Dunstan Brown

The University of York · Department of Language and Linguistic Science

We present an exploratory study of 2- to 3-year-old children’s acquisition of the demonstrative system of Eegimaa (ISO 369–3 bqj), an endangered language belonging to the Jóola cluster of the Atlantic family of the Niger-Congo phylum, spoken by about 13,000 speakers in southwestern Senegal. Eegimaa demonstratives express distance from speaker (prox...

This study investigates the phenomenon of defectiveness in Russian case and number noun paradigms from the perspective of distributional semantics. We made use of word embeddings, high-dimensional vectors trained from large text corpora, and compared the observed paradigms of nouns that are defective in the genitive plural, as suggested by Zaliznja...

Research on lesser-studied languages is vital for the advancement of theories of language acquisition. We discuss two areas where data from Eegimaa has the potential to produce innovative research: (1) language typology, with an overview of the complex demonstratives found in this language, and (2) learning environment and input speech. Here, we sh...

The Trans New Guinea language Mian has a four-valued gender system that has been analyzed in detail as semantic. This means that the principles of gender assignment are based on the meaning of the noun. Languages with purely semantic systems are at one end of a spectrum of possible assignment types, while others are assumed to have both semantic an...

Network Morphology belongs to the family of inferential-realizational theoretical frameworks. This means that paradigms, more specifically the functions which construct them, play an important role. A major feature of Network Morphology is that it is based on defaults and allows for varying degrees of inheritance – from complete to partial – of par...

Inflectional morphology plays a paradoxical role in language. On the one hand it tells us useful things, for example that a noun is plural or a verb is in the past tense. On the other hand many languages get along perfectly well without it, so the baroquely ornamented forms we sometimes find come across as a gratuitous over-elaboration. This is esp...

Defaults play an important role in modern theories of morphology. This chapter starts by considering how they relate to notions such as regularity and productivity. Discussing briefly earlier derivation-based conceptions that arose in phonology, it moves on to look at declarative inheritance-based approaches to morphology. It also illustrates where...

Imagine how the discipline of linguistics would be if expert practitioners of different theories met in a collaborative setting to tackle the same challenging data—to test the limits of their model’s infrastructure and examine how the concrete predictions of their theories differ about the same data. This book represents the result of attempting to...

Language is a complex thing, otherwise we as humans would not devote so much of our resources to learning it, either the first time around or on later attempts. And of the many ways languages have of being complex, perhaps none is so daunting as what can be achieved by inflectional morphology. Indeed, a mere mention of the 1,000,000-form verb parad...

The purpose of modelling inflectional structure computationally is addressed. It is a good way of checking analyses, and it provides external evidence for their validity. The development of a computational analysis can lead to the discovery of new generalizations about a language’s morphology. Finite state morphology and default inheritance methods...

We examine the role of referential properties and lexical stipulation in three closely related languages of eastern Indonesia, the Alor-Pantar languages Abui, Kamang, and Teiwa. Our focus is on the continuum along which event properties (e.g. volitionality, affectedness) are highly important at one extreme or play virtually no role at the other. Th...

The Smith-Stark hierarchy, a version of the Animacy Hierarchy, offers a typology of the cross-linguistic availability of number. The hierarchy predicts that the availability of number is not arbitrary. For any language, if the expression of plural is available to a noun, it is available to any noun of a semantic category further to the left of the...

We examine the varying role of conditions on grammatical relations marking (namely animacy and volitionality) by looking at different languages of one family, using both existing descriptions and working with specially prepared video stimuli. This enables us to see the degree of variation permitted within closely related languages. We look at four...

This is the first book to present Canonical Typology, a framework for comparing constructions and categories across languages. The canonical method takes the criteria used to define particular categories or phenomena (e.g. negation, finiteness, possession) to create a multidimensional space in which language-specific instances can be placed. In thi...

This chapter introduces the volume and discusses the issue of data comparability in linguistic typology. Key concepts of Canonical Typology, including the base, criteria, and the canonical ideal (canon), are introduced and exemplified. Desirable properties of canonical typologies are outlined, and the framework is discussed in relation to other app...

ABSTRACT: This is the first book to present Canonical Typology, a framework for comparing constructions and categories across languages. The canonical method takes the criteria used to define particular categories or phenomena (e.g. negation, finiteness, possession) to create a multidimensional space in which language-specific instances can be plac...

