Linguistics Commons^™

Pinky Extension In American Sign Language: Evidence For A Lexically Restricted Morphological Process, Laurel Whitsett

Linguistics & TESOL Dissertations

This study investigates pinky extension (PE) in American Sign Language (ASL). PE involves extending the pinky finger in signs, even though this feature is not present in standard dictionary representations of those signs. Although PE has been previously described as conveying emphasis, this account does not fully explain its distribution. This study asks whether PE reflects a meaningful part of how signs are structured in ASL, rather than a matter of individual style or variation. Focusing on adjectives, it examines whether PE interacts with sentence position. In ASL, certain adjectives may appear either before (prenominally) or after (postnominally) the noun …

Muzibogun Research Symposium Poster, Serena Parra, Maurissio Gonzalez, Renee Alonzo, Cj Spears

Team - Muzibogun - Documents

This is the research poster which we presented at the 2025 Research Symposium

Muzibogun Morphology, Serena Parra, Maurissio Gonzalez, Renee Alonzo, Cj Spears

Team - Muzibogun - Documents

This shows how we turned our phonemes into morphemes and into words.

Improving Low-Resource Translation With Finite State Grammars, Nicholas J. Uva

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Scarcity of training data continues to pose a problem for the development of neural machine translation systems for low-resource languages. This study develops a method for the incorporation of linguistic information into the training of neural machine translation models for low-resource languages, using morphological grammars created using finite state transducers. This study explores the benefits, historical background, and effectiveness of this approach. This study incorporates morphological tags into a pre-trained multilingual neural machine translation model using a dual encoder structure. This study finds an improvement in performance in the Irish-English translation scenario. This method offers promising results with low computational …

Overregularization Of Irregular Spanish Verbal Morphology: The Cases Of 2sg Preterit And Irregular Past Participles, Elisabeth Baker Martínez

Spanish and Portuguese ETDs

This dissertation investigates a widely observed phenomenon in child language acquisition: overregularization, which occurs when a child applies a regular linguistic pattern where an irregular form is expected (Bybee, 2015), for example, when a child overregularizes irregular 1sg Spanish sé ‘I know’ as sabo. This dissertation adds to the research on the overregularization of Spanish verbal morphology. The population of focus is Spanish-speaking children ranging from the ages of 1;10 – 12;4 with different language backgrounds (e.g., monolingual Spanish children, U.S. child heritage speakers). The studies included address the development of two Spanish morphological forms by focusing on children’s …

The History Of -Eer In English: Suffix Competition Or Symbiosis?, Zachary Dukic, Chris C. Palmer

Faculty Articles

Ecological models of competition have provided great explanatory power regarding synonymy in derivational morphology. Competition models of this type have certainly shown their utility, as they have demonstrated, among other things, the relevance of frequency measures, productivity, compositionality and analyzability when comparing the development of morphological constructions. There has been less consideration of alternative models that could be used to describe the historical co-development of suffixes that produce words with sometimes similar forms or meanings but are not inevitably or solely in competition. The symbiotic model proposed in this article may help answer larger questions in linguistics, such as how …

Exploring Etymology Assignment Description, David Wolff

Open Educational Resources - Teaching and Learning

The English language is a borrowed language, a blend of words from many languages from around the world. We see this in the various ways sounds are represented by letters and letter combinations. In transparent or shallow orthographies, there is high predictability and consistent letter-sound correspondence whereas in opaque or deep orthographies, there are many ways to spell the same sound as well as there are many sounds for the same spellings (Burkins & Yates, 2021; Moats, 2020). This assignment description is a guided inquiry for preservice teachers to explore the concept of etymology by watching and reflecting on six …

Stable Complexity: Verbal Inflection In Prominent And Frequent Environments, Lukas Denk

Linguistics ETDs

Despite presenting challenges for speakers, complex linguistic features such as lexically conditioned inflection (LCI) persist across different languages. LCI forms part of not entirely predictable paradigms which require lexeme-specific knowledge to master. Moreover, LCI remains one of the oldest morphological phenomena in certain languages. Previous research has linked the persistence of such complexity to language-external factors like geographic and social circumstances of speech communities.

This dissertation delves into the question whether language-internal properties are associated with the distribution of inflectional complexity. LCI is compared with other inflectional paradigms across 41 genetically and geographically distant languages. The study shows that LCI …

Memetic Epidemiology: A Mathematical Model For Tracking The Spread Of Linguistic Features Across Western Europe, Benjamin Shavitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this dissertation is to introduce a powerful new method for demonstrating the role of contact in potential cases of linguistic contact spread, Memetic Epidemiology, that can facilitate extensive future research. This dissertation introduces and demonstrates the use of this method on examples from Western and Central Europe.

