Morphological structure of words in Modern English

In the article “Morphological structure of words in Modern English” the author conducted research on the study of the Morphological structure of words in the process of learning Modern English. In this article, the author describes the morphological structure of the word. They are: 1) simple words; 2) compound words; 3) words that consist of the same root and never change their meaning; 4) words that are obscured by various additions to the derivative; 5) words formed with the help of various suffices; 6) affixes that change the form of the word; 7) abbreviations. A morpheme is a small part of a word. A morpheme has an independent meaning. A morpheme can be considered the root of the word. The word itself cannot be considered a morpheme. Affixes are divided into prefixes and suffixes. Both – prefixes and suffixes can change the meaning of the word. Key words: suffix, prefix, accent, structure, participate, separate, base

The Prosody of Wh-exclamatives and Wh-questions in German: Speech Act Differences, Information Structure, and Sex of Speaker

The prosody of non-assertive speech acts other than questions is rather underexplored. Very little is known about the role of information structure in non-assertive speech acts in general. The present study presents two production experiments examining the prosody of string-identical verb-second (experiment 1) and verb-final (experiment 2) wh-exclamatives and wh-questions in German in relation to their status as different speech acts, in relation to their sensitivity to information structure, and in relation to speaker sex. The study shows that the two speech acts are differentiated by many prosodic means, both globally (duration, intonation contour) and locally (accent distribution in the clause-initial and clause-final regions; pitch, duration, intensity on various elements in the clause, especially the subject pronoun and the direct object, which are more prominent in exclamatives, and the verb-second auxiliary, which is more prominent in questions). Exclamatives overall show a very rigid prosodic contour; they typically are realized with an accent on the subject pronoun and on the object and end in a fall. Questions are much more flexible; they are realized as rises or falls, and show a more varied accent structure in the clause-initial and clause-final regions. Both speech acts show information-structural effects of givenness marking, but the effects in exclamatives are remarkably weak. It is proposed that the speech-act marking prosody overrides information-structural effects to some extent. Male and female speakers show differences in their preferred accent patterns for the two speech acts. Some acoustic differences are only reliable for female speakers.

The Role of Melodic and Rhythmic Accents in Musical Structure

Two experiments investigated the perception of melodic and rhythmic accents in musical patterns. Musiclike patterns were created in which recurring melodic and/or rhythmic accents marked higher order periods that, when both accents were present, could differ in terms of period and/or phase according to the construct of joint accent structure (M. R. Jones, 1987). Listeners were asked to indicate the location of accents in these patterns by tapping to tone onsets. Each experiment pursued two main questions. First, are accents, as manipulated, salient to listeners? Second, do listeners track higher order time spans formed by melodic and rhythmic accents in a way that shows a sensitivity to interrelationships between melody and rhythm? Results supported affirmative answers to these questions in analyses of tapping locations and time spans between taps, respectively. Furthermore, results suggested that accents function as temporal landmarks that listeners can use when tracking the time structure of musical patterns, and that the complexity of this time structure arises from higher order time spans marked by different types of accents.

Accent Structures in Music Performance

Perceptual studies suggest that the segmentation of a musical sequence is influenced by three accent structures: rhythmic grouping, melodic, and metric accent structures. We investigate whether performers emphasize these types of accents with systematic performance variations (intensity, interonset timing, and articulation). In three experiments, skilled pianists performed sequences of various musical complexities: simple sequences containing only one accent structure (Experiment 1), more complex sequences containing coinciding or conflicting accent structures (Experiment 2), and a concert pianist's performance of a sonata containing coinciding and conflicting accent structures (Experiment 3). In all three musical contexts, similar systematic performance variations were observed in relation to each type of accent. Variations corresponding to rhythmic grouping accents were most consistent across musical contexts and dominated when the accent structures conflicted. These findings suggest perceptual correlates for the accent structures in music performance that may facilitate listeners' segmentation of musical sequences.