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Three Nganasan-Evenki/Dolgan Morphosyntactic Parallels and Their Implications

Author(s): Florian Siegl / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2015

The following study discusses three morphosyntactic features of Nganasan, the negative verb ’not want’, the distribution of the copula in predicative noun/adjective constructions, and the grammaticalization of a directional postposition into an allative case marker. Whereas for all these features, some Samoyedic parallels are available, there exist equally good parallels in two of Nganasan’s potential contact languages Evenki and Dolgan. Although contacts with the aforementioned languages have been postulated in research on Nganasan earlier, prior studies have concentrated on lexical borrowings. This article attempts to show that these three morphosyntactic features are the outcome of contact induced convergence.

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Noms de personnes latins dans l’Antiquité classique et dans les langues romanes

Author(s): Ioana-Rucsandra Dascălu / Language(s): French Issue: 1-2/2015

This article on onomastics and toponymy aims at showing the changes undergone by names of persons and places, from Classical Antiquity – to which purpose we have explained the names used in Classical Latin – to modern languages. If the classical languages of Antiquity witnessed a close semantic relation between the qualities or drawbacks of a person and the name assigned to him/her, the relation is non-motivated in modern languages. We have also followed the bidirectional relationship between anthroponomastics and toponymy – names of persons making up names of places, as well as names of places resulting in names of persons.

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De la syntaxis la morfosintaxă. Repere teoretice în istoria sintaxei româneşti

Author(s): Elena-Camelia Zăbavă / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1-2/2015

This paper includes a detailed presentation of some of the most important philological works dealing with syntax. Our research aims at emphasizing the main theoretical ideas in the history of Romanian syntax. It starts with the first grammar books in the 18th century and finishes with the new concepts about syntax, as presented in the latest edition of Gramatica Academiei (2005/2008).

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An Approach to the Synoptic Gospels

Author(s): Ioan Beniamin Pop / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2018

The Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, also known as the ‘synoptic gospels’, alongside the Gospel according to John, have been analysed in order to determine the frequency of adverbs exhibited throughout the four gospels. The study attempts to monitor the most frequent characteristics adverbs display and the manner in which these features reveal the cohesion of the text while reinforcing utterances and, at the same time, arranging actions and events or placing emphasis on the modified part of speech. Due to the highly integrated structure of the gospels, however, few involvement features specific to adverbs are expected to be found.

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K některým vývojovým aspektům morfologie současné češtiny

Author(s): Oldrich Ulicny / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2017

A certain shift to the deflectivation enforces in the morphological structure of the contemporary Czech language. At the same time, tendencies to turn towards the analytic language construct are registred. This phenomenon, which has already begun in the older phases of development, is currently increasing in intensity and scope. In this paper, four main types of deflectivation in contemporary Czech are presented, which are documented by numerous references to the behavior of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs.

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Valori semantico-pragmatice ale apoziției în limba română vorbită

Author(s): Rozalia Colciar / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2019

The study approaches the apposition and the means of expressing the appositive relationship in spoken Romanian based on the material extracted from the published spoken language corpora (CORV, IV II and ROVA) which best illustrate the everyday discourse. The appositive relationship is a relatioships of discoursive equivalence between two coreferential linguistic sequences: basis (actual reference) and apposition (virtual reference). The apposition states another feature of the referee characterized by the first term in the commnunication, resuming and completing it. From the pragmatic point of view, the apposition is also a speech act, a discoursive strategy, marking the interrupted message in the form of a supplementary element through which the locutor doubles the first denomination. According to the classifications proposed by GALR II, we study, at clause and senttence levels, the nominal appositions (equative or attributive types), the appositive structures simple or complex (chained), resumative or multiple (analytic) and also semantic types of appositions (identifying, designating or rephrasing). We are going to identify the appositive structures marked by apposemes (adverbs having a metalinguistic function, whose role is to explain the appositive relationship), such as: adică (such as), și anume (namely), altfel spus (in other words), mai bine zis (better said), mai exact (more exactly), respectiv (i.e.).

