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The present study investigates the variation in the plural inflections in modern Dutch dialects, focusing on their diachronic development. The original diversity of declensional classes found in the earliest attested stage of Dutch is indirectly reflected in the varied inventory of plural morphemes in present-day dialects. The gradual confusion and merger of class-specific inflectional markers over time contributed to a reduction in the repertoire of the inherited inflectional plural exponents. With time, the distribution of plural markers tended to become increasingly determined by phonology and gender, or was guided by semantics. The aim of this study is to trace back the patterns of variation in the plural inflection across three present-day Dutch varieties to those found in the earliest attested Dutch and Low Saxon material. The research question addressed in the study is whether the contrasts found across the examined modern Dutch dialects can be directly traced back to the variation in Old Dutch and Old Saxon. The analysis of the developments in plurality patterns is framed in the context of the West Germanic linguistic continuum, allowing us to evaluate the position of Dutch on this continuum. The study reveals that the boundary between different inflectional patterns runs across the Dutch dialectal continuum, with western varieties showing more affiliation with the English plurality patterns, while eastern and southeastern dialects demonstrating a closer affiliation with German. The findings indicate as well that the early traces of this contrast are already detectable in the earliest attestations of Dutch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has established that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulties producing inflectional morphology, in particular, finiteness marking. However, other categories of inflectional morphology, such as possessive 's nominal inflection remain relatively unexplored. Analyses of the characteristics for marking inflection, such as allomorphic categories, may increase our understanding of patterns within disordered grammar to inform the design of interventions and target selection. Data from n = 30 early school-aged children (M = 75 months, SD = 3.38, range = 69–81 months) with DLD were analysed to develop a profile of inflectional morphology skills. Morphological categories included expressive regular past tense, third person singular, and possessive 's. Skills were profiled using an elicitation task. The relationships between expressive morphosyntax, and phonological short-term memory and working memory were also explored. Children demonstrated low accuracy in performance across all inflectional categories, including possessive 's. There were no significant differences between productions of different morphemes, but syllabic allomorphs ([əd]; [əz]) were produced with significantly lower accuracy than segmental allomorphs ([d], [t]; [z], [s]) across all morphological categories. All correlations between expressive morphosyntax and measures of memory were non-significant. Children with DLD show broad deficits in the ability to mark for inflection, including possessive 's; this has implications for theories explaining DLD. Findings may contribute to the design of urgently needed interventions for this clinical population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of students with the experience of migration has been growing year by year in Polish schools. They need to learn Polish relatively fast for educational purposes. This paper presents, based on a pilot glottodidactic experiment, the observations of how foreign children could be helped to learn Polish using simple math exercises. The demonstrated outline of the didactic innovation is aimed at showing how the repeatability of language sequences in the narration of the exercises affects the development of students' grammatical and lexical competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of the Romanian literary language of 100 years ago can only provide a “blurred photo” type of image. The explanation lies in the fact that a natural, vivid language is never static, even if we refer rather to a one moment in time, as was the year 1918. Synchrony is only a methodologically established conventional perspective for the study of languages that are in eternal diachrony. Therefore, what one can remark in relation the Romanian language of that age is its processes and tendencies: the concurrence of noun endings (conotație vs. conotațiune); the alternation of case forms (păcii vs. păcei); the persistence of archaic phonetisms (a ceti) etc

In Vedic Sanskrit, masculine a-stem nominals exhibit two different forms of the nom/voc.pl, a short form (ending in ‑ās) and a long form (ending in ‑āsas). In this article, we will argue that the scope of this variation is not a single nominal but the entire noun phrase. This means that whereas the short form may occur several times in a noun phrase, the long form is either absent or occurs only once. From a functional point of view, complex noun phrases containing one long form are equivalent to simple noun phrases consisting of one long form. In contrast, complex noun phrases containing only short forms are equivalent to simple noun phrases consisting of one short form. The presence or absence of the long form marks the presence or absence of a certain linguistic feature, the exact nature of which still has to be determined. We will argue that in those cases in which two long forms occur in relative proximity to each other, they either have to, or at least can be interpreted as being part of two distinct noun phrases. In order to do so, we will apply morphological, semantic, syntactic as well as stylistic and metrical criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the dynamic nature of childhood bilingualism by analyzing oral speech from returnee heritage speakers (HSs) of Portuguese, who grew up in Germany, but moved to Portugal in childhood/adolescence. The first dataset from 14 speakers showed that the length of exposure to