Part I begins by providing theoretical background for Memetic Epidemiology using understandings, including Memetics, and Evolutionary Phonology and its extensions. Part I proceeds to lay out the objective of Memetic Epidemiology: to provide a new means of demonstrating that contact influenced the rise of linguistic features in certain languages during …

La Morphologie Flexionnelle En Grammaire Fonctionnelle: Place Et Fonction, Nacer Idrissi

Dirassat

Inflectional Morphology in Functional Grammar: Place and Function

We have presented in a previous article (cf. Dirassat n ° 8) the different mechanisms of derivative morphology. This, we have shown, is supported by the predicate formation rules which not only operate at the fund level but also produce structures: synthetic and analytical. The rules of expression (RE) Cl), for their part represent the processes that convert the underlying clause structure (SSJC) into a constituent structure (SC). This type of rule is responsible for the introduction of the different linguistic means, among others the affixes, the auxiliary verbs, the particles, the …

Microvariation In Verbal Rather, Jim Wood

Yale Working Papers in Grammatical Diversity

This paper uses survey results and interactive mapping tools to analyze correlations across different versions of the non-standard verbal use of the word rather, in particular with participial morphology, as in rathered. Across numerous possible instantiations of the construction, there appear to be in fact a quite limited number of grammars, which are generated by an implicational hierarchy of functional heads, along with the availability of a silent verb HAVE. The overall picture supports several broader conclusions. First, silent verbs can be licensed by head-moving to a modal head in the extended projection. This movement is freely available, but …

Cross-Linguistic Morphosyntactic Influence In Bilingual Speakers Of Jamaican Creole And Jamaican English, Taryn R. Malcolm

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Bilingualism in Jamaica is of considerable consequence, as most individuals are early bilinguals, speaking both a variety of Jamaican Creole (JC) from birth and having standardized English (sE) as the language of instruction in education. Immigrants from Jamaica to the United States are an ideal population to examine how cross-linguistic influence (CLI) impacts morphosyntax as JC and sE differ in morphosyntactic constructions, including verb tense- marking, subject-verb agreement, and copula use. While much of the work in the field of CLI has examined spoken language pairs with varying degrees of similarity (or difference) between the languages, examining CLI in a …

On The Relationship Between Frequency, Features, And Markedness In Inflection: Experimental Evidence From Russian Nouns, Jeffrey R. Parker

Faculty Publications

Markedness has a long tradition in linguistics as a way to describe linguistic asymmetries. In this paper, I investigate an argument about the necessity of markedness as a tool for capturing the structural distribution of inflectional affixes and predicting the behavioral consequences of that distribution. Based on evidence from German adjectives, Clahsen et al. argue that the number of specified features of inflectional affixes (which I argue represents a type of markedness) affects reaction times in lexical access. Affixes’ features, however, overlap with how frequently they occur. Clahsen et al. investigate only three affixes in German, leaving open questions about …

A Typology Of Morphological Argument Focus Marking, Aidan Alexander Aannestad

Theses and Dissertations

One of the methods that languages use to indicate which argument (if any) is in focus is morphological; however, there seems to be a major gap in the literature when it comes to understanding the variety and classification of morphological argument focus marking constructions. This thesis is an attempt to fill that gap. I present here both an overview of the types of morphological focus marking constructions found in the world's languages, and a taxonomic classification of said constructions based on the grammaticalisation pathways that result in their genesis. Such constructions include not only the traditional `particle focus' constructions, but …

French Neologisms In Larousse Dictionary Of 2018 And 2019, Amelia Wahyu Julisdianti, Danny Susanto

International Review of Humanities Studies

Larousse is one of the most important and widely used French-language dictionaries. Larousse dictionary annually releases its new edition with the addition of on average 150 new words due to the appearance of new words, known as the phenomenon of neologism. The aim of this study is to identify how new words or neologisms in the Larousse dictionary edition of 2018 and 2019 were formed using a morphological approach. The analysis essentially uses the combination of theories of Lehmann & Martin-Berthet (1999) and Grevisse, M., & Goosse, A. (2007) on four types of word formation: derivation, composition, siglaison (acronym), and …

An Analysis On K-Pop Fandom Slang Word-Formation In The Drama ‘Her Private Life’, Shandina Megarani, Jelita Dini