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Cross-lingual transfer of knowledge in distributional language models: Experiments in Hungarian

Author(s): Attila Novák,Borbála Novák / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2022

In this paper, we argue that the very convincing performance of recent deep-neural-model-based NLP applications has demonstrated that the distributionalist approach to language description has proven to be more successful than the earlier subtle rule-based models created by the generative school. The now ubiquitous neural models can naturally handle ambiguity and achieve human-like linguistic performance with most of their training consisting only of noisy raw linguistic data without any multimodal grounding or external supervision refuting Chomsky's argument that some generic neural architecture cannot arrive at the linguistic performance exhibited by humans given the limited input available to children. In addition, we demonstrate in experiments with Hungarian as the target language that the shared internal representations in multilingually trained versions of these models make them able to transfer specific linguistic skills, including structured annotation skills, from one language to another remarkably efficiently.

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BiVaSE: A bilingual variational sentence encoder with randomly initialized Transformer layers

Author(s): Bence Nyéki / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2022

Transformer-based NLP models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many NLP tasks including text classification and text generation. However, the layers of these models do not output any explicit representations for texts units larger than tokens (e.g. sentences), although such representations are required to perform text classification. Sentence encodings are usually obtained by applying a pooling technique during fine-tuning on a specific task. In this paper, a new sentence encoder is introduced. Relying on an autoencoder architecture, it was trained to learn sentence representations from the very beginning of its training. The model was trained on bilingual data with variational Bayesian inference. Sentence representations were evaluated in downstream and linguistic probing tasks. Although the newly introduced encoder generally performs worse than well-known Transformer-based encoders, the experiments show that it was able to learn to incorporate linguistic information in the sentence representations.

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Le morphème d’insistance meismes en moyen français dans les oeuvres de Christine de Pizan – valeurs et emplois

Author(s): Małgorzata Posturzyńska-Bosko / Language(s): French Issue: 3/2022

The aim of the present article is to analyze the functioning of the meismes morpheme in Middle French, on the basis of Christine de Pizan’s works, above all the attempt to define and arrange the contexts of occurence of its particular paradigms in the language that demonstrates the features of a hybrid system. The analysis of occurences containing the meismes morpheme shows a co-existence of defensive constructions known in Ancient French altogether with the new, more numerous ones. The use of the meismes morpheme is characterized by a strong regularity and a consequence of applying analogical structures, which constitutes a piece of evidence that the system stabilizes, and even codifies itself.

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The development and functions of the inferential marker chog‘i in Uzbek

Author(s): Melike Üzüm / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

In the evidential system of Uzbek, the speaker has different grammatical options in marking the source of information, such as -ibdi, ekan, emish, etc., although it is not compulsory to mark this category in the utterance. In addition to these established markers, new markers have developed into evidentials, and they encode specific sub-categories of evidentiality. In this study, after a brief overview of grammatical markers of evidentiality in Uzbek, the marker chog‘i is examined with a syntactic and semantic approach based on a corpus of selected texts. Its development into an inferential marker is evaluated with special attention to sources of evidentials.

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MORPHOLOGICAL PRODUCTIVITY OF ADJECTIVE-FORMING PREFIXES IN ENGLISH AT THE LEVEL OF WORD-FORMATION RULES