We examine the notion of ‘(inflectional) periphrasis’ within the framework of Canonical Typology, and argue that the canonical approach allows us to define a logically coherent notion of periphrasis. We propose a set of canonical criteria for inflectional morphology and a set of canonical criteria for functional syntax, that is, syntactic construct...

Morphology is particularly challenging, because it is pervaded by irregularity and idiosyncrasy. This book is a study of word structure using a specific theoretical framework known as 'Network Morphology'. It describes the systems of rules which determine the structure of words by construing irregularity as a matter of degree, using examples from a...

An important design feature of language is the use of productive patterns in inflection. In English, we have pairs such as 'enjoy' - 'enjoyed', 'agree' - 'agreed', and many others. On the basis of this productive pattern, if we meet a new verb 'transduce' we know that there will be the form 'transduced'. Even if the pattern is not fully regular, th...

We describe an empirical method to explore and contrast the roles of default and principal part information in the differentiation of inflectional classes. We use an unsupervised machine learning method to classify Russian nouns into inflectional classes, first with full paradigm information, and then with particular types of information removed. W...

We present a corpus-based study of variation in case assignment of the direct object of negated verbs in Russian over the past 200years. Superficially the system of case forms available over this relatively short period has remained largely the same, but the way in which certain cases are used has been radically altered. This is particularly appare...

It is well known that nouns in predicate position with the copular быть / byt´ ‘to be’ in Russian may take either the nominative or the instrumental case. The commonly held view is that predicate nouns with more specified temporal, referential or evidential properties favour the instrumental (Potebnja 1958; Ovsjaniko-Kulikovskij 1912; Patokova 1929...

В статье рассматривается изменение в падежном маркировании предикативных существительных со связочным глаголом быть в русском языке девятнадцатого и двадцатого веков. Известно, что такие существительные могут иметь форму как именительного, так и творительного падежа. Проанализировав различную частотность альтернативных форм в текстах, написанных ме...

This paper analyses constraints on inflectional syncretism and inflectional allomorphy using frequency information. Syncretism arises where one form is associated with more than one function, whereas inflectional allomorphy occurs where there is more than one inflectional class, and a single function is associated with two or more forms. If high fr...

Deponency is a mismatch between form and function in language that was first described for Latin, where there is a group of verbs (the deponents) which are morphologically passive but syntactically active. This is evidence of a larger problem involving the interface between syntax and morphology: inflectional morphology is supposed to specify synta...

In many Oceanic languages the "indirect" possessive construction, which is typically associated with alienable possession, uses special forms to host person and number agreement indexing the possessor. This can be contrasted with the "direct" possessive construction, typically associated with inalienable possession, where a lexical possessum noun i...

Innovations can spread and eventually pervade a language, they can fail to take hold, or they can remain, without ever affecting a large number of lexical items. Examples of the latter kind are interesting, because they provide us with insights into why a linguistic system does not favour such innovations. The second locative in Russian is such an...

Archi is a Daghestanian language of the Lezgic group spoken by about 1200 people in Daghestan. The language is characterised by a remarkable morphological system, with extremely large paradigms, and irregularities on all levels. The Print edition of the Archi-Russian-English dictionary provides morphological information sufficient to produce the wh...

Syncretism - where a single form serves two or more morphosyntactic functions - is a persistent problem at the syntax-morphology interface. It results from a 'mismatch', whereby the syntax of a language makes a particular distinction, but the morphology does not. This pioneering book provides the first full-length study of inflectional syncretism,...

Suppletion is where the word-forms of the same lexeme have phonologically distinct stems. A study of thirty languages shows it to be surprisingly widespread, suggesting resistance to the pressure of paradigmatic levelling. While a major factor in its preservation appears to be the high frequency of the items that display it, two other factors are i...

R. M. W. Dixon & Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald (eds.), Word: a cross-linguistic typology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii+290. - - Volume 40 Issue 2 - DUNSTAN BROWN

Jae Jung Song, Linguistic typology: morphology and syntax (Longman Linguistics Library). Harlow: Longman, 2001. Pp. xix+406. - - Volume 40 Issue 1 - DUNSTAN BROWN

This paper describes a novel undertaking: comparing the relationship between grammatical ambiguity (syncretism) in nouns, as represented in a default inheritance hierarchy, with textual frequency distributions. In order to do this we consider a language with a reasonable number of grammatical distinctions and where syncretism occurs in different mo...