International Review of Humanities Studies

Slang is a language that is used daily and continues to grow due to the development of social media among fan communities. Each fan community has used slang specific to their interests, one of them being the K-Pop fandom. Despite the international growth of the K-Pop fandom and the spread of its cultural influence over recent years, there has been a lack of discussion on the linguistic aspect of its community, on the slang generated and used by its fan community in particular. Therefore, this research aims to expound on how K-Pop fandom slang words found in the drama ‘Her …

Brown's Stages Of Morphosyntactic Development Applied To The Typical Development Of Italian, Marie Laiche

LSU Master's Theses

Background: In A First Language (1973), Roger Brown called for an increase in crosslinguistic data and analysis of morphosyntax across languages as more research in this field is crucial for working out the overarching determinants of language acquisition order and for the ability to accurately compare child language acquisition across different languages. An increase in this research would benefit linguistic researchers and speech-language-pathologists offering services to or evaluating children speaking a different language or more than one language. The current study seeks to add to the field of crosslinguistic research by adapting Brown’s guidelines of English language acquisition to the …

Attitude To The Plural Affix In Uzbek Language, Fazliddin Galievich Sharipov

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

Introduction. The following article reflects the views of Uzbek linguist A. Gulomov, who made a great contribution to Uzbek linguistics sciences. In his scientific works, the scientist pays great attention to the analysis of additives. The period of creation of serious scientific research on the morphology of the Uzbek language falls on the 40’s of the XX century - the years created by A. Gulomov. By this period, a separate study of each morphological phenomenon began gradually due to general morphology. We will consider the work in this direction on an additional example, which was met in 1940 by the …

Sigmorphon 2021 Shared Task On Morphological Reinflection: Generalization Across Languages, Tiago Pimentel, Maria Ryskina, Christopher Straughn

Library Faculty Publications

This year’s iteration of the SIGMORPHON Shared Task on morphological reinflection focuses on typological diversity and cross-lingual variation of morphosyntactic features. In terms of the task, we enrich UniMorph with new data for 32 languages from 13 language families, with most of them being under-resourced: Kunwinjku, Classical Syriac, Arabic (Modern Standard, Egyptian, Gulf), Hebrew, Amharic, Aymara, Magahi, Braj, Kurdish (Central, Northern, Southern), Polish, Karelian, Livvi, Ludic, Veps, Võro, Evenki, Xibe, Tuvan, Sakha, Turkish, Indonesian, Kodi, Seneca, Asháninka, Yanesha, Chukchi, Itelmen, Eibela. We evaluate six systems on the new data and conduct an extensive error analysis of the systems’ predictions. Transformer-based …

Wordhood Issues: Typology And Grammaticalization, Tim Zingler

Linguistics ETDs

This work investigates the distribution of “wordhood issues,” in which a morpheme behaves like a word on one subset of wordhood parameters but like a bound item on another. The empirical focus is on the exponents of definiteness, case, indexation, and tense in 60 unrelated languages from five macro-areas. The methodological basis for the wordhood analyses is a set of eight parameters of phonological and morphological wordhood.

The main result is that grammatical markers (“grams”) retain the ability of morphological words to co-occur with members of different syntactic categories even after being integrated into larger phonological word domains. Meanwhile, grams …

Tones In Shupamem Reduplication, Magdalena Markowska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis presents an analysis of reduplication in Shupamem, an Eastern Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. In this language nouns, verbs, and adjectives undergo full segmental reduplication. At the suprasegmental level, on the other hand, tones of the reduplicants are not entirely faithful to their bases. The tonal asymmetry of the reduplicted phrase also relies on the grammatical function of that phrase within a clause, as well as on the neighboring grammatical words, such as tense particles. This morphological process gives also an insight to an underlying tonal representations in Shupamem. Nominal reduplication, in particular, provides a proof of the …

Semantic Grouping Of Particles In English And Uzbek Languages, Gulrux Shavkatovna Kaxxorova

Scientific reports of Bukhara State University

The article deals with the spiritual groups of downloads in English and Uzbek. Their grammatical features are revealed. These linguistic phenomena, which are studied as "particles" in English and "downloads" in Uzbek, belong to the group of auxiliary words. There are commonalities and differences between the spiritual groups of the English and Uzbek downloads, and it is proved on the basis of examples. Downloads are based on the function of giving additional meaning to the words and phrases that make up speech.

