scholarly journals Hindi noun inflection and distributed morphology

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Smriti Singh ◽  
Vaijayanthi M. Sarma
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Distributed Morphology ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Morphological Operations ◽  
Indian Languages ◽  
Word Generation ◽  
Noun Classes ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Small Set ◽  
Nominal Inflection

This paper primarily presents an analysis of nominal inflection in Hindi within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994 and Harley and Noyer 1999). Müller (2002, 2003, 2004) for German, Icelandic and Russian nouns respectively and Weisser (2006) for Croatian nouns have also used Distributed Morphology (henceforth DM) to analyze nominal inflectional morphology. This paper will discuss in detail the inflectional categories and inflectional classes, the morphological processes operating at syntax, the distribution of vocabulary items and the readjustment rules required to describe Hindi nominal inflection. Earlier studies on Hindi inflectional morphology (Guru 1920, Vajpeyi 1958, Upreti 1964, etc.) were greatly influenced by the Paninian tradition (classical Sanskrit model) and work with Paninian constructs such as root and stem. They only provide descriptive studies of Hindi nouns and verbs and their inflections without discussing the role or status of affixes that take part in inflection. The discussion on the mechanisms (morphological operations and rules) used to analyze or generate word forms are missing in these studies. In addition, these studies do not account for syntax-morphology or morphology-phonology mismatches that show up in word formation. One aim of this paper is to present an economical way of forming noun classes in Hindi as compared to other traditional methods, especially gender and stem ending based or paradigm based methods that give rise to a large number of inflectional paradigms. Using inflectional class information to analyse the various forms of Hindi nouns, we can reduce the number of affixes and word-generation and readjustment rules that are required to describe nominal inflection. The analysis also helps us in developing a morphological analyzer for Hindi. The small set of rules and fewer inflectional classes are of great help to lexicographers and system developers. To the best of our knowledge, the analysis of Hindi inflectional morphology based on DM and its implementation in a Hindi morphological analyzer has not been done before. The methods discussed here can be applied to other Indian languages for analysis as well as word generation.

Gender as an inflectional category

2002 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW SPENCER
Keyword(s):  
Female Patient ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Lexical Entry ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Lexical Categories ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Explicit Analysis ◽  
Mixed Categories ◽  
Peculiar Nature

Russian adjectives, especially participles, can be used as nouns denoting people, e.g. bol′noj/bol′naja ‘(male/female) patient’ from bol′noj ‘sick’, učaščijsja/učaščajasja ‘(boy/girl) pupil’, participle from the verb učit′sja ‘to learn, study’. These are unusual in that they formally reflect the sex of their referent by means of inflectional morphology. Moreover, many surnames inflect like adjectives and they, too, inflect for gender: Mr. Puškin, Čexov, Tolstoj, Dostoevskij but Ms. Puškina, Čexova, Tolstaja, Dostoevskaja. Lexemes such as ‘patient, pupil’ are genuine nouns and not just adjectives modifying null nouns. The latter type do exist and have different properties from converted nouns. Converted nouns and adjectival surnames thus form systematic gender pairs which are forms of a single lexeme. However, gender is not conventionally regarded as an inflection category of the kind which induces word forms of lexemes in this way, rather it is an inherent ‘classificatory’ property of nouns. The paper discusses the peculiar nature of this type of inflectional marking and provides an explicit analysis of the construction. On the semantic side, nouns such as bol′noj, učaščijsja have a similar representation to that of a phrase person who is sick/studies and we effectively have an instance of the poorly researched phenomenon of de-phrasal word formation. On the morphosyntactic side, the lexical entry of the deadjectival noun or surname shares crucial properties with 3rd person pronouns. The analysis raises questions about the nature of lexical categories (especially ‘mixed categories’) and the structure of lexical entries generally.

Theoretical Issues in Inflection

2018 ◽  
pp. 55-82
Author(s):  
Gregory Stump
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Semantic Composition ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Theoretical Issues

The domains of divergence among current conceptions of inflectional morphology appertain to five fundamental issues. What are the basic units in terms of which inflectional morphology is defined? Is the morpheme a theoretically significant concept? What sort of structure do inflected word forms possess? Do they have a quasi-syntactic hierarchical structure that determines their semantic composition? What is the relation between concatenative and nonconcatenative inflectional patterns? Are they equivalent alternatives for realizing morphosyntactic content or is affixation pre-eminent, sometimes triggering nonconcatenative operations of secondary status? What is the relation between a word form’s morphosyntactic properties and their inflectional exponents? Are exponents lexically listed with their properties, or do a word form’s morphosyntactic properties trigger rules that specify their exponents? Finally, what distinguishes inflection from word formation? Are these discrete components? Is their difference purely one of function? Competing answers to these questions are examined in the light of empirical evidence.

