century. Numeral classifiers are common in East and Southeast Asian languages, and are prominent in the cognitive linguistics literature as examples of radial categories. Each member of a radial category is linked to a central prototype, and this view of categorization therefore contrasts with exemplar-based accounts that deny the existence of category prototypes. We explore these competing views by evaluating computational models of category growth that draw on existing psychological models of categorization. We find that an exemplar-based approach closely related to the Generalized Context Model provides the best account of our data. Our work suggests that numeral classifiers and other categories previously described as radial categories may be better understood as exemplar-based categories, and thereby strengthens the connection between cognitive linguistics and psychological models of categorization. Keywords: Category growth; Semantic chaining; Radical categories; Categorization; Exemplar theory; Numeral classifiers ∗Corresponding author Email address: [email protected] (Yang Xu) Preprint submitted to Cognition May 7, 2020 1. Introduction Language users routinely face the challenge of categorizing novel items. Over the past few decades, items such as emojis, blogs and drones have entered our lives and we have found ways to talk about them.
    [Show full text]
  • Maurice Gross' Grammar Lexicon and Natural Language Processing
    Maurice Gross’ grammar lexicon and Natural Language Processing Claire Gardent, Bruno Guillaume, Guy Perrier, Ingrid Falk To cite this version: Claire Gardent, Bruno Guillaume, Guy Perrier, Ingrid Falk. Maurice Gross’ grammar lexicon and Natural Language Processing. Language and Technology Conference, Apr 2005, Poznan/Pologne, France. inria-00103156 HAL Id: inria-00103156 https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00103156 Submitted on 3 Oct 2006 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Maurice Gross’ grammar lexicon and Natural Language Processing Claire Gardent♦, Bruno Guillaume♠, Guy Perrier♥, Ingrid Falk♣ ♦CNRS/LORIA ♠INRIA/LORIA ♥University Nancy 2/LORIA ♣CNRS/ATILF Nancy, France [email protected] Abstract Maurice Gross’ grammar lexicon contains an extremly rich and exhaustive information about the morphosyntactic and semantic proper- ties of French syntactic functors (verbs, adjectives, nouns). Yet its use within natural language processing systems is still restricted. In this paper, we first argue that the information contained in the grammar lexicon is potentially useful for Natural Language Processing (NLP). We then sketch a way to translate this information into a format which is arguably more amenable for use by NLP systems. 1. Maurice Gross’s grammar lexicon gether all the verbs which can take besides a subject, an Much work in syntax concentrates on identifying and infinitival complement but not a finite or a nominal one.
    [Show full text]
  • Word Classes in Radical Construction Grammar
    Word classes in Radical Construction Grammar William Croft, University of New Mexico 1. Introduction Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001, 2005a, 2013) is a construction-based theory of grammar that allows for the representation of both cross-linguistic and language- internal grammatical diversity. Radical Construction Grammar analyses conform to the following three basic principles: (1) Word classes and other syntactic structures are language-specific and construction-specific. What is universal is patterns of variation in the verbalization of experience, represented for example in conceptual space. (2) The internal structure of the morphosyntactic form of constructions consists solely of the part-whole relation between construction roles (“slots”) and the whole construction. The complexity of constructions rests in the symbolic relations between the roles and their meanings/functions, and the rich semantic/functional structure expressed by the construction and its parts. (3) The morphosyntactic forms of constructions are language-specific, that is, there is potentially gradient variation of constructional form across and within languages. Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001) and Morphosyntax: Constructions of the World’s Languages (Croft, in prep.) propose many specific analyses of constructions and universals of constructional variation. While those analyses may and likely will need revision as knowledge of the constructions of the world’s languages increases, any analysis that conforms to the principles in (1)-(3) can be considered
    [Show full text]
  • Corpus Approaches to the Language of Literature
    Corpus Approaches to the Language of Literature Martin Wynne1 and Ylva Berglund Prytz1 Abstract Work in stylistics relies on the evidence of the language of literature. Corpus linguistics is also an empirical approach to linguistic description, relying on the evidence of language usage as collected and analysed in corpora. As linguists and stylisticians have become more aware of the possibilities offered by corpus resources and techniques, then increasingly it is pointed out that the coming together of these fields could be fruitful. But there is as yet little actual research in the area. This colloquium wants to offer an opportunity to disseminate and discuss examples of successful research which has shed new light on literary texts through the techniques of corpus linguistics. Furthermore, it will point to ways forward in demonstrating the resources and techniques necessary for such work in the future. The session will consist of an introductory presentation, providing an introduction to the topic, an outline of the current state of the relatively new area of corpus stylistics and a summary of previous, recent research and activities (15 min). It will be followed by three papers, each offering excellent examples of current trends (3*20 min). The colloquium will be concluded by a general discussion, which is expected to take the form of a discussion of what is meant by corpus stylistics and where the field is moving now (30 min). (The time allocations allow time for switching between speakers, spontaneous questions and possible delays and interruptions. If not used, the discussion session will be extended). PAPER ABSTRACTS Language Norms, Creativity and Local Textual Functions Michaela Mahlberg2 This paper will look at examples of how corpus linguistic methodology can aid the literary analysis of texts with the help of collocations, clusters and keywords, and the paper will also discuss theoretical questions about the relationship between literary and linguistic categories of description.
    [Show full text]
  • Encoding Morphemic Units of Two South African Bantu Languages
    Nordic Journal of African Studies 21(3): 118–140 (2012) Towards a Part-of-Speech Ontology: Encoding Morphemic Units of Two South African Bantu Languages Gertrud FAAß University of South Africa, South Africa & Sonja BOSCH University of South Africa, South Africa & Elsabé TALJARD University of Pretoria, South Africa ABSTRACT This article describes the design of an electronic knowledge base, namely a morpho-syntactic database structured as an ontology of linguistic categories, containing linguistic units of two related languages of the South African Bantu group: Northern Sotho and Zulu. These languages differ significantly in their surface orthographies, but are very similar on the lexical and sub-lexical levels. It is therefore our goal to describe the morphemes of these languages in a single common database in order to outline and interpret commonalities and differences in more detail. Moreover, the relational database which is developed defines the underlying morphemic units (morphs) for both languages. It will be shown that the electronic part-of- speech ontology goes hand in hand with part-of-speech tagsets that label morphemic units. This database is designed as part of a forthcoming system providing lexicographic and linguistic knowledge on the official South African Bantu languages. Keywords: part-of-speech ontology, morpho-syntactic database, tagging, Northern Sotho, Zulu. 1. INTRODUCTION The aim of this article is to describe the design of an electronic knowledge base, namely a morpho-syntactic database structured as an ontology of linguistic categories, containing linguistic units of two Bantu languages. It will be argued that the electronic part-of-speech (POS) ontology goes hand in hand with POS tagsets.
    [Show full text]