German predicted the rate of (in)accurate production of nominal inflection, indicating that the speakers' morphological knowledge had not been sufficiently stabilized due to the return. The second dataset is from one returnee HS who was reimmersed in the German environment after a 4‐year stay in Portugal. The comparative analysis of the speaker's performance 13 months after moving away from Germany and 11 months after being reexposed to German revealed a significant decrease of inaccurate case, gender, and plural marking, which supports the hypothesis of restabilization of linguistic knowledge. Overall, the findings emphasize the effects of lack of exposure on the development of HSs' bilingual competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Old English to Middle English inflection is gradually lost. It is assumed that this is mainly due to phonological and syntactic changes. This article, however, argues that the loss of inflection is not a linear process but new systems can emerge, and that morphological changes play an important role. The nominal inflection of the Lambeth Homilies – an Early Middle English manuscript from the southwest Midlands and dated around 1200 – is investigated in detail. It will be shown that analogical changes within and across inflection classes do not simply lead towards a reduction of inflection. The increase in syncretism and decrease in allomorphy result in a new inflectional system. This new system distinguishes singular from plural, feminine from non-feminine (in the singular and plural), and possessive from non-possessive (in the singular and plural). Additionally, the original inflection classes related to different stems are almost lost, except the weak inflection classes. The inflection classes are instead related to gender; that is, gender is the information that best predicts how a noun is inflected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of the Romanian literary language of 100 years ago can only provide a "blurred photo" type of image. The explanation lies in the fact that a natural, vivid language is never static, even if we refer rather to a one moment in time, as was the year 1918. Synchrony is only a methodologically established conventional perspective for the study of languages that are in eternal diachrony. Therefore, what one can remark in relation the Romanian language of that age is its processes and tendencies: the concurrence of noun endings (conotație vs. conotațiune); the alternation of case forms (păcii vs. păcei); the persistence of archaic phonetisms (a ceti) etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complex relationship between phonological processes and the morphological domains in which they apply has been of persistent interest to linguists (e.g. Kiparsky 1985 2010; McCarthy & Prince 1995; Inkelas & Zoll 2007; Inkelas 2014). The present study addresses one pertinent issue related to morphophonology by examining nominal inflection in the Safané Dialect of Dafing (an East Manding language of Burkina Faso). The existence of overlong vowels and a derived ternary vowel length distinction are central to the inflectional paradigm. They are described and quantified in an elicitation. The inflectional paradigm is also compared to that of other Manding languages, with attention paid to how related languages conform to putative constraints on syllable structure. Of theoretical interest is how morphological categories, even internal to a given inflectional paradigm, engender different phonological operations and restrictions on syllable content. Morphologically dependent phonological processes exist in a diverse set of languages and domains (e.g. Inkelas & Zoll 2007), but the role that markedness plays, and the representation of morphologically dependent phonology within the framework of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) remain a topic of debate, with the two leading approaches being the indexed constraint approach (e.g. McCarthy & Prince 1995; Pater 2000) and the cophonological approach (e.g. Orgun 2000; Anttila 2000 2002). The current study addresses the Dafing data in terms of these two theories of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers further insights on the role of language contact in the reorganization of grammar based on data from two Modern Greek contact-induced dialects: Italiot varieties in contact with both the local Romance varieties and Standard Italian, and Cappadocian, in contact with Turkish. A contrastive investigation reveals interesting correlations and particularities in the reorganization of inflection of the examined systems. Acknowledging that simplification is not triggered solely by contact, we claim that the attested phenomena can be accounted for as temporary complexifications that head toward and ultimately result in simplification within the paradigmatic relations. The amount and type of complexity diverge significantly depending on the (in)compatibility factor among the systems in contact. Furthermore, in terms of loss, addition and replacement of features, our data show that, although replacement and loss are the most prevalent strategies used at the level of morphology, addition is also very likely to occur when structural incompatibility is involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Note of the Latin Granicies 'Border' and the -(it)ies Formations in the Corpus of Medieval Latin in Polan The Polish medieval Latin corpus is a specific collection of texts created during the Middle Ages in the Polish lands. The language itself had a special status as it was no longer the native language of any specific population. Consequently, it underwent changes in the lexicon to the extent that both Latin forms were transferred into Polish and the Polish ones into Latin. Such is the case with the word granicies ‘border’ which was transferred from the Polish word granica ‘border’. The baffling thing is that the transfer itself created a word within the non-productive Latin fifth declension. The purpose of the present article is to try to explain why it was transferred to this specific type of inflection.