scholarly journals Some characteristics of deverbal nominals in Slavic and Romance languages

2016 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivica Peša Matracki ◽  
Vinko Kovačić
Keyword(s):  
Generative Grammar ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Distributed Morphology ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Morphological Operations ◽  
Formation Model ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
The Third ◽  
Theoretical Assumptions ◽  
Deverbal Nominals

In this paper we will investigate the nature of deverbal nominals across languages. Deverbal nouns are typically classified according to their word-formation model: affixation and conver-sion. Our study will compare the word formation of deverbal nominals in Slavic (Croatian, Slovenian and Polish) and Romance languages (Italian, French and Spanish) in order to show (i) that affixation corresponds to a specific mode of morphological operations and (ii) that the differences and similarities between deverbal nominals of these two language families follow from the properties of the base verbs. Furthermore, our analysis will try to shed some light on the distinction between nouns and verbs. The paper comprises three major thematic parts. The first part briefly reviews the basic notions and theoretical assumptions of Generative Grammar regarding word formation. We have especially tried to explain those notions that we draw from Distributed Morphology. This part further exposes the theoretical framework that is used in this paper. In the second part, deverbal nominals in Slavic languages are analysed and de-scribed. We primarily investigate the Slavic languages, since in these languages morphology plays a larger role in the construction of deverbal nouns. The third part contains an investiga-tion of the phrasal structure of nominalizations across the Romance languages. We close the work with a general conclusion about the behaviour of deverbal nouns in these two groups of languages. We concentrate mainly on the differences between the phrasal architecture of nom-inalizations and correspondent verbal constructions.

scholarly journals The Morphology of Yam Languages

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Carroll
Keyword(s):  
New Guinea ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Past Tense ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Morphological Pattern ◽  
Verbal Inflection ◽  
The Family ◽  
Grammatical Mood ◽  
Nominal Inflection ◽  
Large Case

The Yam languages are a primary language family spoken in southern New Guinea across an area spanning around 180km west to east across both the Indonesian province of Papua and Papua New Guinea. The Yam languages are morphologically remarkable for their complex verbal inflection characterized by a tendency to distribute inflectional exponence across multiple sites on the verb. Under this pattern of distributed exponence, segmental formatives, that is, affixes, are identifiable but assigning any coherent semantics to these elements is often difficult and instead the inflectional meanings can only be determined once multiple formatives have been combined. Despite their complex inflectional morphology, Yam languages display comparatively impoverished word formation or derivational morphology. Nominal inflection is characterized by moderately large case inventories, the largest displaying 16 cases. Nouns are occasionally marked for number although this is typically restricted to certain case values. Verbal paradigms are much larger than nominal paradigms. Verbs mark agreement with up to two arguments in person, number, and natural gender. Verbs also mark complex tense, aspect, and mood values; in all languages this involves at least two aspect values, multiple past tense values, and some level of grammatical mood marking. Verbs may also be marked for diathesis, direction, and/or pluractionality. The overall morphological pattern is that of fusional or inflectional languages. Nominal inflection is rather straightforward with nominals taking case suffixes or clitics with little to no inflectional classes. The true complexity lies in the organization of the verbal inflectional system, about which, despite individual variation across the family, a number of architectural generalizations can be made. The family displays a fairly uniform verbal inflectional template and all languages make a distinction between prefixing and ambifixing verbs. Prefixing verbs show agreement via a prefix only while ambifixing verbs via agreement with a suffix, for monovalent clauses, or with both a prefix and a suffix for bivalent verbs. These agreement affixes are also involved in the distributed exponence of tense, aspect, and mood.

His Lordship's -ship and the King of Golfdom. Against a purely functional analysis of suffixhood

2010 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heike Baeskow
Keyword(s):  
Functional Analysis ◽  
Conceptual Knowledge ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Distributed Morphology ◽  
Word Class ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Functional Elements ◽  
Grammatical Morphemes ◽  
Independent Model

For many decades there has been a consensus among linguists of various schools that derivational suffixes function not only to determine the word-class of the complex expressions they form, but also convey semantic information. The aspect of suffix-inherent meaning is ignored by representatives of a relatively new theoretical direction – Neo-Construction Grammar – who consider derivational suffixes to be either purely functional elements of the grammar or meaningless phonological realizations of abstract grammatical morphemes. The latter view is maintained by adherents of Distributed Morphology, who at the same time emphasize the importance of conceptual knowledge for derivational processes without attempting to define this aspect. The purpose of this study is first of all to provide support for the long-standing assumption that suffixes are inherently meaningful. The focus of interest is on the suffixes -ship, -dom and -hood. Data from Old English and Modern English (including neologisms) will show that these suffixes have developed rich arrays of meaning which cannot be structurally derived. Moreover, since conceptual knowledge is indeed an important factor for word-formation processes, a concrete, theory-independent model for the representation of the synchronically observable meaning components associated with -ship, -dom and -hood will be proposed.

