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Our paper investigates how zero-affixed verbal forms (specifically, denominal and deadjectival verbs) are processed by native speakers of Italian during visual word recognition. More specifically, we verify whether, and possibly to what extent, the processing of such forms differs from or resembles the processing of verbs resulting from two other productive word formation schemas in Italian, i. e., suffixation and parasynthesis. The interest of such a comparison lies in the fact that the three considered schemas behave similarly from a functional point of view, i. e.: i) they all change the category of the base, ii) they select the same base category (nouns and adjectives), and iii) they show similar semantic characteristics. However, this shared function is realized by means of different formal exponents (both overt and covert) which might imply different degrees of complexity. Crucially, suffixation and parasynthesis display an overt derivational marking, while zero-affixation obviously does not. On such premises, to verify whether the strength of connections between morphologically complex words and their bases is affected by the nature of the transcategorization marking (overt v s covert) or whether other factors play a more determining role, we conducted a psycholinguistic experiment involving a lexical decision task combined with the masked priming paradigm, which allows focusing on such relations in the mental lexicon. Results indicate that the processing of zero-affixed verbs resembles that of suffixed but differs from that of parasynthetic forms. We interpret such results discussing the possibility that the perception of a morphological relationship might depend less on the overtness of the marking, and more on the overall derivational complexity of the morphological process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, lexical typology has to a large extent been interested in lexical categorization of various cognitive domains (e. g., colour, perception, body), i. e., in how these are cut up by the most important words in a language, and in lexical motivation, or formal relatedness, i. e., in whether words for certain concepts are completely unrelated or related to others via polysemy or derivation (e. g., intransitive vs. transitive verbs, words for 'day' and 'sun', etc.). Grammatical behavior of words and morphosyntactic patterns as encoding meanings traditionally belong to grammatical typology. In this paper, I consider the domain of temperature and show how the close interaction between lexicon and grammar in the encoding of the temperature domain across languages calls for an integrated lexico-grammatical approach to these phenomena. As a useful tool for such an enterprise I suggest an elaborated semantic map comprising three layers – the layer specifying the words with the information on their mutual formal relations (i. e., whether they are identical, completely unrelated or related via derivation or inflection), their morphosyntactic properties (e. g., their part-of-speech affiliation, inflectional potential, etc.), and the constructions they occur in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Discriminative Lexicon is a theory of the mental lexicon that brings together insights from various other theories: words are the relevant cognitive units in morphology, the meaning of a word is represented by its distribution in utterances, word forms and their meaning are learned by minimizing prediction errors, and fully connected networks successfully capture language learning. In this article we model comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verb forms in the Discriminative Lexicon model. Kinyarwanda is a highly inflectional language, and therefore particularly interesting, because its paradigms are almost unlimited in size. Can knowledge of its enormous paradigms be modeled only on the basis of words? To answer this question we modeled a data set of 11,528 verb forms, hand-annotated for meaning and their grammatical functions, in the Linear Discriminative Learning (LDL), a two-layered, fully connected computational implementation of the Discriminative Lexicon model. We also extracted 573 verbs from our data set for which meanings are available that are based on empirical word embeddings obtained from large text corpora, and modeled them in LDL. Both comprehension and production is learned accurately: Kinyarwanda verb forms can be comprehended and produced relying on words as cognitive units, in a two-layered network, in which prediction errors are minimized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at a unified analysis of the different interpretations which constructions involving the German name-mentioning modifier sogenannt 'so-called' can adopt. In contrast to nouns like Sepsis 'sepsis', a noun like Hotel 'hotel', as in sogenanntes Hotel, gives rise to a "distanced" interpretation of the construction rather than one informing about a concept's name. After a thorough investigation of the lexical-semantic properties, we propose the reading of the construction to emerge from an interplay between lexical factors like the head nominal's conventionalization, on the one hand, and pragmatic implicatures rooted in relevance- as well as manner-based principles, on the other. From a compositional perspective, the so in sogenannt will be reasoned to be identical in function to quotation marks as a means to refer to a linguistic shape through demonstration. The different interpretations of the construction will be coupled with the type of binding of the agent-argument variable as well as the event variable of the verbal root nenn- 'call' of sogenannt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]