Author(s): Maja M. Žarković Mccray / Language(s): English Issue: 27/2023

This paper studies the morphological productivity of adjective-forming prefixes at the level of word-formation rules. The productivity at the aforementioned level is the union of the productivity at the level of word-formation types and morphological types. The aim of the paper is to offer pieces of information on the interaction of different concepts within different word-formation types together with the morphological aspect through different morphological types. We find 267 examples of adjectives and analyse 31 prefixes interacting with various simple or complex adjectives in the corpus comprised of news, literary, academic and TV registers. After analytic, descriptive and statistical methods, we conclude that they fall into 5 different conceptual categories, i.e., wordformation type clusters (Quality, Location, Quantity, Time and State). The majority of clusters show that the stem is determining the conceptual category while prefixes refine it. The highest productivity rates are recorded with such word-formation types. The only exceptions are Quantity and Time where the conceptual category depends on the prefixes and stems equally. The results from the morphological analyses show that most of the prefixes are inserting additional semantic pieces of information, usually recording the highest PR and not changing the conceptual category of the stem and appearing within one or multiple clusters, with exceptions for Quantity and Time.

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The reanalysis of /ɡ/ as a verb class marker: An exaptation case within the Catalan 2nd conjugation

Author(s): Manuel Badal / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2023

In Old Catalan, some verbs like beure ‘to drink’ display a velar consonant in the forms that come from Latin perfectum, such as 3sg.prt *ˈbibwit > bec [ˈbek] ‘s/he drank’. This velar was initially a perfect marker. However, the consonant spread analogically from perfective to imperfective forms through an exaptation process. In the present paper, we compare two different verb classes, and prove that the existence of syncretism between the first and third persons of the present indicative (1sg.prs.ind beu [ˈbew] ‘I drink’ vs. 3sg.prs.ind beu [ˈbew] ‘s/he drinks’) is a factor that accelerates the analogical process of velarization.

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Acquisition and processing of word formation in German

Author(s): Sabine Sommer-Lolei,Veronika Mattes,Katharina Korecky-Kröll,Wolfgang U. Dressler / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2023

Cognitive processing strategies can explain general word-formation preferences that influence the structures and their developments. They are based on simplicity, transparency, iconicity, salience, and frequency. We present and discuss evidence from our data on first language acquisition for how these cognitively based general preferences can explain the course of development of word formation and how they interact or compete. The analysis is based on the development of distributions of word formations in longitudinal data and panel data of child speech and their input from high and low socio-economic status families. In order to evaluate the productivity of a word-formation pattern in child speech, we applied the mini-paradigm criterion. Age-of-acquisition effects will be presented according to our own processing studies and to literature.

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Sound patterns, frequency and predictability in inflection

Author(s): András Cser / Language(s): English Issue: 3/2023

The paper investigates the relations between phonological form and information content within Latin verbal inflection from two interrelated points of view. It looks at conditional entropy relations within the present paradigm to see how these relate to the textual frequency of the individual forms; and it seeks to answer the question to what extent the phonological form of stems and endings has the potential to lead to ambiguity in morphological marking. The latter issue is approached from the angle of the information content that word forms taken in themselves have about their morphological status. The broader question of potential ambiguity is broken down into two separate questions: one concerns stems where intra-paradigmatic ambiguity would be possible; the other concerns stems that include phonological material that could itself be interpreted as a morphological marker. The absence of potential ambiguity in the first sense, and its severe restriction in the second sense is interpreted here as an emergent mechanism to enhance the information content of verb forms.

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THE EVOLUTION OF DEPENDENT SUBJUNCTIVE IN ROMANIAN LANGUAGE

Author(s): Maria-Laura Rus / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 5/2023

We focused in this paper on the dependent use of subjunctive in different stages of Romanian language (from the 16th century to the 21st century). We discuss the elements that precede this verbal form and the semantic field they belong to (possibility, probability, certainty, knowledge etc.), some differences due to the evolution of Romanian language and the occurrence of subjunctive in some subordinate clauses.

