Person and number syncretisms in Dutch

The aim of this paper is to make sense of the typologically quite exceptional pattern of person neutralization in the plural as we find it in Dutch verbal paradigms. We argue that Dutch, and most of its dialects, have a structural pattern of syncretism in their verbal paradigm: there are no person-distinctions in the plural. The main question of this paper is: where does this structural pattern of neutralization in Dutch come from, if we cannot explain it as a typologically wellattested pattern? As a first step, note that although the pattern is typologically quite odd, it conforms to another well-known generalization about paradigms: neutralization occurs in the marked half of the paradigm (see e.g. Nevins 2009). Further, we need to explain why this pattern occurs precisely in the Netherlands at this particular point in time. To this, we argue that this pattern arises as the result of a particular language acquisition strategy together with reduced evidence from the input for the fully inflected forms, probably as a result of dialect contact. This reduced evidence causes the third person, being the most frequent form, to dominate the other plural forms. In combination with limited paradigm splitting (Pinker, 1996), this explains the uniform plural that we find in most Dutch dialects.     

The Production of Nominal and Verbal Inflection in an Agglutinative Language: Evidence from Hungarian

The contrast between regular and irregular inflectional morphology has been useful in investigating the functional and neural architecture of language. However, most studies have examined the regular/irregular distinction in non-agglutinative Indo-European languages (primarily English) with relatively simple morphology. Additionally, the majority of research has focused on verbal rather than nominal inflectional morphology. The present study attempts to address these gaps by introducing both plural and past tense production tasks in Hungarian, an agglutinative non-Indo-European language with complex morphology. Here we report results on these tasks from healthy Hungarian native-speaking adults, in whom we examine regular and irregular nominal and verbal inflection in a within-subjects design. Regular and irregular nouns and verbs were stem on frequency, word length, and phonological structure, and both accuracy and response times were acquired. The results revealed that the regular/irregular contrast yields similar patterns in Hungarian, for both nominal and verbal inflection, as in previous studies of non-agglutinative Indo-European languages: the production of irregular inflected forms was both less accurate and slower than of regular forms, both for plural and past-tense inflection. The results replicate and extend previous findings to an agglutinative language with complex morphology. Together with previous studies, the evidence suggests that the regular/irregular distinction yields a basic behavioral pattern that holds across language families and linguistic typologies. Finally, the study sets the stage for further research examining the neurocognitive substrates of regular and irregular morphology in an agglutinative non-Indo-European language.     

Investigations on markedness,syncretism and zero exponence in morphology

The inventories of subject clitics in northern Italian varieties are affected by widespread morphological changes. One of these changes is syncretism. In addition, many dialects display defective paradigms where some of the clitics are missing. The clitics that undergo syncretism and the clitics that are missing tend to be the same: the first person singular and plural, the second plural, and, less frequently, the third plural. Working in the framework of Distributed Morphology, I argue that these clitics are the target of markedness constraints that trigger repair operations leading to either syncretism or the removal of forms from a paradigm. In particular, I propose two such operations: one is feature deletion, which deletes a marked feature specification. This operation is always followed by feature insertion, which inserts the opposite value of the deleted feature specification (this operation leads to syncretism). The other one is obliteration, which deletes a morphosyntactic node and leads to underspecified morphosyntactic representations (this operation leads to paradigmatic gaps). I investigate how these operations affect the morphological exponents in PF, creating syncretisms and gaps in exponence.     

Functional sites in protein families uncovered via an objective and automated graph theoretic approach

We report a method for detection of recurring side-chain patterns (DRESPAT) using an unbiased and automated graph theoretic approach. We first list all structural patterns as sub-graphs where the protein is represented as a graph. The patterns from proteins are compared pair-wise to detect patterns common to a protein pair based on content and geometry criteria. The recurring pattern is then detected using an automated search algorithm from the all-against-all pair-wise comparison data of proteins. Intra-protein pattern comparison data are used to enable detection of patterns recurring within a protein. A method has been proposed for empirical calculation of statistical significance of recurring pattern. The method was tested on 17 protein sets of varying size, composed of non-redundant representatives from SCOP superfamilies. Recurring patterns in serine proteases, cysteine proteases, lipases, cupredoxin, ferredoxin, ferritin, cytochrome c, aspartoyl proteases, peroxidases, phospholipase A2, endonuclease, SH3 domain, EF-hand and lectins show additional residues conserved in the vicinity of the known functional sites. On the basis of the recurring patterns in ferritin, EF-hand and lectins, we could separate proteins or domains that are structurally similar yet different in metal ion-binding characteristics. In addition, novel recurring patterns were observed in glutathione-S-transferase, phospholipase A2 and ferredoxin with potential structural/functional roles. The results are discussed in relation to the known functional sites in each family. Between 2000 and 50,000 patterns were enumerated from each protein with between ten and 500 patterns detected as common to an evolutionarily related protein pair. Our results show that unbiased extraction of functional site pattern is not feasible from an evolutionarily related protein pair but is feasible from protein sets comprising five or more proteins. The DRESPAT method does not require a user-defined pattern, size or location of the pattern and therefore, has the potential to uncover new functional sites in protein families.     

