Showing papers on "Plural published in 1984"

Names for Things: A Study in Human Learning

Abstract: Four chapters in the book's first section, Matters Mainly Psychological, describe empirical observations that explore how a child copes with the fact that many different name-like words can be applied to a single object.A second major section, Matters Mainly Linguistic, contains chapters on phonology, the learning of grammatical categories, the definite and indefinite articles, and the plural. A third section, Matters Mainly Philosophical, focuses entirely on the complex issues of reference and meaning. A final chapter reflects on the implications of the book for developmental psychology.John Macnamara is a world-recognized developmental psychologist and Professor of Psychology at McGill University. An MIT Press/Bradford Book.

On representations in morphology case, agreement and inversion in Georgian

Abstract: In the preceding sections, we have developed the principal components of an analysis of verbal agreement, case-marking, inversion, and related phenomena in Georgian. The most important aspect of this treatment throughout has been the extent to which it is a description of the morphology of the language, employing mechanisms necessary for the description of inflectional morphology rather than the mechanisms of syntax. In particular, no alterations of syntactic structure are posited to account for the inversion construction (or for the difference between Series I and Series II tenses). To the extent to which this account is well-motivated, it establishes our basic descriptive points: ‘Inversion’ in Georgian is a fact about morphology, not a rule of the syntax. While the morphological analysis of this paper differs in fundamental ways from the syntactic treatment of Harris (1981, 1982, 1983), there are also many obvious similarities. For example, both analyses make use of a rule of ‘Unaccusative’, with somewhat similar functions. Both differentiate the subjects of class II and class III verbs by treating the former as having similarities to direct objects of other verbs, where the subjects of class III verbs are similar to transitive subjects. Other parallels could be added; the major difference remains the fact that the present analysis locates these parts of the grammar of Georgian in the inflectional morphology of the language, while Harris locates them in syntactic rules and structures. This difference is hardly surprising. The theory of Relational Grammar, within which her analysis is formulated, cannot be said to contain an explicit theory of morphology, in the sense of a set of systematic mechanisms for relating the inflectional properties of words and their role in a syntactic structure to their surface form. Once we provide a morphological framework in which to discuss these issues we see that Harris' insights about the structure of the language are fundamentally correct, and can be maintained in larger part, but that they pertain to the morphology rather than to the syntax. Beyond the basic descriptive issue of how to treat inversion, however, the analysis above justifies a certain number of broader conclusions, not limited to Georgian. We take up some of these below, in increasing order of their generality. In the analysis defended here, the several classes of Georgian verbs are differentiated lexically in terms of independently motivated morphosyntactic (or inflectional) representations, rather than by arbitrary ‘conjugation-class’ markers. For example, a ‘class IV’ diacritic is no longer necessary, since such verbs are uniquely identified by the combination of subcategorization requirements and inflectional properties for which they are lexically specified. In fact, all of the various Georgian verb classes are now uniquely specified in this way, and no separate arbitrary markers of conjugation class membership are necessary at all in the lexicon. On Harris' analysis, she argues (1981, pp. 228ff.) that conjugation class markers are similarly unnecessary, though they are used throughout her description as a purely expository convenience. The inflectional pattern of a given verb is supposed to follow from the set of arguments it takes, together with the locations of these in (underlying the surface) syntactic structure. While this is surely true (given her syntactic assumptions) for membership in classes 1, 2, and 3, the fact that a verb belongs to class 4 is not similarly deducible from the pattern of its arguments: rather, this is related to the fact that it undergoes inversion. The morphological property of class 4 inflection must thus be accessible to the syntactic rule of Inversion, or else the specific derivational history of the structure in which a verb appears must be accessible to the rules of inflection. Either of these is a variety of interaction between word formation processes and syntactic structure which a restrictive theory would like to exclude; they are unnecessary on an analysis like the present one, in which the locality of reference of inflectional properties is preserved. Naturally, the elimination of arbitrary markers of inflectional class membership (other than