4,450 research outputs found

    Syntactic features in morphology : general problems of so-called pronominal inflection in german

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    Morphological analysis of inflectional categories has been for a long time a favored field of classical structuralism. American scholars, in this respect, concentrated on the representation of inflected forms in terms of concatenated morphemes

    Language acquisition in developmental disorders

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    In this chapter, I review recent research into language acquisition in developmental disorders, and the light that these findings shed on the nature of language acquisition in typically developing children. Disorders considered include Specific Language Impairment, autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome. I argue that disorders of language should be construed in terms of differences in the constraints that shape the learning process, rather than in terms of the normal system with components missing or malfunctioning. I outline the integrative nature of this learning process and how properties such as redundancy and compensation may be key characteristics of learning systems with atypical constraints. These ideas, as well as the new methodologies now being used to study variations in pathways of language acquisition, are illustrated with case studies from Williams syndrome and Specific Language Impairment

    Lexical information from a minimalist point of view

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    Simplicity as a methodological orientation applies to linguistic theory just as to any other field of research: ‘Occam’s razor’ is the label for the basic heuristic maxim according to which an adequate analysis must ultimately be reduced to indispensible specifications. In this sense, conceptual economy has been a strict and stimulating guideline in the development of Generative Grammar from the very beginning. Halle’s (1959) argument discarding the level of taxonomic phonemics in order to unify two otherwise separate phonological processes is an early characteristic example; a more general notion is that of an evaluation metric introduced in Chomsky (1957, 1975), which relates the relative simplicity of alternative linguistic descriptions systematically to the quest for explanatory adequacy of the theory underlying the descriptions to be evaluated. Further proposals along these lines include the theory of markedness developed in Chomsky and Halle (1968), Kean (1975, 1981), and others, the notion of underspecification proposed e.g. in Archangeli (1984), Farkas (1990), the concept of default values and related notions. An important step promoting this general orientation was the idea of Principles and Parameters developed in Chomsky (1981, 1986), which reduced the notion of language particular rule systems to universal principles, subject merely to parametrization with restricted options, largely related to properties of particular lexical items. On this account, the notion of a simplicity metric is to be dispensed with, as competing analyses of relevant data are now supposed to be essentially excluded by the restrictive system of principles

    Specification theory : the treatment of redundancy in generative phonology

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    Latin 1st class -\u101- verbs as thematic formations: On the deficiency of IE roots

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    This study deals with the status of the morphological element -\u101 which marks 1st conjugation verbs in Latin. Adopting a Distributed Morphology framework, I focus on de-nominal/de-adjectival verbs and more generally on derivative ones, beside that on 'primary' -\u101 verbs which are the direct outcome of a PIE root. I demonstrate that -\u101 arises from the nominal domain, and that it is basically associated to agentive Voice. It covers the function of a thematic vowel in order to repair a marked matrix of features, due to the roots which lack an overt verbal character
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