Suppletive verbal morphology in Korean and the mechanism of vocabulary insertion

2009 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-567 ◽  
Author(s):  
INKIE CHUNG
Keyword(s):  
Short Form ◽  
Distributed Morphology ◽  
Morphological Operations ◽  
Verbal Morphology ◽  
Phonological Features ◽  
Vocabulary Insertion ◽  
Correct Form ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Feature Negative ◽  
Late Insertion

This paper provides a Distributed Morphology analysis of the paradoxical interaction of the two cases of verbal suppletion in Korean, and argues that the two suppletion types are characterized by two different types of morphological operations. The two roots found with short-form negation and honorification suggest different morphological structures: [[Neg-V] Hon] for al- ‘know’, molu- ‘not.know’, a-si- ‘know-hon’, molu-si- (not *an(i) a-si-) ‘neg know-hon’; and [Neg [V-Hon]] for iss- ‘exist’, eps- ‘not.exist’, kyey-si- ‘exist-hon’, an(i) kyey-si- (not *eps-(u)-si-) ‘neg exist-hon’. Predicate repetition constructions support the [[Neg-V] Hon] structure. In this structure, however, the negative suppletion (analyzed as fusion of negation and the root) is blocked by the honorific suffix structurally more peripheral to the root. C-command is the only requirement for context allomorphy in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993). Since the [+hon] feature c-commands the root, the root can show honorific suppletive allomorphy in the first cycle with negation intervening between the root and [+hon]. Negation fusion occurs in the second cycle after vocabulary insertion of the root. Fusion, then, should refer to vocabulary items, not abstract features, and will be interleaved with vocabulary insertion. If the output of the root is /kyey/ due to the honorific feature, negative suppletion will not apply and the correct form an(i) kyey-si- will be derived. Therefore, both of the distinct morphological operations for suppletion, i.e., fusion and contextual allomorphy, are necessary. The revised formulation of fusion shows that certain morphological operations follow vocabulary insertion. This derivational approach to the suppletion interaction provides support for separation of phonological and nonphonological features and for late insertion of phonological features.

scholarly journals ARIES: A lexical platform for engineering Spanish processing tools

1997 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSÉ M. GOÑI ◽  
JOSÉ C. GONZÁLEZ ◽  
ANTONIO MORENO
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Inflectional Morphology ◽  
Type Checking ◽  
Efficient Retrieval ◽  
Software Interfaces ◽  
Feature Based ◽  
Run Time ◽  
E Mail ◽  
Unification Grammar

We present a lexical platform that has been developed for the Spanish language. It achieves portability between different computer systems and efficiency, in terms of speed and lexical coverage. A model for the full treatment of Spanish inflectional morphology for verbs, nouns and adjectives is presented. This model permits word formation based solely on morpheme concatenation, driven by a feature-based unification grammar. The run-time lexicon is a collection of allomorphs for both stems and endings. Although not tested, it should be suitable also for other Romance and highly inflected languages. A formalism is also described for encoding a lemma-based lexical source, well suited for expressing linguistic generalizations: inheritance classes, lemma encoding, morpho-graphemic allomorphy rules and limited type-checking. From this source base, we can automatically generate an allomorph indexed dictionary adequate for efficient retrieval and processing. A set of software tools has been implemented around this formalism: lexical base augmenting aids, lexical compilers to build run-time dictionaries and access libraries for them, feature manipulation libraries, unification and pseudo-unification modules, morphological processors, a parsing system, etc. Software interfaces among the different modules and tools are cleanly defined to ease software integration and tool combination in a flexible way. Directions for accessing our e-mail and web demonstration prototypes are also provided. Some figures are given, showing the lexical coverage of our platform compared to some popular spelling checkers.

