Morphology Commons^™

Automatic Glossing In Under-Resourced Languages: Case Studies In Bribri And Cook Islands Māori, Carter D. Anderson

Linguistics Undergraduate Senior Theses

Interlinear glossing is a major task in Indigenous language documentation. In this paper, I explore how effectively two Large Language Models, ByT5 and Gemini 2.5 Flash, can produce interlinear glossed text. I also examine how prompting an LLM with different types of information (dictionary entries, other training samples, and translations) can augment model performance. I apply these models to two under-resourced Indigenous languages: Bribri, which is morphologically complex from Costa Rica, and Cook Islands Māori, which has a simpler morphology and is from the Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean. ByT5 exhibits much better performance when glossing Cook Islands Māori …

Comparing English-Speaking Third Through Sixth Grade Students' Performances On Spoken And Written Cloze Morphological Awareness Tasks, Victoria Henbest, Kenn Apel

Victoria S. Henbest Publications

Purpose: Morphological awareness, the ability to consciously think about morphemes, plays an important role in literacy achievement. Historically, when measuring morphological awareness, researchers primarily have administered tasks in the spoken rather than written modality and few have investigated the influence of modality on task performance. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine whether performance on cloze morphological awareness tasks would be different for English-speaking third through sixth grade students depending on whether the task was administered in the spoken or written modality. We also analyzed whether performance on a written version explained unique variance on measures of …

Mind The Gap: Morphological Defectivity And Suffixal Competition In Polish, Szymon E. Zuberek

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigates morphological defectivity and suffixal competition in the genitive singular of Polish masculine inanimate nouns. Drawing on survey-based grammaticality judgments from native speakers, it examines how respondents select between the suffixes -a and -u or reject both as unacceptable, thereby signaling defectivity. Mixed-effects logistic regressions revealed that defectivity was rare overall but patterned systematically by age, education, and region, with additional baseline variability across lexical items. Suffix choice showed a strong preference for -a, modulated by age, education, and region, with additional baseline variability across lexical items. These findings inform our understanding of paradigm structure, sociolinguistic variation, and …

Morphological And Semantic Analysis Of Plant Names Attested In Hehe Language In Tanzania, Onesmo Simon Nyinondi

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper examines the morphological structure of plant names in Hehe, a Bantu language spoken in the Iringa Region of Tanzania, specifically in the rural areas of Mufindi and Kilolo districts, involving 169 participants. Data were collected through free listings, field interviews (also known as walk-in-the-woods interviews), focus group discussions, and the analysis of written texts containing Hehe plant names. The study shows that Hehe plant names consist of a noun class prefix and a noun stem, with most falling into the 3/4 and 5/6 pairs. Some plant names are also categorised in the 7/8, mainly small plants, and 9/10 …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

A Navajo Corpus Of Historical Narratives, Lukas Denk, Melvatha R. Chee

A Navajo Corpus of Historical Narratives

The Navajo Corpus of Historical Narratives is a digital compilation of morphologically annotated narratives. They were first published by Robert W. Young and William Morgan in the 1950’s in the volumes Navajo Historical Selections (1954) and The Trouble at Round Rock (1952). Nine out of 28 narratives are included in the corpus, totaling over 10,000 Navajo words. The corpus contributes to the understanding of the Navajo language by offering interlinear glosses of words, morphemes, morphs, and a free translation. These different interlinear tiers bridge the gap between the original Navajo text and the free translation provided by Young and Morgan, …

The Creation Of Gender In Conlangs, Alexis L. Campos, Ixchel Mireles, Bryon Haynes, David Kamal, Zachariah Gonzalez

Team - Mere Wudu - Documents

This PowerPoint presentation is an example of grammatical gender and language structure in the world of Mere Wudu using the language of "Letic"

Universal Dependencies For Amahuaca, Candy Angulo, Pilar Valenzuela, Roberto Zariquiey

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

This paper presents the creation of a Universal Dependency (UD) treebank for Amahuaca (Peru), marking the first UD treebank within the Headwaters subbranch of the Panoan family, spoken mostly in Peru and Brazil. While the UD guidelines provided a general framework for our annotations, language-specific decisions were necessary due to the rich morphology of the Amahuaca language. The paper also describes specific constructions to initiate a discussion on several general UD annotation guidelines, particularly those concerning clitics and morpheme-level dependencies.

Diaspora Documentation Of West Albay Bikol, Nhia Borja

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper presents a comprehensive linguistic analysis and cultural documentation of West Albay Bikol, a dialect spoken in Bikol, Philippines. Drawing upon narratives spoken by a native speaker, this study aims to expand the literature on Bikolano language and add the dialects of Balugo and Polangui to the conversation. The motivation for the project stems from a personal aspiration to learn West Albay Bikolano and provide authentic language examples.