This paper focuses on symmetry of positive morphological first language influence on the bases of the examples of EILC and ICLFI which were chosen according to convergence and divergence between Estonian and Finnish morphological structures. Five groups of elative singular forms in texts of proficiency levels B1 and B2 according to a scale of Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching and assessment (CEFR), written by Estonian learners of Finnish and Finnish learners of Estonian were analyzed.

The Polish medieval Latin corpus is a specific collection of texts created during the Middle Ages in the Polish lands. The language itself had a special status as it was no longer the native language of any specific population. Consequently, it underwent changes in the lexicon to the extent that both Latin forms were transferred into Polish and the Polish ones into Latin. Such is the case with the word granicies 'border' which was transferred from the Polish word granica 'border'. The baffling thing is that the transfer itself created a word within the non-productive Latin fifth declension. The purpose of the present article is to try to explain why it was transferred to this specific type of inflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of a detailed analysis of the Roumanian nominal inflectional root. Its aim is to describe the morphonological types of root and their syntagmatic relevance. In this way, seven relevant types of the nominal inflectional root are defined according to its final phonological segments: unmarked vowel root, /u/ root, unmarked consonant root, /j/ root, consonant+liquid consonant root, palatal consonant root and velar consonant root.

This paper presents the results of a detailed analysis of the Roumanian nominal inflectional root. Its aim is to describe the morphonological types of root and their syntagmatic relevance. In this way, seven relevant types of the nominal inflectional root are defined according to its final phonological segments: unmarked vowel root, /u/ root, unmarked consonant root, /j/ root, consonant+liquid consonant root, palatal consonant root and velar consonant root. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Livonian has among the Finnic languages characteristically the greatest variety of optional inflectional ending variants and the most complicated system of morphophonological alternations. The present article gives an overview of the repertoire of simple inflectional forms in verbal and nominal paradigms (53 verb forms and 25 nominal forms) and their ending variants, as well as morphophonological alternations. These ending variants and morphemic alternations served as a basis for establishing 62 verb types and 238 nominal types. For this reason, a minimal set of forms of classificatory significance was established, and the types were arranged into classes on the basis of the series of ending variants in the paradigms. The article provides an introduction to this procedure on the basis of verb types; 22 classes and 5 declensions were established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to our understanding of countability in two ways. First, I derive the various mass and count readings from the interaction between two syntactic features, viz. [Div] (which creates countable items, cf. Borer ) and [Size] (which creates units). Second, I show how crosslinguistic variation in the expression of countability can be reduced to whether [Div] and [Size] each head their own projection or are combined on a single syntactic head (cf. Thráinsson ; Bobaljik and Thráinsson, Syntax, 1: 37-71, ). Finally, I discuss the various Germanic morphemes that can realize the [Size] feature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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