Search results for "Lexical Item"
showing 10 items of 16 documents
Word classes and the scope of lexical flexibility in Tongan
2017
Abstract Tongan is an Oceanic language belonging to the Polynesian subgroup. Based on previous work (Churchward 1953, Tchekhoff 1981, Broschart 1997), Tongan has been classified as a 'flexible' language by various typological approaches on word classes (Hengeveld 1992, Rijkhoff 1998, Croft 2001). This means that lexical items are per se not categorised in terms of major word classes, but they can function as noun, verb, adjective and manner adverb without morphosyntactic derivation. However, not all lexemes are entirely flexible occurring within all these constructions. So the crucial issue of how flexible Tongan really is remains. This question will be addressed by a survey based on a comb…
Effects of masked repetition priming and orthographic neighborhood in visual recognition of words.
1996
Summay.-The role of orthographic neighborhood (neighborhood size and neighborhood Erequency) in visual-word recognition was analyzed using the masked repetition-priming paradigm. Specifically, we varied stimulus-onset asynchrony (33, 50, and 67 msec.) and type of prime (identical, unrelated, unprimed) in a lexical-decision task. Analyses show additive effects of repetition and stimulus-onset asynchrony. Further, the unrelated condition overestimated the repetition effects relative ro an unprimed condition. Fachtatory effects of neighborhood size and inhibitory effects of neighborhood frequency were also found. The results are interpreted in terms of current models of visual-word recognition…
Sub-symbolic Encoding of Words
2003
A new methodology for sub-symbolic semantic encoding of words is presented. The methodology uses the WordNet lexical database and an ad hoc modified Sammon algorithm to associate a vector to each word in a semantic n-space. All words have been grouped according to the WordNet lexicographers’ files classification criteria: these groups have been called lexical sets. The word vector is composed by two parts: the first one, takes into account the belonging of the word to one of these lexical sets; the second one is related to the meaning of the word and it is responsible for distinguishing the word among the other ones of the same lexical set. The application of the proposed technique over all…
How do illiterate adults react to metalinguistic training?
2013
The present study focuses on the capacity of illiterate adults to master three different metalinguistic tasks: judgment of phonological length of words, initial consonant deletion, and lexical segmentation of sentences. Illiterates’ performance, during a pre-test and after training, was compared with that of literates and partial illiterates (adults at the beginning of the process of acquiring literacy) who received the same training. In the pre-test, illiterates were lower than literates in the three tasks; and partial-illiterates were at an intermediate level in two of the tasks. The three groups profited from the training, especially illiterates and partial-illiterates for whom improveme…
Leksinių samplaikų sąrašo tikslinimas: bandymas taikyti Formulex metodą
2017
A number of corpus studies focusing on the description of the use and functions of lexical bundles havebeen conducted recently in order to explore the phraseology of learner language. As with any studiesof lexical bundles, the problem of overlapping or structurally incomplete items poses a particularchallenge. In practice, it is often difficult to align such units with specific discourse functions. The factthat lexical bundles do not constitute neat form-and-meaning mappings results from, among otherreasons, their being grounded in language use rather than language system. In this pilot study weattempt to test a new method called Formulex (Forsyth, 2015a; 2015b) to verify whether an applica…
Precategoriality and syntax-based parts of speech
2008
Late Archaic Chinese is a precategorial language, i.e., a language whose lexical items are not preclassified in the lexicon for the syntactic functions of N and V. This will be shown on the basis of structural-conceptual criteria as those developed by Croft (2000) and Sasse (1993b) as well as on the basis of methodological criteria as those suggested by Evans & Osada (2005). As is claimed in Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 2005), the meaning of lexical items is derived by integrating their own lexical meaning with the meaning contributed by the construction. The construction analysed in this paper is the argument structure construction. Linking between lexicon and syntax is subject…
Strength and weakness of the Old English adjective
2021
Abstract As regards Old English, the inflectional strength and weakness are characterised by a kind of inconsistency. In the case of Old English adjectives these two inflectional properties appear to be different from those associated with nouns and verbs. In the case of the latter the two properties seem to be lexically determined while in the case of adjectives they appear to be determined by syntactic conditions. The traditional accounts of the Old English grammar attribute two paradigms to one adjectival lexical item. The analysis presented in this article postulates that one can actually speak about one adjectival inflection and what is traditionally presented as strong and weak adject…
The 'terroridiom' principle between spoken and written discourse
2008
This paper focuses on phraseology used within the domain of politics, both in written and spoken discourse. We concentrate on the lemma TERROR and on the recurrent sequences in which it is embedded, reflecting how native speakers, both American and British, tend to use it in preferred environments making routinized blocks of language. The data come from two corpora: the spoken corpus includes speeches of George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and the written corpus is made up of articles from The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Since text is nothing but phraseology of one kind or another (Sinclair 2008), our attempt here is to uncover which of the two varieties lends itself more willingly to…
Prepositions and pronouns in connected discourse of individuals with aphasia
2018
The lexical-grammatical divide has been a widely addressed topic in aphasia. Speech parts are generally classified as either belonging to a lexical or a grammatical category based on the frequency of acquisition of new members in their paradigms (open vs. closed classes), thus neglecting heterogeneity within categories. Such an approach has led to contradictory findings. First, prepositions form closed classes, but are classically taken as lexical items. Pronouns, also belonging to a closed class, are analyzed as grammatical elements. Second, both within the group of prepositions and pronouns, forms with different syntactic and semantic properties co-exist. Following the theoretical notions…
The frequency effect for pseudowords in the lexical decision task
2005
Four experiments were designed to investigate whether the frequency of words used to create pseudowords plays an important role in lexical decision. Computational models of the lexical decision task (e.g., the dual route cascaded model and the multiple read-out model) predict that latencies to low-frequency pseudowords should be faster than latencies to high-frequency pseudowords. Consistent with this prediction, results showed that when the pseudowords were created by replacing one internal letter of the base word (Experiments 1 and 3), high-frequency pseudowords yielded slower latencies than low-frequency pseudowords. However, this effect occurred only in the leading edge of the response …