The paper comprises six chapters. The first chapter briefly overviews Bikol dialects and Central Philippine languages and reviews existing literature on the overall Bikol language. The second chapter is an examination …

Language Classification In Western Amazonia: Advances In Favor Of The Pano-Takana Hypothesis, Pilar M. Valenzuela, Roberto Zariquiey

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

The languages of the Pano and Takana families exhibit a considerable number of lexical and structural affinities that cannot be ascribed to mere chance and are not readily detectable instances of borrowing. After the comparative studies by Key (1968) and Girard (1971) the proposal of a genetic relationship between these two families was generally accepted (e.g. Loos 1973, 2005; Suárez 1973; Kaufman 1990; Campbell 1997). Without solid argumentation, however, this classification was later put into question (Fabre 1998; Loos 1999; Fleck 2013) and, even today, there is no full consensus as to whether the observed similarities are due to genetic …

Degrees Of Temporal Remoteness In Pano: Contribution To The Cross-Linguistic Study Of Tense, Pilar Valenzuela, Sanderson Castro Soares De Oliveira

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

Beyond simply indicating future or past tense, the languages of the Pano family grammatically distinguish various degrees of temporal distance relative to a reference point, typically the moment of utterance; i.e., they possess what has been called ‘metrical tense’ (Chung & Timberlake 1985; Frawley 1992), ‘degrees of remoteness’ (Comrie 1985; Dahl 1985; Bybee et al. 1994; Botne 2012), or ‘graded tense’ (Cable 2013). This article offers a comparative analysis of the rich graded tense systems found in Pano, concentrating on morphologically expressed categories. In so doing, it seeks to expand our typological knowledge of languages exhibiting this feature, particularly …

Pragmatic Inferences Of Locative Enclitics In Luganda, Moureen Nanteza

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

This paper examines the non-locative functions of locative enclitics in Luganda (JE 15). Locative enclitics are words which cannot stand alone but attach on a verb to make meaning. Their status is ambiguous between free word and affix, hence motivating their analysis as enclitics. The enclitics are attached on the post final position of their hosts. Although the locative enclitics occur regularly in some Bantu languages (Luganda, Runyankore-Rukiga, Runyoro- Rutooro, Lunda, Ikizu, Fwe, Chichewa, Kinyarwanda among others), they have not been widely studied in the literature. The paper looks at verbal locative enclitics only but the locative enclitics also appear …

An Introductory Overview Of The Koyukon (Athabaskan) Verb, Jonathan K. Vincent

University Honors Theses

The Athabaskan languages of western North America are notorious for exhibiting highly complex verbal morphology. Koyukon, a language spoken along the Yukon River in Alaska, and a member of the Northern branch of the Athabaskan family, is one such example. This overview seeks to introduce students and language practitioners to the theoretical fundamentals of Koyukon's verbal morphology, including the parts that constitute the discontinuous verbal base, or 'verb theme,' as well as the inflectional and derivational processes under which a verb theme may go in order to render morphologically complex surface forms with richly engineered meaning. These principles are amply …

P’Urhépecha Classifier Morphemes, Matthew Ball

The Journal of Purdue Undergraduate Research

No abstract provided.

Final Vowel Devoicing In Blackfoot, Samantha Leigh Prins

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a study of final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot, an indigenous language of Montana and Alberta. Previous research on final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot variously suggests word-final, phrase-final, and utterance-final vowel devoicing processes (e.g. Taylor 1965, Bliss & Gick 2009, Frantz 2017), though, the conditioning environment for this phenomenon had not been a research focus prior to this study. The present study investigates intonation units (IUs) as the conditioning domain for final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot.

Final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot is investigated here by examining the common word-final suffixes –wa (3SG.AN) and –yi (4SG) in two recordings …

Non-Manual Articulators In Irish Sign Language Verbs: An Analysis With Data Mining Association Rules, Robert G. Smith, Markus Hofmann

Conference Papers

The Signs of Ireland (SOI) corpus (Leeson et al., 2006) deploys a complex multi-tiered temporal data structure. The process of manually analyzing such data is laborious, cannot eliminate bias and often, important patterns can go completely unnoticed. In addition to this, as a result of the complex nature of grammatical structures contained in the corpus, identifying complex linguistic associations or patterns across tiers is simply too intricate a task for a human to carry out in an acceptable timeframe. This work explores the application of data mining techniques on a set of multi-tiered temporal data from the SOI corpus. Building …

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. …

Argument Encoding And Pragmatic Marking Of The Transitive Subject In Shiwilu (Kawapanan), Pilar Valenzuela

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a nearly extinct Kawapanan language from Peruvian Amazonia. The goal of this article is twofold. First, it investigates the obligatory cross-referencing of arguments in the complex Shiwilu verb. This system is predominantly nominative accusative, with the caveat that main clause object markers coincide with those conveying subject in one type of clause involving nominal predicates, as well as subject and object of dependent clauses. Second, this article provides a first analysis of the enclitic =ler, which may attach to transitive subjects and thus exhibits an ergative-like distribution. Unlike the situation in languages with syntacticized ergative systems, …

Applicative Constructions In Shipibo-Konibo (Panoan), Pilar Valenzuela

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

This article provides a detailed, typologically informed treatment of applicative constructions in Shipibo-Konibo, a Panoan language from Peruvian Amazonia. Shipibo-Konibo has three applicative suffixes: affective (i.e., benefactive or malefactive), dedicated malefactive, and associative. These applicative types are rather common cross-linguistically and hence the language cannot be said to be particularly rich either in terms of number or kinds of applicative constructions. Nevertheless, the Shipibo-Konibo system exhibits certain points of special interest such as the interplay between transitivity and the different applicative construction types, which include a restriction on the dedicated malefactive to combine with transitive verbs only, and the almost …