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The concept of coarseness encoded by the lexeme mak ‘coarsely’ is represented at various levels of grammar in Modern Korean. At the level of lexis, the adverb mak designates diverse meanings associated with ‘coarsely’. At the level of bound morphology, the same form can be used as a derivational prefix to verbal, adverbial, or nominal roots to designate ‘recklessness’ or ‘low quality’. At the level of discourse, it carries diverse functions but its core functions are to intensify the meaning and to signal the speaker's negative stance toward the event being described, and to dramatize the event being described with the overtone that the unfolding event/situation was unexpected and, therefore, uncontrollable. The discourse marker development shows extensive subjectification and intersubjectification. The discourse marker often co-occurs with a locution involving a reported speech, with a negative evaluation of the locution of the original author being reported, and with semantically vague deictic pro-verbs, to signal the speaker's inability to find suitable expressions. By using the discourse marker mak, the speaker invites the addressee into the vivid scene of the event in order to create an affective common-ground. In that aspect, mak is a rhetorical device for dramatization in discourse.

Depending on context, the English lexeme now can be used either as a time adverb or a discourse marker (DM). Unlike its temporal counterpart, the discursive now does not lend itself to a straightforward translation into Polish, representing instead a complex, one-to-many kind of relationship between the original and the target language. Based on the assumption that cross-linguistic research making use of translation data may be highly revealing about semantically opaque expressions, such as DMs, the study aims to gain a deeper insight into the nature of now by looking at its Polish equivalents from the perspective of their potential to bring to the surface and elucidate the functions that the marker serves in various contexts. The image of the DM now which emerges from the study is that of a contextually richly nuanced expression, fulfilling numerous discourse-structuring and intensifying functions. In its structural role, now proves capable of marking a number of different relations between discourse segments, such as contrast, result, return, explanation or elaboration. As an intensifying device, the DM can be more explicitly emotive (expressing, for instance, irritation or disbelief), emphatic or conative in nature. In more general terms, the paper shows how a translation-based study may inform pragmatic research.

In the Uzbek language, the phrases describing certain features of the person in the speech activity of language owners realize the linguistic syntactic possibilities of the language among the nominative units expressing the concept of personality. In Uzbek linguistics, the syntax of a phrase has been studied in different scientific approaches, but the semantic types of a phrase have not been distinguished. Importantly, this article discusses the existence of a type that serves as a description of a person among the spiritual types that express a phrase in speech. At the same time, the article reflects the idea that the formation of phrases as a result of certain syntactic relations of words in the speech process, the syntactic connection of words in the speech process as a way of forming interactions, the formation of noun units, linguistic-syntactic patterns.

Telicity and agentivity are semantic factors that split intransitive verbs into (at least two) different classes. Clear-cut unergative verbs, which select the auxiliary HAVE, are assumed to be atelic and agent-selecting; unequivocally unaccusative verbs, which select the auxiliary BE, are analyzed as telic and patient-selecting. Thus, agentivity and telicity are assumed to be inversely correlated in split intransitivity. We will present semantic and experimental evidence from German and Mandarin Chinese that casts doubts on this widely held assumption. The focus of our experimental investigation lies on variation with respect to agentivity (specifically motion control, manipulated via animacy), telicity (tested via a locative vs. goal adverbial), and BE/HAVE-selection with semantically flexible intransitive verbs of motion. Our experimental methods are acceptability ratings for German and Chinese (Experiments 1 and 2) and event-related potential (ERP) measures for German (Experiment 3). Our findings contradict the above-mentioned assumption that agentivity and telicity are generally inversely correlated and suggest that for the verbs under study, agentivity and telicity harmonize with each other. Furthermore, the ERP measures reveal that the impact of the interaction under discussion is more pronounced on the verb lexeme than on the auxiliary. We also found differences between Chinese and German that relate to the influence of telicity on BE/HAVE-selection. They seem to confirm the claim in previous research that the weight of the telicity factor locomotion (or internal motion) is cross-linguistically variable.

The paper deals with the multicultural character of Slovak standard lexis, which is based on the acquisition of foreign lexemes and their adaptation into the language system of Slovak. It focuses on languages that have left important traces on Slovak lexis. The paper also considers five main factors that determine the multicultural character of Slovak standard lexis from the point of view of language ecology: language status, linguistic similarity, linguistic contrast, particularities of language, and codification of language. The influence of these factors on the hosting language represents a complex eco-linguistic phenomenon that is regularised in and by communication.

The present study examined the extent to which word production and recognition rely on shared representations in lexical access by examining cross-modality transfer effects and frequency effects in a training paradigm. Participants were trained in reading high- and low-frequency words in a lexical decision task and were subsequently tested in producing picture names and vice versa, both in their second (Experiment 1) and in their first language (Experiment 2). The same pattern of results was found for first and second language processing. Both tasks showed strong, within-modality repetition effects with faster responses and smaller frequency effects for repeated items. Training with repeated lexical decision, sped responses, and reduced the size of the frequency effects in subsequent picture naming. In contrast, training with repeated picture naming sped responses in lexical decision, but did not significantly decrease frequency effects. The results imply an amodal representation (lemma) that is shared between production and recognition and is not sensitive to word frequency. Also, they imply that a frequency sensitive phonological representation (lexeme) is activated automatically during visual word recognition.

In this paper, the authors continue developing a Linguistic Theory of the Complex Systems models, but in terms of Semantics. Each symbol (transformed function) is syntactically a lexeme, carrying an associated sememe or atomic semantic unit. Each sememe can be decomposed into semes or quantic semantic unities. They may be studied as semantic systems, associated with syntactic systems that serve them as superstructure, with two levels: the quantic and the atomic. Also, it is demonstrated that for all models of complex reality, there exists a complex model from the syntactic and semantic point of view.

