Academic literature on the topic 'Lexical Inherent structure'

This chapter reviews the evidence for the origins of morphomic patterns in the effects of defunct sound changes or extinct functional motivations and reflects on their substance and on the types of alternation involved, concluding that morphomic patterns exist independently of their phonological substance and that it is possible that any kind of formal difference (suppletion, defectiveness, heteroclisis, periphrastic structure, internal allomorphy) is liable to morphomic distribution. The chapter reasserts the crucial role of lexical identity in explaining morphomic structures in the face of f

This chapter examines the syntactic and semantic properties of heads, e.g. Voice, Appl, and little p, that add participants to events. Instead of assuming that such heads exist as distinct primitives in the functional lexicon, it is proposed that there is one such head, which can get different interpretations depending on how it is merged into the structure. The chapter’s approach attributes the relative uniformity of the expression of argument structure to the principles that interpret syntactic structure semantically; thus, syntax is truly autonomous, with the atoms of syntactic representati

Polysynthetic languages have been involved in a variety of language contact situations. In cases of occasional contacts, polysynthetic languages have been simplified, both by learners (approximate varieties) and native speakers (foreigner talk). Such simplified versions can be the source also of a number of pidgins based on polysynthetic languages. Those pidgins did not inherit the morphological complexity of the source languages, but instead use pronouns for person marking and largely analytic structures. Sometimes unanalyzed complex verbs are used, where the original meaning of the affixes d

Lexical semantics is concerned with inherent aspects of word meaning and the semantic relations between words, as well as the ways in which word meaning is related to syntactic structure. This chapter provides an introduction to some of the main themes in lexical semantic research, including the nature of the mental lexicon, lexical relations, and the decomposition of words into grammatically relevant semantic features. The mapping between the semantics of verbs and their associated syntax is discussed in terms of thematic roles, semantic structure theory, and feature selection. A review of some of the most influential findings in second language research involving both open-class and closed-class lexical items reveals important implications for classroom pedagogy and syllabus design in the domain of vocabulary instruction.

In this paper, we discuss the diachronic change in the internal structure of direct and indirect objects in Greek. We do so by comparing the properties of dative and genitive objects in Classical vs. (Standard and Northern) Modern Greek. We argue that there are two distinct modes of dative and genitive objective case assignment: they are either prepositional or dependent (structural) cases, as proposed by Baker & Vinokurova (2010), and Baker (2015). In other words, the change from Classical to Standard Modern Greek must be analyzed as a development from a grammatical system where dative and genitive were lexical/inherent cases, PPs, to a system where genitive is a DP that receives dependent case in the sense of Marantz (1991). By reviewing the diachronic paths of morphological dative, prepositions and prefixes, we propose that the morphological loss of dative from the history of Greek is only indirectly relevant to the diachrony of argumental datives, while change in the case-assigning properties of prepositions played a central role.

This chapter explores the notion of motivation. It is typically explicated in terms of inheritance: lexical items inherit properties from more general patterns. Inheritance is attractive for morphology partly because it has also been invoked in the organization of concepts. It explores three models of motivation. The impoverished entry theory claims that lexical entries contain only idiosyncratic material, and higher-order items or schemas fill in the predictable parts. The full entry theory claims that words are encoded in full, and they are motivated by virtue of being redundant with schemas. The chapter argues that the proper realization of motivation is in terms of relational links, which mark pieces of structure shared between lexical items, both between words and schemas, and both horizontally and vertically. Hence motivation is extended beyond the typical top-down relations.

This paper analyzes English symmetrical predicates such as collide and match. Its point of departure is an analysis of the concept “similar” from Tversky (1977) that appears to show that similarity is psychologically asymmetrical. One basis for this claim from Tversky is that the sentences “North Korea is similar to Red China” and “Red China is similar to North Korea” are assessed as differing in meaning by experimental subjects; this seems to imply that the symmetrical entailment R(x,y) ↔︎ R(y,x) fails for this concept. Five experiments are presented that show (1) the apparent asymmetry of similar is reproduced for 20 predicates that are intuitively thought to be symmetrical, (2) unique linguistic-interpretive properties hold for these symmetrical words, such as reciprocal interpretation when they appears intransitively, (3) the asymmetrical interpretation of subject-complement constructions containing the symmetrical words is a consequence of general linguistic-interpretive principles. On the basis of the experimental findings, we offer an analysis of symmetrical predication. One major claim of the analysis is that symmetry is a property of lexical items and has no special syntax. A second claim is that the structural positioning of Noun Phrases in sentences containing symmetricals—rather than inherent semantic properties of the Noun Phrases themselves—sets their status as Figure and Ground in the comparison, even if the nouns are nonsense items. Finally the behavior of symmetrical predicates is shown to vary as a function of their differing lexical class assignments and collateral semantic designations, such as activity vs. state. Most generally, it is claimed that a deeper understanding of symmetrical terms comes from analyzing the semantics of syntactic structures in which they appear.

The paper deals with upgrading of an electronic semantic dictionary of RUSLAN for automatic processing of Russian texts. The previous versions of the dictionary were created in the 1990-es and early 2000-es mainly for automatic processing of the Russian Federation’s state papers. Now the Authors inherit the basic formalism of the Dictionary, including the metalanguage and the structure of the dictionary entry. The current version is revised and enlarged in a number of ways. While the initial versions mostly predate the advent of corpus linguistics, the current version is based on corpus data.