Search results for "inflectional morphology"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
The evolution of Catalan inchoative verbs from the 13th century to the 16th century
2021
En aquest treball, analitzem la subclasse de verbs incoatius del català, pertanyent a la tercera conjugació, aplicant el concepte d’exaptació (Lass 1990), que serveix per a explicar canvis que consisteixen en la reutilització de material morfològic no funcional: en els verbs incoatius, el procés d’exaptació consisteix en el reciclatge d’un afix lèxic com a increment del radical quan perd el valor semàntic inicial de ‘canvi d’estat’ i queda relegat a certs verbs de la tercera conjugació. Aquesta reutilització funcional comporta l’aparició d’una subclasse de verbs dins de la tercera conjugació que, a causa de la seua estabilitat, ha esdevingut el model flexiu majoritari d’aquesta conjugació. …
Perceived similarity between written Estonian and Finnish : Strings of letters or morphological units?
2017
The distance or similarity between two languages can be objective or actual, i.e. discoverable by the tools and methods of linguists, or perceived by users of the languages. In this article two methods, the Levenshtein Distance (LD), which purports to measure the objective distance, and the Index of Perceived Similarity (IPS), which quantifies language users’ perceptions, are compared. The data are the quantitative results of a test measuring conscious perceptions of similarity between Estonian and Finnish inflectional morphology by Finnish and Estonian native speakers (‘Finns’ and ‘Estonians’) with no knowledge of and exposure to the other (‘target’) language. The results show that Finns s…
The Loss of Grammatical Gender and Case Features Between Old and Early Middle English: Its Impact on Simple Demonstratives and Topic Shift
2017
AbstractIn this paper we examine the relation between the loss of formal gender and Case features on simple demonstratives and the topic shifting property they manifest. The examination period spans between Old English and Early Middle English. While we argue that this loss has important discourse-pragmatic and derivational effects on demonstratives, we also employ the Strong Minimalist Hypothesis approach (Chomsky 2001) and feature valuation, as defined in Pesetsky & Torrego (2007), to display how their syntactic computation and pragmatic properties have come about. To account for the above innovations yielding the Early Middle Englishϸe(‘the’), we first discuss the formal properties o…