The aim of this paper is to investigate a specific naming strategy, which is based on compounding and exemplification, examining data from Chinese. We will focus on what we will label ‘exemplar-based compounds’, i.e. compounds consisting of at least one lexeme denoting an exemplar of the category referred to by the whole compound. We propose that ‘exemplar-based’ compounds in Chinese be divided into two macro-types: (1) [ exemplar 1 -exemplar 2 ] category , in which the exemplars may or may not exhaustively list the members of the category denoted by the compound (e.g. dāoqiāng ‘sword-spear, sword and spear > ‘swords, spears and similar things = weapons’); (2) [ exemplar-class] category , in which the first constituent exemplifies the class denoted by the second one; this type includes compounds in which the second constituent is a classifier (e.g. niǎozhī ‘bird’, chuanzhī ‘ship’, with zhī ‘ clf ’). After a detailed discussion of exemplar-driven category naming and of compounding and classifiers in Chinese, we will present the results of a corpus-based study, based on data of Premodern and Modern Chinese. We will show how the exemplar-driven abstraction characterising these constructions evolved into systematic reference to a category and to its individual items, revealing a change from a procedural category construction to a naming concept label.

The article covers peculiarities of conceptualizing situations of visual perception represented by the words svetly (light), bright and light in Russian and English languages. The necessity of using experimental procedures, such as hypothetic-deductive method (HDM), in investigating concept contents is pointed out. The stages of HDM with regard to experimental investigating the semantics of the words svetly (light), bright and light are described. The paper proves that there are similar as well as different cognitive motives according to which the language speaker perceives qualities described by these words. Specific semantic-cognitive characteristics of the svetly lexeme taking part in formation of its figurative meanings, in contrast to the light lexeme, are analyzed.

Various linguistic and extra-linguistic criteria have been put forward as useful for evaluating the semantic prototypicality of polysemous lexemes. It has been suggested that most of these criteria are linked to frequency of occurrence of senses. However, the provision of additional quantitative linguistic data can shed more light on this complex lexical issue. The present paper embarks on a corpus-based investigation of whether a three-factor measurement of prototypicality based on a) frequency of occurrence of a sense (as the central feature), b) contextual saliency, and c) inter-category similarity produces significant results, particularly when applied to a highly polysemous lexeme – in this case the verb look. Besides investigating the quantitative linguistic background of the central (prototypical) member of a semantic category, the paper briefly scrutinizes whether the same combination of quantitative data can be applied to gauging the level of prototypicality of senses other than the prototype. The findings strongly support the application of the proposed three-factor methodology and point to the need for further work on the identification of suitable criteria for evaluating attested levels of category membership of multiple senses of a lexeme.

The terms from the sphere of lexeme piatra (stone) are developing metaphorical meanings. The images based on the term piatra (stone) are spreading their semantics on different dimensions, from the usual meaning to a plastic representation viewed vertically. To fulfill the proposed purpose, we will stop at a research minicorpus composed on the basis of some phraseology dictionaries, as well as of a series of verses which belong to the biblical text. At the same time, we will emphasize the produced pragmasemantic effect, to force the interlocutor to pay attention in the sight of decoding the messages which contain the lexeme piatra (stone).

Considerable changes in the economic, political and social situation in Russia in the last decades were embodied in language. One of the representations of dynamically changing discourses is embedding of words and expressions which were seldom used earlier in communication and fixed in lexicographical sources with the label “outdated” into the sphere of everyday use. The lexeme innovation appears to be a case in point of this tendency. The paper presents an analysis of the development dynamics of the given “key word of the current time” exemplified in All-Russian newspapers over the period from 1999 to 2012.

Two dimensions of emotional meaning appreciably influence how well a lexeme is processed and remembered: valence (how pleasing) and arousal (how exciting). Although subjective, Likert-style ratings of such dimensions have a long history of fruitful use in experimental psychology—including psycholinguistics and bilingualism research—they have seldom figured in research of second language vocabulary acquisition. A literature review highlights reasons why this neglect is problematic. Fortunately, valence and arousal ratings are freely available for thousands of single words in a few languages. However, ratings of phrasal vocabulary items are rare. This study investigated how well the valence and arousal of two-word English collocations composed of content words can be estimated by proxy measures based on the rated valence and arousal of the constituent words. Evidently, genuine whole collocation ratings are needed. However, the square of the correlation between proxy ratings and genuine ratings estimates the degree to which the emotional content of collocations is compositional (i.e., predictable from the constituent words) meaning that, for emotional content, 1 - r2 estimates the learning load of a typical collocation over and above the learning load of its constituent words. Finally, over 100 English MWEs are newly rated for valence and arousal.

SAMAR is a system for subjectivity and sentiment analysis (SSA) for Arabic social media genres. Arabic is a morphologically rich language, which presents significant complexities for standard approaches to building SSA systems designed for the English language. Apart from the difficulties presented by the social media genres processing, the Arabic language inherently has a high number of variable word forms leading to data sparsity. In this context, we address the following 4 pertinent issues: how to best represent lexical information; whether standard features used for English are useful for Arabic; how to handle Arabic dialects; and, whether genre specific features have a measurable impact on performance. Our results show that using either lemma or lexeme information is helpful, as well as using the two part of speech tagsets (RTS and ERTS). However, the results show that we need individualized solutions for each genre and task, but that lemmatization and the ERTS POS tagset are present in a majority of the settings.

