The Structure of the Lexicon

1993 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph C. Salmons
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Internal Structure ◽  
Direct Evidence ◽  
Morphological Features ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
Gender Assignment ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
Lexical Structure

Data from language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and diachronic studies have all shown that the lexicon has a clear internal structure, which includes relationships among lexical items based on phonetic and phonological characteristics, semantic features, morphology, and frequency of use. In the absence, however, of direct evidence from grammar, such lexical structure has even recently been deemed irrelevant to linguistic theory. In this paper, I use evidence from German grammar, specifically gender assignment, to support a model of lexical structure like that proposed particularly within Natural Morphology. German gender assignment has been shown to be largely predictable on the basis of phonological shape (e.g. final and initial segments or clusters), semantic features, and morphological features — all factors considered to be part of the lexicon's internal structure by Bybee and others. In this way gender assignment reflects lexical structure. Moreover, frequently used vocabulary tends to violate such rules, as Bybee's view of lexical structure would predict. By so doing, German grammar exploits almost exactly the structure of the lexicon which has been proposed based on data from areas other than grammar in its narrow sense.

Linguistic Theory in Second Language Acquisition

Language ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 202
Author(s):  
Sara Thomas Rosen ◽  
Suzanne Flynn ◽  
Wayne O'Neil
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Linguistic Theory

Number and Gender Assignment to loanwords in Arabic: Implications from Varieties

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sami Hamdi
Keyword(s):  
Gender Assignment ◽  
The Core ◽  
Grammatical Categories ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
And Gender

Number and gender are two of the core grammatical categories in Arabic. The assignment of number and gender to foreign words is an area of conflict between MSA and other Arabic varieties. This paper investigates the factors that stand behind the seemingly irregularity of number and gender assignment in Arabic. It appears that speakers follow a form standardized by MSA or enforce another form following their dialects and community conventions. This variation in number and gender assignment to loans gives rise to multiple competing forms that may not be recognized by MSA or some other varieties of Arabic. Yet, the findings demonstrate consistency in assigning number and gender to loans by applying native patterns motivated by frequency of use andthe semantics of the referents.

Language acquisition in the absence of experience

1991 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 597-612 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Crain
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Experimental Evidence ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Natural Languages ◽  
Syntactic Knowledge ◽  
Early Emergence ◽  
Fundamental Goal ◽  
Decisive Evidence

AbstractA fundamental goal of linguistic theory is to explain how natural languages are acquired. This paper describes some recent findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment. The first section presents several general observations about language acquisition that linguistic theory has tried to explain and discusses the thesis that certain linguistic properties are innate because they appear universally and in the absence of corresponding experience. A third diagnostic for innateness, early emergence, is the focus of the second section of the paper, in which linguistic theory is tested against recent experimental evidence on children's acquisition of syntax.

Grammaticalization Processes in the Area of Temporal and Modal Relations

1992 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Giacalone Ramat
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Linguistic Development ◽  
Context Dependent ◽  
General Linguistic ◽  
The University

This study investigates some instances of linguistic development in the acquisition of a second language that might be subsumed under the issue of grammaticalization. First, the notion of grammaticalization is discussed with reference to the current linguistic debate and its applicability to the domain of language acquisition is evaluated. Then, some cases are examined drawing on data on the acquisition of Italian collected during several years at the University of Pavia. With respect to temporality and modality, learners are shown to move from lexical means or context-dependent strategies to a gradual acquisition of the morphological devices required by the target language. The results of the analyses are discussed in terms of their implications for both general linguistic theory and language acquisition research.

The value of clitics in non-native Spanish

1985 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juana M. Liceras
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Parameter Setting ◽  
Conflicting Evidence ◽  
L2 Learners ◽  
French And English

One of the tasks of second language acquisition research is to determine the ‘linguistic’ nature of interlanguage systems. To achieve this goal it is mandatory to formulate the properties of learners' grammars in terms of the theoretical constructs proposed by linguistic theory. I have proposed elsewhere (Liceras, 1985) that, permeability, one of those properties, is related to parameter setting. In this paper, it is hypothesized that the location of a given process in the different components of the grammar may also be relevant in the determination of permeability. In the light of conflicting evidence provided by the Spanish interlanguage of French and English speakers with respect to the value of clitics in the non-native grammar, it is suggested that, due to the nature of ‘intake’, L2 learners of Spanish may locate clitics in the lexicon (as affix-like elements) or postlexically (as words in the syntax) rather than giving them a unidimensional value. I have also suggested that non-native clitics may not share all the properties that are assigned to Modern Spanish clitic pronouns.

