On the Formation of Verb Compounds in Early Middle Japanese

This paper is dedicated to the formation of verb compounds in Early Middle Japanese, a stage of the Japanese language used in the Heian Period (794–1185). The findings reveal that current verb compounds have come a long way from Old Japanese. Multiple verbs in Old Japanese are assigned to an associate type, rather than a compounding type of relation. Thus, the serial constituents receive equal syntactic weight, giving rise to the extensive use of the coordinate type and succession type of multi-verbs. In Early Middle Japanese, the combinations of the two constituents seem much tighter, giving rise the frequent use of the modifier-predicate V-V. The conclusion emerging from this study is that it was not until Early Middle Japanese that verb compounds in the strict sense appeared. Moreover, two types of verb weakening are observed in Early Middle Japanese: (a) transformation of the first verb into a prefix, (b) grammaticalization of the second verb into a directional/resultative complement.

Is Morphology used to encode Derivations when Learning a Foreign Language?

Derived words suggest a very efficient mnemonic when they have to be learnt as items in a foreign language (FL). They could be remembered by tagging in semantic memory the property that is lexicalized by the stem and storing the particular affix. A learning experiment was designed to find out whether students make spontaneous use of this encoding strategy. The results indicated that subjects' recall performance was better for derived words than underived ones, even when the presence of stems was not pointed out to them by the experimenter. The error data were compatible with the use of the proposed mnemonic. Surprisingly, subjects who were given only native language translations did better on the derivations than those who were provided additional comment on the morphological structure of these words. This finding proves that the method of giving translations for FL words is not so bad after ail and that the memory representations subjects form in such conditions are not necessarily of the paired-associate type.

Word Association and Formal Training of the Written Language: Consolidation of the Response Base

Commonalities of adult word associations with 659 stimulus words were examined as a function of the elementary school grade level at which the words are formally introduced in their written form. There was a systematic decrease in the commonality of associates as a function of the grade level at which a stimulus word is introduced. A random sample of 20 words from each grade level showed that 64% of the primary responses to these words had been introduced in written form before the second grade. This suggests that early experiential associates of the spoken language become consolidated into more succinct networks. To investigate a possible paired-associate type of learning as an explanation for the high commonality of words learned early, associations of children in kindergarten through the fifth grade were obtained with 70 of the 659 words (10 from each grade level from kindergarten through sixth grade). Three significant effects of commonality were noted: (1) words introduced in the second grade had the highest commonalities regardless of the grade of the child, (2) the commonality of a word had a tendency to increase in the grade when it was introduced (even though responses by children in preceding grades indicated familiarity with the word), (3) the commonality of a given word increased at each succeeding grade level even though the children's vocabulary was steadily expanding. The commonalities observed for children and adults are discussed in terms of time and manner of formal introduction of the written words.