Suppletion is a morphological phenomenon where different inflectional forms are not related phonologically. Mel'čuk defines it in the following way: "For the signs X and Y to be suppletive their semantic correlation should be maximally regular, while their formal correlation is maximally irregular." (Mel'čuk 1994: 358) Russian čelovek (человек) 'pe...

In this paper we describe the mapping of Zaliznjak's (1977) morphological classes into the lexical representation language DATR (Evans and Gazdar 1996). On the basis of the resulting DATR theory a set of fully inflected forms together with their associated morphosyntax can automatically be generated from the electronic version of Zaliznjak's dictio...

In this paper we describe the mapping of Zaliznjak’s (1977) morphological classes into the lexical representation language DATR (Evans and Gazdar 1996). On the basis of the resulting DATR theory a set of fully inflected forms together with their as-sociated morphosyntax can automatically be generated from the electronic version of Zaliznjak’s dicti...

Mayali has four genders and five morphological classes, with formal identity between the gender prefixes and four of the morphological class prefixes. Gender and morphological class are assigned according to different but largely overlapping semantic principles. We analyze these partially overlapping systems within the NETWORK MORPHOLOGY framework;...

This paper discusses the construction of a typological database of agreement on the basis of fifteen languages taken from different language families so as tomaximise diversity. For each of these languages, the database will contain detailed information about agreement controllers, targets, domains, categories, and conditions. Thus the database is...

The Surrey Syncretism Database encodes information on inflectional syncretism in 30 genetically and geographically diverse languages, representing such morphosyntactic features as case, person, number and gender. Syncretism is defined as when some set of words fail to distinguish morphosyntactic feature values which we believe, based on language-in...

This paper has three goals. First we wish to elucidate the complex paradigms of Dalabon. In languages like Dalabon, which encode information about multiple pronominal arguments on adjacent slots on the verb, the two slots are frequently merged. The resultant set of combinations typically lies somewhere between an irregular paradigm and a set of for...

As a contribution to morphological typology, we analyse dependencies between grammatical categories within a formal framework, namely Network Morphology. The dependencies are expressed by Category Dependency Constraints of the framework, and they determine the dependency of case on number, of gender on number, and of gender on case. Within this are...

We present a network morphology analysis of Russian noun stress. Nouns have a default fixed stem stress, but some nouns have nondefault stress that may deviate in a way that is determined by the form’s position within the paradigm: different declensions prefer particular patterns as their nondefault choices. Membership of a particular declension, i...

Inflectional endings are assigned in languages by general principles, but these can come into conflict. We address the question of how such conflict is resolved. A particularly complex example is the Russian genitive plural, where we find that with soft-stem nouns there is a conflict between exponent assignment according to declension class and a d...

1. Introduction: what is morphological complexity? The paper is a prospectus for a European Research Council funded project 1 (Corbett, Baerman and Brown), which aims to chart the limits of linguistic complexity by focusing on inflectional morphology. Quite apart from its inherent interest to linguists, we believe that it may present particular cha...

The nature of the relationship between frequency of use and grammar in natural language is poorly understood. In order to understand this relationship better, we will look at textual frequency distributions in a language which encodes a reasonable number of grammatical distinctions in its word forms, namely Russian. In this paper, we will focus spe...

The phenomenon of suppletion, as found in English go~went where different inflectional forms of the same lexical item are not related phonologically, has a special place in morphology. Part of its importance is that it sets one of the outer bounds for the notion ‘possible word’ in a human language. It provokes questions about how such forms are to...

The databases record instances of deponency, which is the term we have adopted to describe mismatches between morphology and morphosyntax. The prototypical example are the deponent verbs of Latin, which involve a mismatch between passive form and active meaning. That is, a normal Latin verb had active forms such as amō 'I love' and amāvī 'I have lo...

A Dictionary of the Archi (Daghestanian) Language including word sounds and illustrations.Archi is spoken by about 1200 people in a remote mountain region in Daghestan. The language is characterised by remarkable phonetics, a very high degree of irregularity in all its inflecting word classes and by its morphological system, with extremely large pa...

Agreement is a puzzling phenomenon, found widely in languages of different types. Basically, agreement is the expression of information in the wrong place. In the sentence: the system works intermittently, information about the number of systems is expressed redundantly on the verb (works versus work) which, were it not so familiar, would surprise...