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Phonology/phonetics and morphology interact in such a way as to render difficult any clear-cut dividing line between these subfields. Romanists have long observed that phonetics play a crucial role in language change. From this point of view there is nothing exceptional in the fact that phonetics/phonology may provide the system with the very substance of morphological oppositions. The number and the extension of the morphological processes amenable to phonetic principles in the Romance domain are so wide that only a few typical phenomena are treated in this chapter. Furthermore, it is not always evident how one can establish the extent to which a given morphological alternation is phonologically driven, whether we are dealing with a purely phonological phenomenon or whether we should recognize some lexical conditioning in the choice of the allomorphs. The examples discussed (allomorphy in the definite article, subject clitics and affixes, possessives, and the nominal, verbal, and adjectival stems) show that the phonetic impulse for a morphological alternation may no longer be transparent ; in other cases, the trigger of a given pattern is no longer available or can only be identified following a process of diachronic reconstruction.
This chapter elaborates on two case studies in structural variation to illustrate how the comparison of closely related grammatical systems fuels research questions on general theoretical issues. Our first case study regards subject clitics in central Romance dialects. Subject clitics have been studied extensively over recent decades, but they still raise several questions concerning the nature of null subject languages. Analogously, there is a huge literature on the selection of perfective auxiliaries – the second case study in our chapter – and, as in the case of subject clitics, lesser-known non-standard dialects display a kaleidoscope of auxiliation options whose rationalization poses fascinating analytical challenges and yields insights into basic issues of linguistic theory. The core question raised by our case studies concerns the modelling of linguistic diversity: do the above phenomena result from a finite set of discrete parameters or emerge from random language-specific options? We argue that the otherwise ‘hyperastronomical’ number of possible grammars is aptly constrained by syntactic factors, although inflexional morphology – which syntax cannot control entirely – may have a role in the realization of specific auxiliary or subject clitic forms in each dialect and for each person.
This chapter uses data from a range of Romance languages to illustrate the different definitions of the notion of suppletion in the linguistic literature, and to offer a typology of suppletion (notable the difference between ‘incursive’ and phonologically induced suppletion). Suppletion may be most usefully viewed simply as an extreme contrast between unity of meaning, on the one hand, and disunity of the forms expressing that meaning, on the other. The typology and distribution of Romance suppletions is described, for example, from the numeral system, from the system of marking comparatives in adjectives, from the inflexional morphology of personal pronouns, from the inflexional morphology or verbs, nouns, and adjectives. While the Romance languages provide cross-linguistically typical illustrations of suppletion in its different manifestations, the Romance data are particularly thought-provoking with regard to, among other things, (i) the particular role of synonymy between lexemes in determining the emergence of incursive suppletion in diachrony; (ii) the role of existing abstract patterns of alternation in providing ‘templates’ for the paradigmatic distribution of suppletive alternants; and (iii) the role of phonological resemblance as a determinant of incursive suppletion.
This paper synthesizes evidence for the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages from three disciplines – genomic research, archaeology, and, especially, linguistics – to reassess the validity of the Anatolian and Steppe Hypotheses. Research on ancient DNA reveals a massive migration off the steppe c. 2500 BCE, providing exceptionally strong support for the Steppe hypothesis. However, intriguing questions remain, such as why ancient Greek and Indo-Iranian populations had a smaller proportion of steppe ancestry, and Anatolian apparently had none at all. Lexical and archaeological evidence for wheels and looms provides essential clues about the early separation of Anatolian from the Indo-European community and the late entrance of Greek into the Aegean area. Evidence from the morphologies of the Indo-European languages supports these findings: the morphological patterns of the Anatolian languages show clear archaism, implying earlier separation, while the morphologies of Indo-Iranian and Greek display an array of similarities pointing to relatively late areal contact. Both the lexical and the morphological evidence, then, alongside the genomic and archaeological record, suggests that the Steppe hypothesis offers a preferable solution. Ultimately, these conclusions demonstrate the need for more dynamic models of change, including considerations of contact, stratification, and cross-disciplinary approaches.
Debate around inflectional morphology in language acquisition has contrasted various rule- versus analogy-based approaches. This paper tests the rule-based Tolerance Principle (TP) against a new type of pattern in the acquisition of the possessive suffix -im in Northern East Cree. When possessed, each noun type either requires or disallows the suffix, which has a complex distribution throughout the lexicon. Using naturalistic video data from one adult and two children – Ani (2;01–4;03) and Daisy (3;08–5;10) – this paper presents two studies. Study 1 applies the TP to the input to extrapolate two possible sets of nested rules for -im and make predictions for child speech. Study 2 tests these predictions and finds that each child’s production of possessives over time is largely consistent with the predictions of the TP. This paper finds the TP can account for the acquisition of the possessive suffix and discusses implications for language science and Cree language communities.
