Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Toward Ontology Generation From Tables, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Yuri A. Tijerino, David W. Embley, Yihong Ding, George Nagy

Faculty Publications

At the heart of today’s information-explosion problems are issues involving semantics, mutual understanding, concept matching, and interoperability. Ontologies and the Semantic Web are offered as a potential solution, but creating ontologies for real-world knowledge is nontrivial. If we could automate the process, we could significantly improve our chances of making the Semantic Web a reality. While understanding natural language is difficult, tables and other structured information make it easier to interpret new items and relations. In this paper we introduce an approach to generating ontologies based on table analysis. We thus call our approach TANGO (Table ANalysis for Generating Ontologies). …

Analogical Modeling And Morphological Change: The Case Of The Adjectival Negative Prefix In English, Don William Chapman, Royal Skousen

Faculty Publications

This article examines the usefulness of Skousen’s Analogical Modeling (AM) for explaining morphological change. In contrast to previous accounts of analogy, AM constitutes a general unified model of language that accounts for both sporadic and systematic changes. AM also provides explicit constraints on analogy that allow explanation of how morphological changes begin, which forms most likely serve as patterns for analogy, and which forms are most likely to change.

AM is then tested on the case of the adjectival negative prefix in English (in-, un-, dis-, etc.), using the Middle and Early Modern English portions of the Helsinki corpus as …

Preaspiration And Gemination In Central Numic, Dirk Elzinga, John E. Mclaughlin

Faculty Publications

The Numic (Uto-Aztecan) languages are well known for consonant gradation, which each language shows to some degree. Three consonantal series have been reconstructed for Proto-Numic: Geminating, Nasalizing, and Spirantizing. The Central Numic languages Timbisha, Shoshoni, and Comanche have preserved these three consonantal series and added a fourth, Aspirating. The Aspirating series is historically derived from the Geminating series, but it is synchronically distinct from it. On the basis of verb class behavior in Central Numic, we show that the Central Numic Aspirated series is a straight forward consequence of Proto-Uto-Aztecan stress patterns as reflected in pre-Proto-Central Numic.

Word-Formation As Creativity Within Productivity Constraints: Sociolinguistic Evidence, Don William Chapman, Pavol Stekauer, Slávka Tomaščíková, Štefan Franko

Faculty Publications

Productivity has been one of the central topics in the field of word-formation in recent decades. Heretofore, productivity has been mainly, if not solely, discussed in formal terms, such as which affixes can be used with which stems, the productivity of rival affixes, etc. Such a formal approach leaves out the speakers’ needs for creating new words. Accounting for speakers’ word-formation needs requires a re-evaluation of the notion of creativity. In our approach to word-formation, this notion emphasizes the active role of language users, reflecting the fact that, in each act of naming, there is more or less significant space …