Affix Ordering And Templatic Morphology In Mandan, Ryan Kasak

Linguistics Graduate Dissertations

Mandan [ISO: mhq] is a Siouan language traditionally spoken in northwestern North Dakota on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The language no longer has any L1 speakers, and fewer than a dozen L2 speakers remain. This dissertation provides a description of the phonological and morphological systems of the language, as well as contextualizes these systems within a formal framework. The data come from an assembled corpus of over five hundred pages of transcribed traditional narratives and twenty hours of recordings of those narratives done in the 1970s, which is supplemented by data from more recent fieldwork done in the early …

Morphometric Analysis Of Subfossil Macronycteris Spp. (Chiroptera: Hipposideridae) From Madagascar, Jamie Lynn Alumbaugh

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Macronycteris bats are morphologically conservative between species but demonstrate intraspecific morphological variation between geographic locations and sexes. Two of the four living species of Macronycteris are found on Madagascar, where they are broadly distributed and demonstrate a trend in body size correlated with the latitudinal precipitation cline on the western side of the island. The presence of an extinct species, M. besaoaka, from Anhjohibe Cave in northern Madagascar suggests that Macronycteris was once more diverse, at least with respect to morphology. Since its description, taxonomic and phylogenetic revisions have reshaped our understanding of this genus. On Madagascar, these include the …

Peaze Up! Adaptation, Innovation, And Variation In German Hip Hop Discourse, Matt Garley

Publications and Research

In this study, I investigate the stylistic use of various forms of the hip hop leave-taking peace in a 12.5-million-word corpus (2000-2011) of German-language Internet hip hop discussions. The English orthography is compared with a number of hybrid variants including, e.g., , , and . I analyze the distribution of these variants over time by comparison to use of the form in an American hip hop forum. I complement these results with a qualitative analysis of peace and its variants as situated in discourse, drawing a connection between linguistic features, discursive use, and corpus distribution. The discourse of German hip …

The Variable Expression Of Transitive Subject And Possesor In Wayuunaiki (Guajiro), Andres M. Sabogal

Linguistics ETDs

In Wayuunaiki, verbal affixes cross-reference clausal arguments in various ways. Most notably, there are two ways to express transitive subjects, and two ways to express possessors. Much like voice alternatives, the variable expression of subject and possessor impart different perspectives on a situation type, but unlike traditional voice categories, syntactic valence remains equal. This dissertation characterizes these constructions with a specific question in mind: what do these two cross-referencing alternations communicate and what influences their usage? To answer these questions, I consider the linguistic properties observed in the usage of these constructions in narratives (Jusayú 1986, 1994), and informal conversations. …

Alternations In Murui: A Morphological Approach, Amy Havlicek

Theses and Dissertations

Murui is a Witotoan language spoken in Colombia and Peru. This thesis focuses on alternations of voiced and voiceless alveolar and velar stops in Murui that occur at some morpheme boundaries in verbs. The alternations of the voiced and voiceless alveolar stops occur in the active indicative suffix allomorphs [‐dɯ] ~ [‐tɯ] ~ [‐d] ~ [‐t] and the alternations of the voiced and voiceless velar stops occur in the passive indicative suffix allomorphs [‐ka] ~ [‐ɡa]. These stops may also become voiced or voiceless when other suffixes are present in the verb. I focus my analysis on the inflectional morphology …

Single Versus Concurrent Systems: Nominal Classification In Mian, Greville G. Corbett, Sebastian Fedden, Raphael Finkel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

The Papuan language Mian allows us to refine the typology of nominal classification. Mian has two candidate classification systems, differing completely in their formal realization but overlapping considerably in their semantics. To determine whether to analyse Mian as a single system or concurrent systems we adopt a canonical approach. Our criteria – orthogonality of the systems (we give a precise measure), semantic compositionality, morphosyntactic alignment, distribution across parts of speech, exponence, and interaction with other features – point mainly to an analysis as concurrent systems. We thus improve our analysis of Mian and make progress with the typology of nominal …

Saisiyat Morphology, Daniel Kaufman

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Study Of Sociolinguistic Variation In A Small Community : Puerto Rican Spanish In Amsterdam, New York, Zahir Mumin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The objective of the current study is to contribute to the larger body of sociophonetic variation research by describing and analyzing Spanish as spoken in a small Puerto Rican community in the US. First, I describe phonological and morphosyntactic features of Spanish as used by four different groups of Puerto Rican informants in Amsterdam, New York based on the duration of time that they have lived on the Island of Puerto Rico. Previous research on Puerto Rican Spanish in the US has focused particularly on final /s/ deletion (Poplack, 1980b, 1980c), final liquid production of /l/ and /ɾ/ (Ramos-Pellicia, 2007), …