The tongue is a fundamental organ in feeding, vocalization, and grooming. It is characterized by evolutionary adaptations reflected by diet, habitat, and function. Rodents are a very diverse mammalian order and the tongue's morphology varies in size, form, and presence of papillae. This work aimed to describe the morphological and ultrastructural aspects of the tongue of Spix's yellow-toothed cavy (Galea spixii, Wagler, 1831). Tongues of Spix's yellow-toothed cavies were analyzed with light microscopy, scanning, and transmission electron microscopy. The results showed that the tongue was divided into apex, body, and root. There were different types of papillae, such as vallate, foliate, laterally placed fungiform, fungiform, filiform, and robust filiform. The epithelium was organized into layers, including keratinized, granulous, spinous, and basal, below were lamina propria, and musculature, which evolved mucous and serous gland clusters. The tongue of Spix's yellow-toothed cavy was structurally and ultrastructurally similar to other rodents and had papillae with similar morphologies to other Caviidae species. However, the presence of robust filiform papillary lines and laterally placed fungiform papillae showed the main differences from other species. This was the first description of the tongue of Spix's yellow-toothed cavy.
Are the dimensions of morphological diversity dependent on the cognitive pathways for processing, storage, and learning of word structure, and if so, how? Conversely, are languages that differ in their morphological structure processed and learned in different ways? This volume examines the relationship between linguistic cognition and the morphological diversity found in the world’s languages. As the idea that domain-general cognitive processes and morphological typology are inextricably linked has moved into the mainstream of linguistics, the field has diversified conceptually and methodologically. This introduction to the volume offers an overview of conceptual issues that underpin the volume’s papers and some of the methodological trends they reflect. It thus serves as a roadmap for the papers that follow.
Morphological structures interact dynamically with lexical processing and storage, with the parameters of morphological typology being partly dependent on cognitive pathways for processing, storage and generalization of word structure, and vice versa. Bringing together a team of well-known scholars, this book examines the relationship between linguistic cognition and the morphological diversity found in the world's languages. It includes research from across linguistic and cognitive science sub-disciplines that looks at the nature of typological diversity and its relationship to cognition, touching on concepts such as complexity, interconnectedness within systems, and emergent organization. Chapters employ experimental, computational, corpus-based and theoretical methods to examine specific morphological phenomena, and an overview chapter provides a synthesis of major research trends, contextualizing work from different methodological and philosophical perspectives. Offering a novel perspective on how cognition contributes to our understanding of word structure, it is essential reading for psycholinguists, theoreticians, typologists, computational modelers and cognitive scientists.
The morphology of quaggas, their taxonomy, habitats, and behaviors are described. Photographs, illustrations, and taxidermy specimens are employed to examine representations and descriptions critically, for example, did quaggas have horse-like tails, and were Daniell and Harris correct in their illustrations of body striping? My analysis of taxidermy specimens shows sexual dimorphism: stallions were slightly smaller than mares, which is unlike the situation in other subspecies of plains zebras. Quaggas, named Equus quagga by both Boddaert and Gmelin, lived in a variety of habitats in the Cape Colony and Orange Free State (areas that are now part of the Western Cape, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, and the Free State provinces) including: the nama Karoo, succulent Karoo, fynbos, Albany thicket, savanna, and grassland biomes. A quagga breeding group consisting of a stallion, several mares, and their foals often joined other breeding groups to form a herd. Quaggas often grazed with wildebeests (gnus) and ostriches, and all three species probably benefitted from this association; these animals often migrated together in large numbers seeking grazing and water.
The aim of this short paper is to examine the morphological categories of direction and direct-inverse marking in Northwestern Rma/Qiang (< Trans-Himalayan/Sino-Tibetan). Based on evidence from published sources (LaPolla and Huang 2003; H. Sūn 1981; Liú 1998, 1999; Sun and Evans 2013), it is argued that the verbal systems of some northern varieties are more characteristic of hierarchical alignment than previously recognized.
It is often assumed that pre-schoolers learn a second language (L2) with ease, even for structures that are absent in their L1, such as Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers learning L2 English grammatical inflections (e.g., ducks, horses). However, while the results from Study 1 showed that such learners can imitate plural words (age = 3;5, N = 20), Studies 2 and 3 showed that they cannot yet generate or comprehend plural morphology (Study 2: age = 4;8, N = 20; Study 3: age = 4;1, N = 20), raising questions about when this is achieved. These findings have important implications for school readiness, as well as for identifying those at risk of developmental language disorders.
This article aims to examine to what extent English and Jordanian Arabic (JA) have the same classification of N + N compounds based on their degree of compositionality. It also attempts to propose a universally applicable classification of compositionality in N + N compounds. I suggest a modified version of the degree of compositionality based on previous classifications by Fernando (1996), Dirven and Verspoor (1998), and Kavka (2009). The new classification is based on the semantic contribution of the head and the non-head to the meaning of the whole compound. After I have applied the new scale to the JA data, I argue that English and JA have compounds that exhibit the four degrees of compositionality; namely completely compositional, semi-compositional, semi non-compositional and completely non-compositional. The article concludes with some recommendations for future research.