Morphological Features and Markedness in the Old French Noun Declension

1987 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas C. Walker
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Morphological Analysis ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Old French ◽  
Morphological Features ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
General Properties ◽  
Morphological Studies ◽  
Adjectival Inflection

In the evolution of morphological studies, morphological features and markedness have come to play increasingly important rôles. Feature notation in morphology allows the development of the notion of natural morphological class, renders explicit much of the internal structure of paradigms and permits the exploitation, suitably adapted, of many of the results obtained in phonology. Markedness considerations, particularly when linked to general theories of morphology, again highlight morphological structure, constrain the variety of permitted analyses, and indicate, at least in part, the expected direction of historical change. In the sections to follow, I will present an analysis of Old French nominal and adjectival inflection which makes key use of morphological features and the differences between the marked and unmarked values of these features. This study will be particularly concerned with constraining the morphological analysis of Old French and conversely, with using Old French data to investigate more general properties of morphological systems.

A new aerophilic species of the genus Diploneis (Bacillariophyta) from the Mawsmai cave of Meghalaya, Northeast India

Phytotaxa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 443 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
CHINTAN BHATT ◽  
BALASUBRAMANIAN KARTHICK
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Central Area ◽  
Northeast India ◽  
Morphological Features ◽  
Electron Microscopic ◽  
Scanning Electron Microscopic ◽  
Scanning Electron

A new aerophilic species, Diploneis mawsmaii sp. nov., is here described from a speleo-environment. The species is found on mosses growing under the water dripping region of Mawsmai cave, Meghalaya state of India. It is discussed based on detailed light and scanning electron microscopic observations and compared with morphologically similar Diploneis species like D. modica Hustedt, D. modicahassiaca Lange-Bertalot & A. Fuhrmann, D. boldtiana Cleve and D. zula Kulikovskiy & Lange Bertalot. Diploneis mawsmaii possesses distinct morphological features such as a largely expanded central area bearing a prominent circular to oval central nodule and the internal structure exhibiting short striation with acute ends and the flattening of longitudinal canals at the central area. This discovery increases our understanding of cavern biodiversity in the Indo-Burma hotspot region.

scholarly journals Predicting the birth of a spoken word

2015 ◽  
Vol 112 (41) ◽  
pp. 12663-12668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon C. Roy ◽  
Michael C. Frank ◽  
Philip DeCamp ◽  
Matthew Miller ◽  
Deb Roy
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Learning Environment ◽  
Word Learning ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Multimodal Data ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Frequency Of Use

Children learn words through an accumulation of interactions grounded in context. Although many factors in the learning environment have been shown to contribute to word learning in individual studies, no empirical synthesis connects across factors. We introduce a new ultradense corpus of audio and video recordings of a single child’s life that allows us to measure the child’s experience of each word in his vocabulary. This corpus provides the first direct comparison, to our knowledge, between different predictors of the child’s production of individual words. We develop a series of new measures of the distinctiveness of the spatial, temporal, and linguistic contexts in which a word appears, and show that these measures are stronger predictors of learning than frequency of use and that, unlike frequency, they play a consistent role across different syntactic categories. Our findings provide a concrete instantiation of classic ideas about the role of coherent activities in word learning and demonstrate the value of multimodal data in understanding children’s language acquisition.

A corpus and lexical analysis of the Spanish idiom a conciencia

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Belén López Meirama
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Lexical Semantics ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Lexical Analysis ◽  
Initial Approach ◽  
Frequency Of Use

AbstractThe aim of this study is to make a detailed description of the polysemic structure of the phraseme a conciencia. The methodology is based on an understanding of lexical semantics including the parameter of frequency of use in corpora (see Sinclair 1991), with data drawn from Corpus del Espanol del Siglo XXI (CORPES XXI). I will first discuss briefly certain issues relating to polysemy that will arise in the analysis; second, I will make an initial approach to the meaning of a conciencia based on lexicographic information, to be followed by a presentation of the corpus analysis itself. Finally, I will consider the semantic study of this particular phraseme by considering its combinability as seen in the contexts studied. In the conclusions I will try to show the internal structure of the form.

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