In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme (less precisely, a word) that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word-formation that creates compound lexemes (the other word-formation process being derivation). Compounding or Word-compounding refers to the faculty and device of language to form new words by combining or putting together old words. In other words, compound, compounding or word-compounding occurs when a person attaches two or more words together to make them one word. The meanings of the words interrelate in such a way that a new meaning comes out which is very different from the meanings of the words in isolation. The contrast of the words between English to Albanian: Bus driver in English compound words in Albanian simple word (shofer ose shofer i autobusit) or housekeeper – amëvise; schoolbook - libër shkolle; classroom – klasë; homework - detyrë shtëpia.

This article highlights certain inconsistencies that exist in modern lexicography with respect to word meaning representation and proposes an alternative outlook on the nature of word meaning based on the principles of the functional linguo-anthropological theory. Through the case study of the lexeme bank, it has been demonstrated that word meaning can be presented as a more coherent structure if only the functional evaluative nature of language be taken into account more accurately while compiling a dictionary entry. The article defends the idea that the evaluative nature of human experience as a source of meaning in language determines the way lexical items behave in real texts and, therefore, demonstrates the necessity of abandoning basic principles of referential semantics (with its stress on objective features of referents as physical objects) in lexicographical descriptions.

The Japanese interactional particle yo has been the subject of much uncertainty and controversy, as researchers have proposed various disparate functions and meanings of this small lexeme. Attending closely to the interactional environment where yo is used, I hereby propose a generic semiotic for this omnipresent particle and its role in highlighting the communal nature of meaning-making interaction. In particular, I show that yo is deployed by speakers and understood by recipients as an indication that a particular stretch of talk needs to be properly “registered” for both talk progressivity and the joint accomplishment of specific interactional concerns to be acknowledged and acted upon. I argue that this explicit indication of the usually taken-for-granted presupposition that any given effort at communicative action cannot be implemented in interaction until it is received somewhere foregrounds the semiotically interlocked contingency of the next turn at talk, engendering a variety of context-bound pragmatic effects.

This study investigated the nature of the retrieval architecture of Semitic morphemic entities in word production in Hebrew, a language with a non-concatenated morphology. By taking advantage of the potential for dissociation of form and meaning in Hebrew, we explored the relative contribution of word-form and semantics to morphological processing. In two picture–word interference (PWI) experiments we investigated the lexical status of the two primary morphemes: the root and the word pattern (WP), with the effects of morphological, phonological and semantic relatedness between written distractors and picture names. Facilitation effects were observed for both the root and the WP. Moreover, neither semantic nor phonological similarity affected picture naming in the absence of a morphological relation. Although both the root and the WP induced equally robust morphological effects, we postulate a typical and distinct processing mechanism for each type of morpheme. We interpret our findings as evidence for a parallel processing mechanism of morphemic entities, which is implemented in part at the lemma level and in part at the lexeme level, where the output of both processes is integrated. Implications of these findings for the retrieval architecture of morphemic entities are discussed.

Do typological properties of language, such as agglutination (i.e., the morphological process of adding affixes to the lexeme of a word), have an impact on the development of visual word recognition? To answer this question, we carried out an experiment in which beginning, intermediate, and adult Basque readers (n =3 2 each, average age = 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively) needed to read correctly versus incorrectly inflected words embedded in sentences. Half of the targets contained high-frequency stems, and the other half contained low-frequency stems. To each stem, four inflections of different lengths were attached (-a ,- ari ,- aren, and -arentzat, i.e., inflectional sequences). To test whether the process of word recognition was modulated by the knowledge of word structure in the language, half of the participants’ native language was Basque and the other half’s native language was Spanish. Children showed robust effects of frequency and length of inflection that diminished with age. In addition, the effect of length of inflection was modulated by the frequency of the stem and by the native language. Taken together, these results suggest that word recognition develops from a decoding strategy to a direct lexical access strategy and that this process is modulated by children’s knowledge of the inflectional structure of words from the beginning of their reading experience.

The article presents a usage-based analysis of color attribution, i.e. the construal of the relation between color property and an entity to which it is attributed in painting descriptions. The study is based on the corpus of 100 catalog entries written for American art museums. It focuses on the two most frequent morpho-syntactic patterns in the attributive use of basic color terms – ACN and N of NC – where the color concept surfaces either as an adjective or a noun. Drawing on a number of studies in the Vantage Theory framework ( MacLaury, 1997 , MacLaury, 2002 , MacLaury, 2003 , Taylor, 2003 ), the morpho-syntactic variation in the color word usage is interpreted in terms of alternative vantage construal. The two patterns exhibit features comparable to those described for dominant and recessive vantages in color categorization, and are analyzed as two vantages in the construal of color attribution as an atemporal relation. Thus, the study attempts to apply Vantage Theory, originally developed for modeling color categorization at the lexeme level, to more complex attributive constructions.

This paper demonstrates how a number of well described but problematic verb–preposition constructions in English can be analysed in a consistent and unified manner within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). The analyses proposed make extensive use of the novel feature in FDG of separating lexemes from their predicate (now predication) frames. It is shown that the syntactic and semantic differences between the various verb–preposition constructions can be accounted for by assuming three different predication frames: the ‘composite predicate frame’, the ‘resultative frame’ and the ‘verb + prepositional complement frame’. Next the question is addressed of how to match lexemes and predication frames in such a way that both under- and overgeneration of verb–preposition constructions is prevented. It is suggested that the lexicon plays a crucial role here, in the sense that it is the information provided by or inferrable from the meaning definition of a lexeme that determines which combinations of lexemes and predication frame are acceptable. Finally, it is argued that the separate storage of lexemes and predication frames calls for a new perspective on the difference between arguments and modifiers. It is concluded that what matters is not the obligatory or optional expression of a participant as dictated by the predicate, but its presence – obligatory or optional – in the predication frame selected.