structurally motivated aspects of the form of words belonging to such classes) is defended here only for Georgian; but it remains to be seen whether, in other languages where arbitrary partitions of the lexicon are generally posited to account for differences in inflectional properties, it may not be possible to reduce this arbitrariness in light of independently motivated properties of lexical entries. For example, in those Romance languages where verbs are traditionally organized into arbitrary classes (‘first conjugation’, ‘second conjugation’, etc.), it seems quite likely that representations of verb stems provided with a thematic vowel in the lexicon could eliminate the need for such an unilluminating division (cf. Platt 1981 for one such attempt). The point is a moderately subtle one, since it could be maintained that the theme vowels simply act as diacritics on such an analysis of Romance verb classes. It can be argued, however, that the morphology must contain some principle to insert these vowels in any event, and that prohibiting any subdivision of verb stems other than one which is substantively motivated in such a way yields a more restrictive theory than one which allows explicit diacritics unrelated to any unitary structural characteristic of the forms they categorize. Naturally, the validity of this suggestion is impossible to assess clearly until it has been explored in more concrete detail in actual analyses. The rules above make crucial use not only of agreement in inflectional features between a verb and its arguments, but also of (some sort of) ‘co-indexing’ relation between the morpho-syntactic representations in INFL, which eventually determine agreement in verbs, and the NPs they agree with. Such co-indexing is familiar in the case of subject agreement, and in fact plays a crucial role in the Government/Binding theory in governing the subject position in finite clauses; it is less obvious for non-subjects. Stowell (1981), however, has proposed that verbs are co-indexed with all of their subcategorized arguments in order to yield a unified definition of ‘proper government’. In the case of Georgian, one prediction which results from this is that all positions reflected in agreement are automatically properly governed, from which it follows (correctly) that such positions may be unfilled phonetically. One could express this in current idiom by saying that Georgian is a generalized ‘Pro-drop’ language. A further instance in which coindexing between non-subjects and agreement is necessary is cited in Anderson (1974). In the Abkhaz-Abaza languages, a verb-initial agreement marker /y/ (marking third person plural or neuter singular intransitive subjects or transitive objects) is deleted if and only if the verb is immediately preceded in linear order by the NP with which it is co-indexed. In fact, when one considers inflectional systems of even moderate complexity, the plausibility of the position that all agreeing arguments (and not only the subject) are co-indexed in the verb is considerable. The relation of co-indexing that is involved, however, is clearly different from that obtaining between freely occurring NPs. In sentences containing a reflexive phrase, it is clear that the agreement element related to the subject must be kept separate from that relating to the object, despite the fact that the ‘reference’ of the two is the same. If the subject is first or second person, for example, the reflexive will have different agreement features (namely, third person singular) from those of its antecedent, and the two must be kept separated in the morpho-syntactic representation of the verb. It is for such reasons that we have referred to ‘co-superscripting’ rather than ‘co-indexing’ as the relation obtaining between an argument and the morphosyntactic representation of agreement in the clause. Finally, we conclude that analyses such as that presented here validate the notion of a morphosyntactic representation with significant internal structure, and of rules which create and manipulate such representations without effecting other syntactic structure. As long as one confines one's attention to languages with relatively simple inflection, it is possible to sweep inflectional morphology under the rug to a considerable extent, assuming that the formal categories of inflected words bear a rather straightforward relation to the syntactic structures in which they appear. Just as it would be extremely dangerous to generalize about the theory of segmental phonology on the basis solely of analyses of Chinese (however extensive), though, it is unlikely that an adequate picture of inflectional morphology can be derived from the study of languages like English, German, and French in which this aspect of grammatical structure is relatively impoverished. A closer study of a language like Georgian suggests richer possibilities for the apparatus describing the traditional domain of inflection — possibilities which might be productively explored even in languages like English, where the data are not rich enough to motivate them by themselves.

Can Y'all Function as a Singular Pronoun in Southern Dialect?