An important goal for humanoid robots is to achieve fast, flexible and stable walking. In previous research, the structure and walking algorithms evolved separately, resulting in a slow evolution speed and lack of an initial design basis. This paper proposes comprehensively considering body morphology and walking patterns, exploring the relationship between them and their influence on the motion ability. The method parameterizes the body morphology and walking patterns. Then a response surface model is established to describe the complex relationship between these parameters and finally obtain the optimized parameters, which provides a reference for the structural design and gait generation.
It is true that most teachers have limited knowledge of how words work in English. Linguistics hasn’t been a feature of their own schooling or their teacher education, and you can’t teach what you don’t know. The good news is that it isn’t hard to build the knowledge – in fact, it’s fun. In this chapter we look more closely at the linguistic threads that contribute to the rich tapestry of each word: etymology, orthography, phonology and morphology.
Chapter 3 outlined four key principles for teaching spelling: start with meaning; teach spelling explicitly; teach a repertoire of spelling knowledge; and integrate spelling instruction into all subject areas. This chapter introduces a 10-step process for planning and implementing a spelling program that is grounded in those four principles. Interspersed among the steps in the planning process are some of the questions teachers and parents frequently ask as they embark on the implementation process. What would your answers be? My responses are posted at the end of the chapter.
This chapter is focused on getting spelling assessment right, and expands upon steps 9 and 10 in the program planning process, introduced in chapter 4: assessing spelling in use, and keeping records of teaching and learning.
Chapter 2 described how words work in English, and provided guidance on what to teach in spelling. Just as important as knowing what to teach is knowing how to teach, and that is the focus of this chapter. Many teachers simply teach spelling the way they were taught – through a list of words to be learned for an end-of-week assessment. However, research shows that this is an ineffective way to learn to spell. This chapter outlines four key principles for teaching spelling, each based on what the research tells us about how we learn to spell. 1 Start with meaning. 2 Teach spelling explicitly. 3 Teach a repertoire of spelling knowledge. 4 Integrate spelling instruction across all subject areas.
Spelling can be a source of anxiety for school children and working professionals alike. Yet the spelling of words in English is not as random or chaotic as it is often perceived to be; rather, it is a system based on both meaning and a fascinating linguistic history. Misty Adoniou's public articles on the processes of teaching and learning spelling have garnered an overwhelming response from concerned parents and teachers looking for effective solutions to the problems they face in teaching English spelling to children. Spelling It Out, Revised edition aims to ease anxiety and crush the myth that good spelling comes naturally. Good spelling comes from good teaching. Based on Misty Adoniou's extensive research into spelling learning and instruction, this book encourages children and adults to nurture a curiosity about words, discover their history and, in so doing, understand the logic behind the way they are spelled.
We propose an integrated deep learning model for morphological segmentation, morpheme tagging, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, and syntactic parsing onto dependencies, using cross-level contextual information flow for every word, from segments to dependencies, with an attention mechanism at horizontal flow. Our model extends the work of Nguyen and Verspoor ((2018). Proceedings of the CoNLL Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. The Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 81–91.) on joint POS tagging and dependency parsing to also include morphological segmentation and morphological tagging. We report our results on several languages. Primary focus is agglutination in morphology, in particular Turkish morphology, for which we demonstrate improved performance compared to models trained for individual tasks. Being one of the earlier efforts in joint modeling of syntax and morphology along with dependencies, we discuss prospective guidelines for future comparison.
The Rostania occultata species complex (‘Collema occultatum s. lat.’) is revised in Fennoscandia and found to consist of four species, all epiphytes on deciduous trees: Rostania effusa A. Košuth., M. Westb. & Wedin sp. nov., R. occultata (Bagl.) Otálora et al., R. pallida A. Košuth., M. Westb. & Wedin sp. nov. and R. populina (Th. Fr.) A. Košuth., M. Westb. & Wedin comb. nov. Rostania effusa and R. pallida are newly described from humid habitats in old-growth boreal coniferous forests, usually with a mixture of deciduous trees, and from similar areas in the subalpine birch-dominated forests of Fennoscandia. Rostania effusa is characterized by apothecia with red-brown apothecium discs and an excipulum thallinum with a simple pseudocortex and cubic to oblong, muriform spores. Rostania pallida has apothecia with whitish to pale yellowish discs and an excipulum thallinum with a distinct cellular pseudocortex, and ellipsoid, muriform mature spores that are often constricted at the centre. A lectotype is designated for Collema quadratum J. Lahm ex Körb. The new combination Rostania populina is introduced for the species recognized until now as the variety Rostania occultata var. populina (Th. Fr.) Perlmutter & Rivas Plata. A key to the six species in Rostania s. str. is included.