This paper focuses on the discursive and grammatical means by which science students extract and objectify knowledge from the dynamics of the laboratory setting. I argue that nominalization is a particularly important strategy by which this curriculum unit and teacher apprentice students into objectifying the data, evidence, and conclusions from the labs. This paper shows how students are tasked with mastering an unusual locution: the use of the verb ‘to weigh’ as a noun in the subject position, with atypical syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. I suggest that these novel nominalizations are a way that inquiry-based curricula apprentice students into an ideology of scientific research that backgrounds potentially fallible researchers and their technology, and privileges instead the inscriptions that are the products of that lab work. Evidence is presented showing that students adopt and even extend the unusual nominal constructions involving the lexeme ‘weight’.

Grice's Cooperative Principle is assumed to be a basic concept in pragmatics, yet its interpretation is often problematic. The use of the word ‘cooperative’ seems to lead to confusion between Grice's technical notion and the general meaning associated with the lexeme cooperation , leading to what I term ‘cooperation drift’. It is argued that these misinterpretations stem, in part, from the relocation of the Cooperative Principle from philosophy to linguistics. In order to access a meaning that is more representative of Grice's view, it is necessary to see the writings on the Cooperative Principle and implicatures in the context of Grice's work as a whole. A close study of Grice's writings shows the concept of cooperation to be peripheral to his thought: the recurring issues are the distinction between sentence-meaning and speaker-meaning, the notion of systematicity in language, and the idea of rationality being central to human action.

This study aimed to provide a unified description of the lexeme hao , in which its polyfunctionality is accounted for in terms of an abstract basic meaning that interacts in various ways with the different levels of discourse in which hao can function. The corpus contained two sets of data: naturally occurring daily conversations (totaling 120′55″) and radio interviews and call-ins (120′32″ in total). The daily conversations are less formal and less planned than the radio interviews and call-ins. They were taped via audio cassettes and transcribed into intonation units, i.e., sequences of words combined under a single unified intonation contour, usually preceded by a pause. The theoretical and analytical framework adopted in this study was drawn from the work of M.A.K. Halliday [An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Edward Arnold, London, 1994], a tripartite model consisting of ideational, textual, and interactional levels. Acting as a loose talk marker, hao is mainly used to contribute to the relevance of utterances. Specifically, in addition to functioning as an adjective or a degree adverb at the ideational level, it can be used as a marker of closure or transition at the textual level and as a marker of agreement or concession at the interactional level. Put differently, as a predicative adjective, hao can be used in a declarative sentence to express a speaker’s positive attitude towards something, i.e., to indicate that something is “good.” Then it develops into a discourse marker, which construes a world that has no reference in the described situation, but only to the speaker’s world of belief about coherence, especially about correlations between situations.

The research reported here is an attempt to explore the functions of shuo ‘say’ in informal Chinese speech and writing. We further probe into the grammaticalization of shuo, discussing how the various lexical, grammatical and discourse functions have come into being, with reference to the general tendencies of semantic change proposed by Traugott [(1982). In: Lehmann and Malkiel (Eds.) Perspectives on Historical Linguistics. Benjamins, Amsterdam. pp. 245–272; (1989) Language 65(1), 31–55] and Traugott and Konig [In: Traugott and Heine (Eds.), Approaches to Grammaticalization, Vol. I. John Benjamins, Philadelphia. pp. 189–218], and the metaphor MIND-AS-BODY proposed by Sweetser [(1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge]. The corpus used in this study contains two sets of data: non-face-to-face talk on BBS (the Electronic Bulletin Board System) and face-to-face daily conversation, mainly produced by young people in Taiwan. Our data indicate that shuo, in addition to acting as a complementizer as discussed by S. Huang [On the (almost perfect) identify of speech and thought: Evidence from Chinese dialects. (1982). Paper presented at Fourteenth International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics] and Cheng [(1997). In: Cheng (Ed.), Taiwanese and Mandarin Structures and Their Developmental Trends in Taiwan II: Contacts between Taiwanese and Mandarin and Restructuring of their Synonyms. Yuan-Liou Publishing Co. Taipei. pp. 105–131], can also occur in an utterance-initial position, functioning as a marker of hearsay, and in an utterance-final position, as a marker of counterexpectation or as an intensifier. On the whole, the data suggest that the initial and final shuo's are innovations serving an expressive function. In particular, the lexeme shuo is moving from the propositional level to the expressive level; i.e., it is evolving from a verb meaning ‘say’ that prefaces an utterance conveying information into a discourse marker that encodes the attitude of the speaker toward the proposition.

Scientific style manuals typically stress that scientific texts should use consistent terminology: in other words, a given entity or process should consistently be denominated by the same lexeme. But to what extent do native-English-speaker scientific writers actually follow this advice? To investigate this question, I analyzed anaphoric references in a sample of biomedical research abstracts. My results indicate that (1) straight repetition is indeed a common anaphoric strategy; (2) proforms are used infrequently; (3) where straight repetition would be inappropriate because of Given/New structure or other considerations, writers typically make use of reductive head-repetition (e.g. erythrocytes referring back to murine erythrocytes ) or determiner-plus-hypernym structures (e.g. these cells ); and (4) packaging devices (notably packaging nominalizations as defined by Halliday) have anaphoric function, and occur very frequently. The anaphoric use of reductive head-repetition forms part of a much wider system of taxonomy construction and manipulation, based on nominal groups with “general nouns” (such as protein ) as head. In general, and despite the occasional use of synonyms, these findings suggest that the conventional style-manual exhortation to use consistent terminology is sensible advice grounded in native-English-speaker practice. Applications of these findings in the second-language academic writing classroom are briefly discussed.

