Uninflected structure in genetic dysphasic speech: evidence from French

We present the results of 20 French subjects with familial language impairment (FLI) on a linguistic battery task, with an emphasis on verb production. The results show strong qualitative differences between the verb production of FLI subjects and that of controls. Language-specific factors do not seem to determine the production of verbs in French FLI individuals. Rather, verb frequency and the inflectional status (uninflected vs. inflected) of the form seem to be determining factors in correct/incorrect production of a verb in a sentence context. The phonetic structure of French inflection provides additional arguments against the hypothesis of a processing deficit in FLI subjects. French tense morphemes are stressed and salient, and should therefore be produced without problems, according to the processing hypothesis. We found evidence contrary to this postulate. We therefore submit that the morphological deficit hypothesis is supported by the French data

<i>‘Je sais et tout mais...’</i> might the general extenders in European French be changing?

This paper addresses contemporary trends in the use of general extenders in two recent corpora of spontaneous French stratified by age. In these corpora, certain variants (e.g. et tout) are highly prevalent in the speech of young people compared to older speakers, while others are not. Other studies have shown that general extenders’ form as well as frequency tends to vary with respect to speakers’ age, while some extenders may also undergo grammaticalisation. The present study includes a comparison with a late 20th-century corpus of spoken French, and finds that not only age grading but also generational change might be occurring. This conclusion is supported by qualitative and quantitative analysis of the contemporary data, showing that the forms most frequent among young people appear to have acquired new pragmatic functions

The Breton of the Canton of Briec

This work is a detailed description of the phonology, morphology and syntax of the Breton dialect spoken in and around Briec, Brittany. The study is based in part on a corpus of about forty-five hours of recorded conversations with 31 Breton native speakers from the Canton of Briec. This dialect has never been studied in detail so far. However, existing works provide specific data about it: the linguistic atlases, contain information about several locations within the canton: Edern, Landudal and Briec itself. A doctoral thesis by André Cornec on the canton’s toponyms, provides phonological, lexical and grammatical information on it and a manuscript dictionary composed during WWII by Father Jean Louis Le Scao, a native speaker of Briec Breton supplies not only lexical data, but also information on all other areas of the dialect The thesis starts with the study of the phonology of the dialect done through an inventory of its phonemes, followed by a study of its morphophonology, which covers consonantic mutations. Breton in general has one of the broadest ranges of mutations amongst Celtic languages. The Briec dialect has an even broader range than literary Breton. In addition, Briec Breton has developed an array of sandhi-based phenomena termed ‘linking and intrusive consonants’ in the present work. These latter phenomena have been little-reported so far. Verbal morphology presents unusual features too, namely the use of the past unreal conditional to express the present conditional and the use of the pluperfect to express a perfect. The work concludes on a substantial lexical section followed by an extensive glossary. The author, who resides in Australia, also provides an extensive description of his acquisition, mainly as an adult, of the dialect through family members and native informants. This provides an illustration the plight of speakers of minority languages

Speech perception & language change in old & middle English

An analysis of* methods and models in historical ling¬ uistics: specifically, the utilization of speech perception methodology with respect to the evolution of the structure which in modern English denotes progressive aspect

Multiple alignments of inflectional paradigms

Most models of inflectional morphology rely at their core on the identification of recurrent and diverging material across inflected forms. Across theoretical frameworks, this can be expressed in terms of morpheme segmentation, rules, processes, patterns or analogies. Finding these recurrences in large structured lexicons is an important step in empirical computational morphology, where analyses are induced bottom-up from inflected forms. This can be done by aligning all the forms in each paradigm, a task of Multiple Sequence Alignments which is well known in other fields such as evolutionary biology and historical linguistics. In this paper, we present the specific problems which arise when aligning inflected forms, provide a simple alignment format, define evaluation measures and compare two implemented methods on 13 inflectional lexicons. Our intent is to provide the conditions for the inter-operability of future systems, and for incremental improvements in this fundamental step for quantitative morphology

A simple surface realization engine for Telugu

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