Prolegomena to a neurocomputational architecture for human grammatical encoding and decoding

The study develops a neurocomputational architecture for grammatical processing in language production and language comprehension (grammatical encoding and decoding, respectively). It seeks to answer two questions. First, how is online syntactic structure formation of the complexity required by natural-language grammars possible in a fixed, preexisting neural network without the need for online creation of new connections or associations? Second, is it realistic to assume that the seemingly disparate instantiations of syntactic structure formation in grammatical encoding and grammatical decoding can run on the same neural infrastructure? This issue is prompted by accumulating experimental evidence for the hypothesis that the mechanisms for grammatical decoding overlap with those for grammatical encoding to a considerable extent, thus inviting the hypothesis of a single “grammatical coder.” The paper answers both questions by providing the blueprint for a syntactic structure formation mechanism that is entirely based on prewired circuitry (except for referential processing, which relies on the rapid learning capacity of the hippocampal complex), and can subserve decoding as well as encoding tasks. The model builds on the “Unification Space” model of syntactic parsing developed by Vosse & Kempen (2000, 2008, 2009). The design includes a neurocomputational mechanism for the treatment of an important class of grammatical movement phenomena

Issues in Esahie Nominal Morphology: From Inflection to Word-formation

The present study is a documentation-oriented research which aims at exploring the nominal morphology of Esahie, an otherwise unexplored cross-border Kwa language. Essentially, it examines pertinent inflectional and word formation issues in the nominal domain of Esahie such as noun class system, agreement, syncretism, nominalization, and compounding. The overall goal of this thesis is to investigate and provide a comprehensive account of the attested types, structure, formation, and the lexical semantics of nouns and nominalizations in Esahie. This thesis also seeks to understand what the facts about the structure and formation of nouns and nominalizations in Esahie reveal about the nature of the interface between morphology, phonology, syntax, and semantics, and about the architecture of the grammar in general. In interpreting the Esahie data, we ultimately hope to contribute to current theoretical debates by presenting empirical arguments in support of an abstractive, rather than a constructive view of morphology, by arguing that adopting the formalism of Construction Morphology (CxM, see Booij 2010a-d), as an abstractive model, comes with many advantages. We show that the formalism espoused in CxM is able to deal adequately with all the inflectional and word formation issues discussed in this thesis, including the irregular (non-canonical) patterns which are characterized either by cumulative exponence or extra-compositionality. With regards to compounding, this study confirms the view (cf. Appah 2013; 2015; Akrofi-Ansah 2012b; Lawer 2017) that, in Kwa, notwithstanding the word class of the input elements, the output of a compounding operation is always a nominal. This characterization points to a fascinating (mutual) interplay between the word-formation phenomena of compounding and nominalization, since the former operation invariably feeds into the latter. Overall, this thesis shows that nominalization is a prominent word-formation operation in Kwa grammar. Data used in this thesis emanates from several fieldtrips carried out in some Esahie speaking communities in the Western-North region of Ghana, as well as other secondary sources

The processing of gender information in languages of distinct morphosyntactic gender marking systems

87 p.When talking about people, gender information is taken as an essential feature during language processing. The gender here may be definitional (e.g., King is male or Queen is female), stereotypical (e.g., doctor, male-biased) and/or grammatical (e.g., miner-o/a, male/female miner, morpho-syntactic form for linguistic agreement). All the three types of gender can provide information on gender. World languages are categorized into three groups based on how gender is encoded in a language: genderless languages (no morpho-syntactic gender is required), natural languages (morpho-syntactic gender agreement is required based on biological gender) and grammatical gender languages (grammatical gender agreement is compulsory between related words). Difference between the three language groups is the presence/absence of morpho-syntactic gender. The current thesis is aimed to investigate how gender information (definitional, stereotypical and/or grammatical) is processed in languages with distinct gender marking systems. Three experiments are conducted: while Experiment I investigate pronoun resolution in a genderless language (i.e., Mandarin Chinese, for its asymmetrical gender specificity in the third person pronouns), Experiments II and III explored the processing of stereotypical gender in noun phrases in Spanish (grammatical) and Mandarin Chinese (genderless). ERP mismatch paradigm is employed for all the three experiments. Cross-linguistic comparisons are carried out and different processing mechanisms resulting from distinct gender marking systems are reported