Compounding has received little attention in linguistic typology and, in particular, in studies on linguistic universals. This paper seeks to study compounding as a universal process with special reference to Arabic nominal compounding. It aims to point out whether compounding is a universal process in light of Standard Arabic nominal compounding. It attempts to extrapolate universal tendencies in compounding with respect to the following features of compounding: the identity of compounding, classification of compounds, headedness of the compounds in the world's languages, relationships between the constituents of compounds, and universality of compounding. It proposes lines of empirical research and methodological suggestions towards the study of universals in compounding. The focus of the study is on nominal compounds consisting of two lexemes.

According to autonomous descriptions of Swedish morphology, for the majority of nouns the gender of the lexeme and the phonological nature of the last segment or segments of the base form (indefinite singular) determine the inflectional category of the noun. The purpose of the present study is to find out if Swedish may resort to the use of larger shapes than the terminal segment or segments in the allegedly ambiguous monosyllabic CVC words. It has been shown in other languages—here giving English as an example—that items in semiproductive classes (like the English ablaut verbs string:strung and spin:spun) are associated via formal phonological links or bundles of links that constrain the manner in which native speakers pattern these form-to-form connections within morphological paradigms (see Bybee & Slobin, 1982; Bybee, 1985). The present wug-type experiment with legal nonwords was administered to three groups of children, i.e., 8- to 9-year-olds, 10- to 11-year-olds, and 15-year-olds. It was hypothesized that the ambiguous monosyllabic CVC lexemes would stabilize themselves slowly and late during language acquisition. The results show a vowel and consonant effect in the en-gender CVC nonwords. Swedish thus resorts to the use of larger shapes (schema analogies) than the terminal segment or segments. Moreover, a development of paradigm membership toward adultlike patterns is seen at late stages of language acquisition of both the ambiguous and the unambiguous nonword types.

Hale and Keyser's Lexical Aargument Structure (LAS) (1993, 1997, 1998) is a currently influential hypothesis of verb derivation based entirely on the syntactic principles of head movement/incorporation (Travis, 1984/Baker, 1988). A specific claim of LAS concerns two types of denominal verbs: locatum, e.g., to saddle, from the syntax of the light verb to provide with, and location, e.g., to shelve, from the light verb to put. This article presents a reanalysis of locatum/location verbs within the framework of Lexeme-Morpheme Base Morphology (LMBM) (Beard, 1995). LMBM, one detailed realization of the type of lexeme-based morphology long advocated by Aronoff (1976, 1994), maintains a strict segregation of open-class lexical categories (lexemes: adjectives, verbs and nouns) from closed-classes (morphemes: adpositions, affixes, pronouns, etc.). By eliminating preposition as a lexical head of phrase, Prepositional Phrases (PP) must be reanalyzed as either Noun Phrase (NP) or Adjective Phrase (AP), a distinction which allows us to take advantage of insights provided by Kiparsky (1997), who notes that syntax of the type assumed by Hale and Keyser is incapable of distinguishing non-existent from existing locatum/location verbs. In addition to the syntactic distinctions provided by LMBM, the adoption of the notion telic role, “information about the use or purpose of an object” (Pustejovsky, 1995: 86), as part of the semantic representation of nouns, provides a mechanism to account for Kiparsky's observation that a denominal locatum/location verb must be derived from a “canonical use” of the base (Kiparsky, 1997: 482). In contrast with Hale and Keyser's arguments for syntactic sufficiency and Kiparsky's call for reliance on semantic principles, however, we argue in accord with LMBM's strict modularity that both syntax and semantics have a role.

Developmental Review 20, 29–80 (2000) doi:10.1006/drev.1999.0494, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on Hunting the Fox of Word Learning: Why ‘‘Constraints’’ Fail to Capture It Gedeon O. Dea´k Vanderbilt University It is often asserted that young children’s word learning is guided by constraints or internal biases. Constraints are broadly described as ‘‘any factor that favors some possibilities over others’’ (Medin et al., 1990). Researchers have argued that special- ized lexical constraints cause children to make some inferences about word mean- ings before others. An analysis shows that the concept constraint is not informative because it does not differentiate a circumscribed set of word learning behaviors. Defining constraints as innate and domain-specific does not remedy this problem. We cannot separate the effects of so-called constraints or biases from a wide range of cognitive and contextual influences on children’s inferences about novel word meanings. This conclusion is supported by a selective review of these influences. The summary highlights our need for an explanatory framework that is sufficiently rich to capture the flexibility and diversity of children’s word learning. The core of such a framework is summarized as a set of general characteristics of human word learning. These characteristics must serve as a starting point for any viable theory of word learning. Prescriptions for future development of a viable framework are suggested.  2000 Academic Press Word learning 1 is a complex and intractable problem for which researchers have offered a seemingly simple and powerful solution. The problem is that preschoolers’ prolific acquisition of new words (averaging a half dozen per day; Carey, 1978) seems impossible given the radical indeterminacy of word meanings. A novel word has an indefinite number of possible meanings, and it is unlikely that children regularly receive information that unambiguously specifies a single meaning. Yet children often infer new words’ correct or Preparation of the manuscript was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spencer Foundation. Thanks to Douglas Behrend, Ken Dodge, Michael Maratsos, Jean Mandler, Dan Schwartz, Tedra Walden, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and discussion. Address correspondence to Gedeon Dea´k at the Department of Cognitive Science, 9500 Gilman Drive, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0515. E-mail: deak @cogsci.ucsd.edu. Word learning includes a phonological representation, assignment to a form class, designa- tion of intensional and extensional meaning, and associations among these components. For simplicity, however, ‘‘word meaning’’ will indicate mapping a lexeme onto a referent concept. We are typically interested in mappings that allow generalizing of the lexeme to novel refer- ents. Copyright  2000 by Academic Press All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