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Deriving Morphologically Irregular Passive Potential Adjectives in Polish

Author(s): Sebastian Wasak / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2023

In Polish, passive potential adjectives are productively formed by means of attaching the suffix -alny to transitive verbs (Szymanek 2010). They have been shown to project the external argument of their verbs, as well as being able to co-occur with agentive przez-phrases and instrumental phrases (Bloch-Trojnar 2019). Hence, under a syntactic approach to word formation such as Distributed Morphology, they are derived via outer affixation, with their structure containing the vP and VoiceP heads. A small subset of Polish passive potential adjectives are derived with affixes other than -alny. These include czytelny ‘legible, readable, understandable’, strawny ‘digestible’ and zrozumiały ‘understandable, comprehensible’. In this paper, it is demonstrated that while these adjectives behave similarly to -alny adjectives in terms of licensing Voice-related modifiers, they are excluded from a wide range of verbal contexts available to regularly derived passive potential adjectives. As such, czytelny, strawny and zrozumiały offer evidence for the claim that the layer that introduces event implications is distinct from the verbal head that triggers spell-out. Specifically, adjectives such as czytelny, strawny and zrozumiały can be argued to contain the little v head, but not the cyclic vP projection, which is in line with the architecture of grammar as proposed by Embick (2010).

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Variation in the 1sg.indef: More than you wanted to know

Author(s): Péter Rácz,Ágnes Lukács / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2024

The first person singular indefinite or non-definite of Hungarian verbs that end in -ik shows variation between the regular -k suffix and the -m suffix, used otherwise in the definite. This variation is systematic and subject to metalinguistic awareness. Our study relies on previous quantitative work, a frequency dictionary compiled from the new Hungarian Webcorpus, as well as a forced-choice elicitation experiment to assess the role of word frequency, word length, derivational endings, and across-form similarity in shaping this variation. We find that first person singular indefinite variation is largely defined by natural categories: verbs that look similar will also show a similar preference to -k/-m. This pattern is attested in the webcorpus as well as in participant responses in the elicitation task.

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No lowering, only paradigms: A paradigm-based account of linking vowels in Hungarian

Author(s): Péter Rebrus,Péter Szigetvári,Miklós Törkenczy / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2024

This paper analyses linking vowels of Hungarian in a paradigm-based approach. We argue that the quality of linking vowels is determined by such a complex interaction of phonological, morphological, and morphophonological factors on both stems and suffixes that attributing them to individual morphemes is not plausible. Instead in the model proposed here linking vowels emerge from the identification of initial and final substrings within and across paradigms.

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Hungarian auxiliaries revisited

Author(s): Ágnes Kalivoda,Gábor Prószéky / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2024

This paper uses a corpus linguistic approach to investigate finite verbs co-occurring with infinitives. It aims to explore a range of similar verbs along a set of formal-distributional features based on Kálmán C. et al.'s (1989) study. We used hierarchical agglomerative clustering to analyze the data. The analysis identifies four clusters, two comprising verbs more auxiliary-like than the others. The results of this experiment are broadly similar to those of Kálmán C. et al. (1989); however, we also find remarkable differences. Most importantly, the so-called stress-avoiding verbs are likely to occur between the preverb and its associated infinitive, indicating that they are much closer to central auxiliaries than previously assumed.

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Sound Change or Analogy? Palatalisation in the Plural Paradigm of the Khotanese i-declension

Author(s): Alessandro Del Tomba / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2024

The article deals with the origin of palatalisation in the plural paradigm of the Khotanese i-declension. According to the common view, palatalisation resulted from regular sound change only in the nominative-accusative plural, with the etymological form of the endings remaining not-palatalised in the rest of the plural inflection. Subsequently, there emerged a tendency for the palatalised allomorph to become generalised and extend across the paradigm. However, a thorough examination of older and later Old Khotanese manuscripts challenges this perspective, revealing no evidence of original allomorphy between the palatalised and non-palatalised stem variants in the plural. This study demonstrates that palatalisation did not originate from analogical levellings but rather arose from regular sound change. Additionally, the article draws a comparison between the i-declension plural paradigm and the inflection of most numerals greater than ‘three’, which exhibit palatalisation in all case forms except for the nominative-accusative.

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