Abstract: DESPITE THE PROMINENCE Of the pronoun you-all, and its variant y'all, in Southern dialect, few attempts have been made to study these forms in detail.' Wider acceptance has recently been gained by two previously controversial suppositions: (1) that y'all is used by all social classes in the South (which implies that for Southerners themselves, y'all is not a stigmatized element;' and (2) that y'alls is used as the corresponding possessive form.' Little is known, however, about the historical development of y'all, its use, or even its meaning. The purpose of this paper is to specify the meaning of y'all within Southern speech by establishing the number of its referent. Y'all is known to be a second person pronoun, but its precise nature is a matter of dispute. Traditional explanations define y'all as an exclusively plural form of the pronoun you, meaning simply 'more than one'. This is the position accepted by most Southerners-that is, by the majority of the people who use y'all as part of their normal speech. Opposing analyses, while admitting that y'all is often plural, claim that it also has a prevalent singular usage. One notable argument for singular y'all is made by H. L. Mencken (1948, p. 337), who says that the notion that you-all is never used in the singular

Robot controller with parallel processing of plural weighted position data which is combined at output to form a single command

Abstract: A robot controller including a movement command forming unit, object position variable forming unit, a compressing/enlarging unit, a plurality of position control units, and an object position command unit. The movement command forming unit specifies the formation of a plurality of movement object positions. The object position variable forming unit forms a position variable used to correct a position deviation from a previously taught position or a manually entered position. The compressing/enlarging unit operates to compress or enlarge object position variables outputted by the object position variable forming unit. The position control unit receives respective object position variables to perform velocity control and position control. The object position command unit adds the output signals of the position control units to output an object position command, according to which the robot is moved to the object position.

Zero Plurals among the Japanese Loanwords in English

Abstract: F OR DECADES THE USUAL MORPHOLOGICAL VIEW of inflected languages has involved an analysis of derivational and inflectional elements which may be affixed to other morphemes, with tabulated paradigmatic charts like those of Francis (1954) and Gleason (1961). However, what if the lexicon of a language changes in such a way as to require substantive revision of such charts within the analysis? Such is the case for the English language. Japanese has given English at least 544 different loanwords, few of which contain derivational morphemes. Most are native compounds, a basic kind of English morphemic structure. The standard dictionaries of English (including The Second Barnhart Dictionary of New English) record at least 490 nouns, 52 adjectives, and 2 interjections borrowed from Japanese, plus 71 duplications caused by spelling variation, main entries for both the full and the short forms of an item, functional shifts, etc. When we inquire about the inflectional morphemes in this corpus, we note that there are no verbs. So the possible problem of the assimilation of Japanese borrowings into the verb inflection-system of English does not arise. However, at least 311 of the 490 nouns are clearly count nouns. A few others might be, as dictionaries may not have recorded a plural form when it actually exists. Where a plural spelling form is indicated, 182 take -s, and go 'a game' and hootch take -es. This analogized regularization is predictable, since most Japanese nouns end in a vowel. There are also 3 partially Latin items-Katsuwonidae, shigellae, and shigelloses. However, 125 borrowings have not fitted comfortably into the pluralization system; this number drastically enlarges the total number of irregular plurals in English. There are 89 which take -0 (table 1), 29 which can take either -0 or -s, and 7 collective nouns which occur only as zero plurals. The zero collectives are burakumin 'certain people treated as an inferior caste', genro 'Japanese elder statesmen', kanamono 'sword mounts', menuki 'pair of ornaments on a Japanese sword hilt', mompei 'work trousers', norito 'Shinto ritualistic prayers', and zaibatsu 'industrial conglomerate'. It might be noted that The Second Barnhart Dictionary records 28 Japanese nouns borrowed in the 1960s and 1970s, with 8 of 149