The treatment of morphology in Word Grammar has received less attention than syntax and semantics, but the general principles are equally applicable to morphology. We outline a theory of inflectional morphology which uses ideas familiar from the Word-and-Paradigm tradition — Inflection, Lexeme and Stem — in combination with the logic of default inheritance. We apply this theory to a range of different morphological data: agglutinative (Swahili) and fusional, with and without syncretism (English, Welsh). We show that it is possible to analyse each of these types in a natural way without forcing it into an unsuitable mould, and in a discussion of Cree we show how dialect variation can be accommodated. We compare the WG theory with other approaches which are currently popular, especially a-morphous morphology, distributed morphology and network morphology.

In a recent series of papers, Caramazza and Miozzo [Caramazza, A., 1997. How many levels of processing are there in lexical access? Cognitive Neuropsychology 14, 177-208; Caramazza, A., Miozzo, M., 1997. The relation between syntactic and phonological knowledge in lexical access: evidence from the 'tip-of-the-tongue' phenomenon. Cognition 64, 309-343; Miozzo, M., Caramazza, A., 1997. On knowing the auxiliary of a verb that cannot be named: evidence for the independence of grammatical and phonological aspects of lexical knowledge. Journal of Cognitive Neuropsychology 9, 160-166] argued against the lemma/lexeme distinction made in many models of lexical access in speaking, including our network model [Roelofs, A., 1992. A spreading-activation theory of lemma retrieval in speaking. Cognition 42, 107-142; Levelt, W.J.M., Roelofs, A., Meyer, A.S., 1998. A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, (in press)]. Their case was based on the observations that grammatical class deficits of brain-damaged patients and semantic errors may be restricted to either spoken or written forms and that the grammatical gender of a word and information about its form can be independently available in tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs). In this paper, we argue that though our model is about speaking, not taking position on writing, extensions to writing are possible that are compatible with the evidence from aphasia and speech errors. Furthermore, our model does not predict a dependency between gender and form retrieval in TOTs. Finally, we argue that Caramazza and Miozzo have not accounted for important parts of the evidence motivating the lemma/lexeme distinction, such as word frequency effects in homophone production, the strict ordering of gender and phoneme access in LRP data, and the chronometric and speech error evidence for the production of complex morphology.

In a series of papers we have argued that the distinction between lemma and lexeme levels of representation in lexical access may be unnecessary. We pointed out that the evidence cited in support of this view is not incompatible with alternative accounts that do not assume a lemma level of representation. Furthermore, we argued that there are neuropsychological observations and results from tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiments that appear to be problematic for the lemma/lexeme distinction. Roelofs et al. [Roelofs, A., Meyer, A.S., Levelt, W.J.M., 1998. A case for the lemma/lexeme distinction in models of speaking: comment on Caramazza and Miozzo (1997). Cognition 69, 219-230.] have challenged our conclusions by attempting to demonstrate that (1) a model that incorporates the lemma/lexeme distinction can account for the putatively problematic neuropsychological and TOT data; (2) there are other data that appear to be problematic for a type of model that does not include a lemma level of representation. In the present paper we respond to these criticisms by showing (1) that the neuropsychological and TOT data still represent a challenge for the lemma/lexeme distinction, and (2) that the other evidence cited by Roelofs et al. is not incompatible with lexical theories that assume only one lexical layer.

Accounts of spoken word production differ on whether aphasics' formal paraphasias derive solely from segmental distortion or whether some derive instead from whole word substitution. Form-related paraphasias produced by nine aphasics during picture naming were examined for evidence of lexical effects (word, frequency, and grammatical class biases) and for the manner in which target phonemes and word shape were preserved. Preservation patterns were consistent with previous descriptions of aphasic and nonaphasic form-related speech errors. Evidence for word and frequency biases was found, as well as a grammatical class bias sensitive to the degree of target-response segmental overlap. In conjunction, the results indicate that formal paraphasias arise, at least in part, via word substitution. The findings are supportive of interactive models with phonological-to-lemma feedback and/or modular models with a grammatically organized lexeme level.

The paper examines some of the semantic and pragmatic consequences of a form being both a lexeme (i.e. a simple sign) and a conventional utterance. The approach presented here has far-reaching consequences for the manner in which interjections are identified, analyzed, and subclassified. In particular it it suggested that interjections have all the features attributed to utterances, including the facts that they convey complete propositions and have an illocutionary purpose. Given that interjections are context-bound, it is possible to observe that the referential arguments in the propositions conveyed by interjections are provided by context. As lexemes, interjections have ‘real’ semantic (i.e. propositional/conceptual) content, and within the decomposition of all interjections are basic deictic elements such as ‘I U ’, ‘you A ’, ‘now T ’, ‘here P ’, and ‘this I ’. These ‘primitive’ deictic elements are not tied referentially to any entities until they are placed in context. In this sense both a pragmatic and a semantic approach are required to account for interjections. Interjections are, therefore, shifters (indexicals) by virtue of being built semantically out of basic deictic elements and so should be considered a reasonable topic within the study of deixis. Definitions, using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach to lexical decomposition, are proposed for a varied range of interjections from English, Mparntwe Arrernte (Central Australia), American Sign Language, and Italian.

