Paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech

Recent evidence has indicated that a word's morphological family and inflectional paradigm members get activated when we produce words. These paradigmatic effects have previously been studied in careful, laboratory context using words in isolation. This previous research has not investigated how the linguistic context affects spontaneous speech production. The current corpus analysis investigates paradigmatic and syntagmatic effects in Estonian spontaneous speech. Following related work on English, we focus on morphemic and non-morphemic word final /-s/ in content words. We report that linguistic context, as measured by conditional probability, has the strongest effect on the acoustic durations, while inflectional properties (internal structure and inflectional paradigm size) also affect word and segment durations. These results indicate that morphology is part of a complex system that interacts with other aspects of the language production system.

A statistical approach to rivalry in lexeme formation: French -iser and -ifier

Rivalry in lexeme formation refers to a situation where multiple, rival lexeme formation processes may be used to fill a gap in a morphological family. In this paper we study one such situation, the rivalry between the suffixes -iser and -ifier in French to derive verbs from nouns and/or adjectives. We propose a statistical approach to the problem, and use multivariate logistic regression applied to a large dataset derived from existing ressources to establish that phonological, morphological, and semantic properties of the morphological family all contribute independently to predicting preference for one or the other suffix. One main result of this study is that rivalry can not be studied in terms of the relationship of a single base and a derived lexeme, as multiple members of the morphological family play a role in jointly predicting the choice of a suffix.

Draft Genome Sequences of Staphylococcus Podophages JBug18, Pike, Pontiff, and Pabna

We report here the draft genome sequences of Staphylococcus bacteriophages JBug18, Pike, Pontiff, and Pabna, which infect and lyse S. epidermidis and S. aureus strains. All bacteriophages belong to the morphological family Podoviridae and constitute attractive candidates for use as whole-phage therapeutics due to their compact genomes and lytic lifestyles.