Variable concord and sentential plural marking in Puerto Rican Spanish

Abstract: ECENT analyses of syllable-final segments which form the inflectional system in Puerto Rican Spanish have indicated that their variable deletion may be differentially constrained by phonological, structural and informational factors.' In the case of the nominal plural marker (s), i t was found tha t although its deletion from determiners, nouns, and adjectives in the noun phrase did not occur if i t threatened to make the sentence ambiguous, this possibility rarely occurred because of many types of contextual disambiguation. The main constraints on (s) deletion were phonological and syntactic. The syntactic constraint was a quantitative tendency towards local concord: noun phrases tended to retain a marker on all their components, or more frequently, on none of them. The verbal plural marker (n) was found to be relatively rarely deleted, and its deletion was more strongly constrained by functional (i.e. informational) factors. These variables have traditionally been studied in isolation, although there is some indication tha t their behavior is interdependent according to functional criteria: analysis of individual

Electronic apparatus having plural detachable memories

Abstract: A personal computer or the like having plural detachable external memories wherein the efficiency of use of such external memories is improved by the fact that the addresses allotted to each of the plural external memories are rendered variable.

Adquisición de morfemas del español

Abstract: Proofs of real and artificial words (similar to Berko�s, 1958) were applied to 109 spanish children 3 to 6 year-old, in order to determine the evolution in the use of plural morphemes, augmentatives and diminutives, past imperfect, and past definite. Results show an important progress between 3 an 4 year-old, later development being slower. An order of difficulty in the acquisition of these morphemes is established and errors made are analysed. Overregularization of errors with real irregular verbs were also found. Some implications were drawn on the morpheme acquisition process.

Singular and plural objects: Thoughts on object relations theory

Abstract: Object relations theory has been dominated by the concept of the mother as the primary and most influential object in infancy. New considerations of the role of the father are questioning this premise and raising issues about the influence of multi-object relationships in very early life. Illustrations are drawn from different cultures with a wide variety of child rearing practices. Implications for theory, assessment, and treatment are illustrated through case material.

The selection and coexistence of a plural number of primitive tRNAs and the origin of the genetic code.

Abstract: Simulation experiments on Darwinian evolution of primitive tRNAs in coacervate droplets were carried out using four kinds of colored marbles in a computer system. Plural numbers of specified primitive tRNAs were selected and coexisted continuously under the suitable conditions. We suggest that these conditions simulate the real process of selection and coexistence of primitive tRNAs and the origin of the genetic code.

Young children's comprehension of number markers

Abstract: Young children's comprehension of four number markers (demonstratives, regular nouns, third person of the auxiliary be, and regular present tense verbs) was investigated through their presentation in sentences conveying non-redundant information about number Comprehension of each sentence was tested in two tasks: pointing to one of a pair of line drawings and acting out with toys the action described by a sentence The results indicated that, firstly, the number information carried by the verb is rarely attended to or mastered before some component of the noun phrase; and, secondly, that the is/are allomorphs of the auxiliary be are mastered much earlier than the singular and plural forms of third-person regular present tense verbs Both the overall order of difficulty in understanding the four number markers investigated and the analysis of individual data were consistent with the developmental sequence reported by several authors for the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in spontaneous speech production

Ethonyms in Hausa

Abstract: Hausa ethnonyms, terms indicating a person's or~g~n, ethnic affiliation, or professional or social position, are formed with a prefix ba?- in the singular and a suffix -aawaa in the plural. This paper provides a detailed specification of the segmental and tonal characteristics of 'these ethnonyms and a comprehensive list of currently acceptable forms. The paper illustrates the semi-productive nature of the construction and the imperfect pairing of forms with ba?- and -aawaa. The use of ethnonyms to indicate 'supporters or followers of a person' is documented as well as the overlooked functioning of ethnonyms as adjectival qualifiers. The paper explores the relationship between the suffix -aawaa and the identical suffix found with names of towns and villages. The major conclusion is that ba?- and -aawaa are suppletive derivational markers, the former originally denoting 'person ... ', the latter indicating 'community ... '.