This paper reports a study of the effects of semantic and grammatical interference basing on the analysis of about 300 Russian speech errors (slips of the tongue) of two kinds: contextual semantic substitutions (when a word semantically related to a distractor word from the current sentence is substituted for the target word) and contextual substitutions of a grammatical feature such as case, number, gender and person, resulting from the interference of a grammatical feature of an "interloper" (a distractor word form from the current sentence, either preceding or following the target word).Contextual semantic substitutions demonstrate the effect of lexical retrieval failure due to the semantic interference of another word from the current utterance, e.g.:U nas taburetka na kuxne -> U nas taburetka na stuleWe have a stool in the kitchen -> We have a stool in the chair[The word stule 'chair' is selected instead of the target noun kuxne 'kitchen' due to the semantic interference of the word taburetka 'stool'.]The semantic interference effect is assumed to result from competition among lexical nodes during lexical retrieval. The distractor word spreads activation to semantically related lexical nodes, which begin to compete with the target lexeme node. If a node semantically related to the distractor word is more highly activated, it may be selected instead of the target word. Not surprisingly, phonological similarity seems to augment the semantic interference effect.Once the lexical node is selected, there is another process responsible for the selection of the word's grammatical features. Contextual substitutions of a grammatical feature indicate that grammatical features, like lexical nodes, can also compete for selection, e.g.:Ja ne javljajus? specialistom po igr-e na klarnet-eI not am specialist in playing-SG.F.DAT clarinet-SG.M.LOC-> Ja ne javljajus? specialistom po igr-e na klarnet-uI not am specialist in playing-SG.F.DAT clarinet-SG.M.DATI am not a specialist in playing the clarinet[The dative case form of the noun klarnet 'clarinet' is substituted for the target locative case form due to the interference of the dative case feature of the noun igre 'playing'.]The grammatical encoding mechanism has to decide which grammatical form of the target word to select. Due to the intrusion of a distractor word form, which activates an irrelevant grammatical feature, the process of grammatical encoding can derail, and the irrelevant feature can overwrite the target feature. In Russian (a highly inflected language), such derailment will usually surface as a wrong inflection suffixed to the lexical stem of the target word. This account contradicts the view that the selection of grammatical features is an automatic consequence of lexical selection.To summarize, speech error data demonstrate pervasive within-speaker interference of both word meanings and grammatical features throughout the sentence production process, indicating that the process is generally competitive. A way to account for the interference effects is to suggest that alongside its conceptual field, a word form activates a field of its grammatical features, spreading activation to other words within the current sentence.

Programs with a natural-language user interface and text-processing programs require a vocabulary providing the mapping of the individual word form onto a lexeme, e.g. “says”, “said”, “saying”→“see”. Examples of such programs are indexing programs for information retrieval, and spelling correctors for text-processing systems. The lexicographical task of such a computer vocabulary is especially difficult for Slavic languages, because their morphological structure is complex. An average Czech verb, for example, has 25 forms, and we have identified more than 100 paradigms for verbs. In order to support the creation of a Czech vocabulary, we have designed a system of programs for paradigm identification and derivation of words. The result of our effort is a vocabulary comprising 110 000 words and 1250 000 word forms. This vocabulary was used for the PASSAT system in the Czechoslovak Press Agency. This vocabulary may also be used in a spelling corrector. However, for such an application the vocabulary must be compressed into a compact form in order to shorten the access times. Compression is based on the paradigmatic structure of morphology which defines suffix sets for each word.

Spanish Abstract: En este ensayo se analiza la distincion romana entre los conceptos de autoridad y potestad, y se desarrolla el pensamiento del jurista espanol Alvaro d'Ors basado en esta distincion. English Abstract: This paper explores the Roman distinction between the idea of auctoritas and the idea of potestas. Auctoritas is the influence that derives from personal respect, wisdom, and virtue without having legal power. Potestas instead comes from the Indo-European lexeme pot-, which refers to the established power. The division of roles between the auctoritas of augurs, jurists, judges, and senators, on the one hand, and the potestas of magistrates and family fathers, on the other hand, served to establish not only a wise and healthy political, social, and legal balance in Roman society but also an ontological equilibrium. Because the power was considered indivisible by nature (Cicero, De re publica 1.38.60), it must respond to something or someone beyond itself and be limited by an external agent (i.e., by moral authority). Moral authority was, therefore, an effective check on the power of Rome.

The issue of what kind of frequency affects compound word (e.g., ‘‘butterfly’’) production has recently received special attention in the context of distinguishing two major types of speech production models. The frequency effect is widely assumed to originate from the lexical system (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994), and one model (IN, Caramazza, 1997) predicts that the frequency of the compound words themselves (‘‘butterfly’’) determines naming performance and another model (WEAVER++, Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) predicts the frequencies of the constituents (/butter/ and /fly/) are the effective frequency. Such predictions are deduced from the following combinations of assumptions of the two models. WEAVER++ assumes that compounds are decomposed into its constituents at a lexeme level where phonological (or orthographic) forms are represented, and this is also the level at which frequency effect locates. IN assumes that a compound is represented by one node (‘‘butterfly’’) in its only lexical layer, which is also the locus of the frequency effect. Chronometric studies have yielded inconsistent results (e.g., Bien, Levelt, & Baayen, 2005; Janssen, Bi, & Caramazza, submitted for publication). Here we present convergent evidence from the perspective of aphasia. It has been assumed that the same mechanism underlie the frequency effect in predicting the naming latencies of unimpaired speakers and the frequency effect in affecting the accuracy of anomic patients (see Miozzo, Jacobs, & Singer, 2004; Nickels, 2001). We report two Chinese patients with whom we studied oral compound production and written compound production respectively. The question is whether compound frequency or the frequencies of the constituents best predict the naming accuracy in the two modalities of output.

