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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Morphophonological And Semantic Adaptation Of Arabisms In Galician, Lotfi Sayahi, Juan Antonio Thomas Jan 2005

Morphophonological And Semantic Adaptation Of Arabisms In Galician, Lotfi Sayahi, Juan Antonio Thomas

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This papers analyzes the processes of morphophonological adaptation of words from Arabic origin that are present in Galician, a Romance language spoken in Northwestern Spain. It presents a list of all the Arabisms present in this language, some four hundred fifty entries, and assesses the conditions for its contact with Arabic. Detailed analysis of twelve words unique to Galician, i.e. not present in Castilian Spanish, highlights their importance as a distinguishing feature within this particular linguistic system and investigates the great variability in their adaptation. A final argument will be made that lexical borrowing in this case was partially a …


Taking A Free Ride In Morphophonemic Learning, John J. Mccarthy Jan 2005

Taking A Free Ride In Morphophonemic Learning, John J. Mccarthy

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

As language learners begin to analyze morphologically complex words, they face the problem of projecting underlying representations from the morphophonemic alternations that they observe. Research on learnability in Optimality Theory has started to address this problem, and this article deals with one aspect of it. When alternation data tell the learner that some surface [B]s are derived from underlying /A/s, the learner will under certain conditions generalize by deriving all [B]s, even nonalternating ones, from /A/s. An adequate learning theory must therefore incorporate a procedure that allows nonalternating [B]s to take a «free ride» on the /A/ →[B] unfaithful map.