Morphologie und Semantik der n-Erweiterung bei Muttern und Vatern im Deutschen

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-79
Author(s):  
Alexander Werth
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Limited Extent ◽  
Prepositional Phrases ◽  
Low German ◽  
German Dialects ◽  
Semantic Concepts ◽  
Formation Pattern ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Comparative Constructions

Abstract: This paper deals with German kinship terms ending with the form n (Muttern, Vatern). Firstly, data from newspapers are presented that show that especially Muttern denotes very special meanings that can only be derived to a limited extent from the lexical base: a) Muttern referring to a home where mother cares for you, b) Muttern standing for overprotection, and c) Muttern representing a special food style (often embedded in prepositional phrases and/or comparative constructions like wie bei or wie von Muttern). Secondly, it is argued that the addition of n to kinship terms is not a word-formation pattern, but that these word forms are instead lexicalized and idiomatized in contemporary German. Hence, a diachronic scenario is applied to account for the data. It is argued in the present paper that the n-forms have been borrowed from Low German dialects, especially from constructional idioms of the type ‘X-wie bei Muttern’ and that forms were enriched by semantic concepts associated with the dialect.

The paradigmatic aspect of compounding and derivation

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-609
Author(s):  
AYSUN KUNDURACI
Keyword(s):  
Current System ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Morphological Operations ◽  
Dynamic Aspect ◽  
Noun Compounds ◽  
Autonomous Morphology

This study aims to show the dynamic aspect of word-formation paradigms in autonomous morphology by examining the compound marker in Turkish Noun–Noun compounds, as in buz paten-i ‘ice-skate (ice skate-cm)’, and its relation to derivational suffixes. The study proposes a process-based morphological paradigm structure which involves compounding and derivational operations. In this system, the compound marker has a formal paradigmatic function: it creates correct lexeme forms based on bare Noun–Noun compounds, which would otherwise serve as input to certain derivational operations. The current system thus accounts for both permitted and unpermitted suffix combinations involving compounding and the optionality in certain combinations, such as buz paten-ci (-si) ‘a/the ice skater (ice skate-agt-cm)’, where the compound marker may (not) appear in combination with the (derivational) agentive -CI. The study also presents a survey which implies that a group of derivational affixes is in a paradigmatic relation with the compound marker, and all of these affixations constitute alternative paths in a dynamic paradigm structure. The findings of the study are considered to contribute to the understanding of the nature of the autonomous morphological operations and paradigms, which cannot be restricted to the lexicon or manipulated by syntax.

Latviešu valodas apguvēju korpusa (LaVA) izmantošana pētniecībā un mācību uzdevumu izstrādē

2021 ◽  
pp. 142-161
Author(s):  
Ilze Auziņa ◽  
◽  
Kristīne Levāne-Petrova ◽  
Roberts Darģis ◽  
Kristīne Pokratniece ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Language Proficiency ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Parts Of Speech ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Repeated Analysis ◽  
Reflexive Verbs

The Latvian Language Learners Corpus (LaVA) developed at the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia, includes more than 1000 texts created by foreign Latvian language learners studying at Latvian higher education institutions for the first or second semester reaching A1 (possibly A2) Latvian language proficiency level. The size of the corpus is more than 180 000 words. The morphologically annotated texts have been checked manually; the language learners' errors have been manually annotated. In addition, each text is accompanied by information about the author of the text (metadata): gender, age, native language, knowledge of other languages. When analysing the data, this information can be used to determine how the learner's mother tongue and language skills, in general, affect the acquisition of the Latvian language. Users of the corpus can analyse the data both on the LaVA website (see http://lava.korpuss.lv/search) and in the SketchEngine tool, where the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data can be performed. The quantitative approach makes it possible to find out the tendencies of the use of a word, word form, or construction and allows to determine the frequency of mistakes made by language learners. In addition, the objectivity of the research is ensured by looking at the data of language learners from different aspects and performing repeated analysis. For example, by statistically analysing the nouns used in learners' texts, it can be concluded that declension 4 nouns are most often used. The next in terms of frequency of use are declension 1, 5 and 2 nouns, while declension 3 and 6 nouns and indeclinable nouns are used very rarely. Qualitative analysis reveals certain features of morphology and word formation, including aspects of syntax, based on empirical data. It is possible to qualitatively analyse the erroneous use of nouns, verbs, or other parts of speech, trying to understand what rules determine this. For example, consider using non-reflexive verbs instead of reflexive verbs, using infinitives instead of finite forms (person forms), using a suffix that does not fit the noun paradigm, etc. According to LaVA data analysis, including learners error analysis, exercises and tests are generated. The exercises are intended to help the language learner to strengthen the linguistic competence of the Latvian language, for example, the use of verb forms in the indicative mood, both in indefinite and perfect tense forms. Exercise creation consists of three stages: (1) analysis of LaVA errors and identification of typical errors, (2) Collecting of sample sentences from various corpora of the Latvian language, for example, LVK2018, Saeima, with word forms and constructions in which language learners most often make mistakes in LaVA texts, (3) generation of different exercises using the selected sample sentences.

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