The power of a grammar as an explanatory device is limited by the kind of data brought within its scope. Tranel (1976) considered the phonology of the cardinal numbers in Standard and Montreal French, linking the description to an evaluation of synchronic grammar. Essential to an explanation of the phonology of numbers is the acknowledgement of their duality of function, as lexeme and as clitic; and of the differences in the synchronic and diachronic status of final consonant loss, with the consequent differences in the synchronic phonology on which lexemic constraints operate in Standard French and the French of Montreal. The linguist who excludes historical and social data, or who selects linguistic data too narrowly cannot hope to match explanation with psychological reality.

One of the most productive sources of vocabulary in contemporary French is the deriviation from the predicate component of a structure organized in line with surface structure. Since the analysis of binomial verbal and nominal elements is indifferent to the semantic distinctions between transitivity, instrumentality and metaphor, as required, for example, for the characterization of, respectively, grade-cǒtes, grade-foue, baise-mains , light is thrown on the intermediate stages in a generative model, of importance for the development of such lexis. Problems such as the explanation of croque-monsieur are resolved by the incorporation of causative construction in the model. Morphological and phonological constraints on the first element and on the whole binomial allow conclusions to be drawn about the necessary stages in the development from syntagm to lexeme in contemporary French.

The definition of a lexeme is generally based on a number of parameters is ensure his discreteness versus other lexemes that may share some but not all of its features. This leads to the semantically based distinction of xynonyms, antonyms, etc. However, frequently the shades of meaning that differentiate lexical items are subtle and the distinction between genuine polysemy and mere connotational divergence becomes a difficult exercise. This paper discusses a number of non-semantic parameters that may be considered to resolve this dilemma and in particular argues for valency to be included in the analysis of lexemes that have this feature.

The concepts of synonymy and polysemy are the stock in trade of the linguist and particularly the semanticist. Yet certain complications concerning these concepts seem to have been overlooked. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to these complications and to suggest how they might be handled. The paper begins by identifying three levels of synonymy, i.e. form-synonymy, lexeme-synonymy and sense-synonymy, of which the last is shown to be the most important and the one which linguists tend to have in mind when they talk about synonymy. From the nature of sense-synonymy, it is seen to follow that to be operationally adequate any conception of synonymy in terms of sense-synonymy presupposes a method of dividing the meaning of a lexeme into a finite number of senses. Some linguists, however, view synonymy and polysemy as interdependent and propose to solve the problem of polysemy by means of synonym substitution tests. The present paper argues against this position, showing (a) that to treat synonymy and polysemy as interdependent is to be guilty of circularity, and (b) that, if polysemy is treated as dependent on synonym substitution tests, the latter will either fail to serve as a sufficient condition of polysemy or fail to serve as a non-circular condition at all. A more viable approach, it is suggested, is to treat polysemy as methodologically prior to synonymy and to handle polysemy independently of synonymy. The outlines of such an approach are offered on the basis of Weinreich's distinction between contrastive and complementary senses. Contrastive senses can be operationally distinguished by means of the well-known ambiguity tests, while complementary senses can be operationally distinguished by means of semantic inferability tests (for which the author ventures to claim some originality). In the light of this approach to polysemy, sense-synonymy is seen to exist on two levels, that of contrastive sense and that of complementary sense, of which the latter is the more useful for dealing with synonymy in a natural language, such as English.

This paper argues that contemporary morphological theories are undermined by the concept of the linguistic sign, the morpheme or the word, which forms the basis of these theories. Instead of the sign, grammars operate on two distinct and definitionally incompatible basic units, the lexeme , which is a linguistic sign, and the (grammatical) morpheme , which is not. Grammars must contain autonomous lexical and morphological components in order to have sufficient power to explain the independence of the sets of conditions on lexical, syntactic and morphological rules. Such a model can be properly constrained to prevent these components from operating in disregard of each other by (a) discrete definitions of ‘lexeme’ and ‘morpheme’; (b) one specific principle constraining features added to underlying lexical bases by abstract (phonology-free) lexical derivations, and (c) an independently motivated markedness theory. This model also maps morphology onto abstract lexical and syntactic derivates in the proper order, accounting for what Baker has recently called the ‘Mirror Principle’ plus the exceptions to it.

The articles have generally a threefold use in Polynesian, viz. personal, deictic, and ligative. The forms of the personal and deictic articles may serve as morphological criteria for the classification of the Polynesian languages, which at present is based on exclusively phonetic indices. In function the articles are more complex than their names: “definite” and “indefinite” do not always have their European values, and the contrast of singular and plural is rather an antithesis of collective and numerative. All the Polynesian articles, except the vestigial ligative, help to differentiate noun from verb, to define personality and substance in the lexeme, sometimes with the added sense of plurality, emphasis, and size, but not of gender as in Indo-European and isolatedly in Indonesian. Their origin appears to be associated with demonstrative or selective usage like that of the allied Austronesian articles, to which they bear a close resemblance in function, if not in form. The articles, as part of the wider category of particles, constitute, with the pronouns, the active elements in the Polynesian (and the Austronesian) sentence.