Morphology Commons^™

A Morphological Study Of The Antonymous Compounds In Chinese: How The Word Class Changes And Why, Yihan Zhou

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

The majority of Chinese words are compounds. Among compounds, there is a special kind of compounds. It is made up of two antonymous morphemes. The antonymous compounds undergo functional shift. In 40% percent of the cases, the compounds have different word classes from the morphemes. The thesis investigated how the functional shift happens and why it happens.

Based on the critique of the definitions of antonymous compounds used in others’ studies, the thesis comes up with a broad definition. With the help of primary sources such as dictionaries, secondary sources, and the definition, the thesis collects 292 antonymous compounds.

The …

Order Of Acquisition: A Comparison Of L1 And L2 English And Spanish Morpheme Acquisition, Kyle A. Mcferren

Senior Honors Theses

This paper examines the order of acquisition for grammatical morphemes in Spanish and English first and second language learners. Brown’s first morpheme order study, conducted in 1973, laid the foundation for what would become one of the most common types of study conducted within the field of second language acquisition. The four orders of acquisition relevant here are examined and compared in order to support the roles of salience, morphophonological regularity, complexity, input frequency, and native language transfer in first and/or second language acquisition. The conclusion is that these five determinants work interdependently in determining the difficulty of acquiring a …

The Shawnee Alignment System: Applying Paradigm Function Morphology To Lexical-Functional Grammar's M-Structure, Nathan Hardymon

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

Shawnee is a language whose alignment system is of the type first proposed by Nichols (1992) and Siewierska (1998): hierarchical alignment. This alignment system was proposed to account for languages where distinctions between agent (A) and object (O) are not formally manifested. Such is the case in Shawnee; there are person-marking inflections on the verb for both A and O, but there is not set order. Instead, Shawnee makes reference to an animacy hierarchy and is an inverse system. This thesis explores how hierarchical alignment is accounted for by Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), and also applies Paradigm Function Morphology to …