Paradigmatic generalization of morphemes

Syncretism in inflectional paradigms corresponds often only partially to natural classes. In this paper, I propose Morpheme Generalization Grammars, a novel paradigm-based approach to this phenomenon where the morphosyntactic content of every affix corresponds to the maximal area of the paradigm where it regularly occurs, whereas additional Morpheme Generalization Rules selectively extend its paradigmatic coverage by deleting part of the featural content of affixes for specific paradigm cells. The resulting formalism maximizes the use of paradigmatic extension rules familiar from the Rules of Referral in Paradigm Function Morphology, but has also close parallels to Impoverishment rules in Distributed Morphology. By imposing inherent restrictions on the content of inflectional affixes, it substantially reduces the amount of analytic ambiguity in the modeling of inflectional morphology.     

Recurring discharge patterns in multiple spike trains

Simultaneously recorded spike trains were obtained using microwire bundles from unrestrained, drug-free cats during different sleep-waking states in forebrain areas associated with cardiac and respiratory activity. Cardiac and respiratory activity was simultaneously recorded with the spike trains. We applied the recurring discharge patterns detection procedure described in a companion paper (Frostig et al. 1990) to the spike and cardiorespiratory trains. The pattern detection procedure was applied to detect only precise (in time and structure) recurring patterns. Recurring discharge patterns were detected in all simultaneously recorded groups. Recurring discharge patterns were composed of up to ten spikes per pattern and involved up to four simultaneously recorded spike trains. Fourty-two percent of the recurring patterns contained cardiac and/or respiratory events in addition to neuronal spikes. When patterns were compared over different sleep-waking states it was found the the same units produced different patterns in different states, that patterns were significantly more compact in time during quiet sleep, and that changes in the discharge rates accompanying changes in sleep-waking states were not correlated with changes in pattern rate.     

Greek dialectal evidence for the role of the paradigm in inflectional change

Several dialectal variants of the inflectional ending for person, number, tense, and voice in the Modern Greek past imperfective nonactive paradigm are presented here by way of showing the relevance of dialect material for linguistic theory. In this case, the endings underwent reshapings based on other related endings (e.g., 3PL based on 1/2PL), providing a basis for understanding the nature of interactions among different “cells” within a paradigm and the constructs that can be employed to model them. As a result, both rules of referral and O–O correspondence relations are shown to have to take sub-word similarities into consideration, and various constraints on such interactions are considered and rejected in favor of a liberal view that allows for any cell to relate to any other cell. Finally, a distinction is motivated, based on cell-to-cell influences, between adventitious and significant syncretism of form.     

Testing Whether and When Abstract Symmetric Patterns Produce Affective Responses

Symmetry has a central role in visual art, it is often linked to beauty, and observers can detect it efficiently in the lab. We studied what kind of fast and automatic responses are generated by visual presentation of symmetrical patterns. Specifically, we tested whether a brief presentation of novel symmetrical patterns engenders positive affect using a priming paradigm. The abstract patterns were used as primes in a pattern-word interference task. To ensure that familiarity was not a factor, no pattern and no word was ever repeated within each experiment. The task was to classify words that were selected to have either positive or negative valence. We tested irregular patterns, patterns containing vertical and horizontal reflectional symmetry, and patterns containing a 90 deg rotation. In a series of 7 experiments we found that the effect of affective congruence was present for both types of regularity but only when observers had to classify the regularity of the pattern after responding to the word. The findings show that processing abstract symmetrical shapes or random pattern can engender positive or negative affect as long as the regularity of the pattern is a feature that observers have to attend to and classify.     

Organspezifische multiple Formen der Glutamatdehydrogenase in Medicago sativa

Summary The alteration of the multiple forms of NAD-dependent glutamic dehydrogenase (GDH) during the development of Medicago sativa is investigated by means of polyacrylamide electrophoresis. Seed germination is accompanied by a characteristic change of the GDH-isoenzyme pattern. Seeds contain seven isoenzymes, which gradually decrease in number during germination. At the same time a pattern of new isoenzymes becomes visible. The seed pattern is called GDH-I and the later appearing pattern GDH-II. GDH-I is characteristic for the cotyledons, whereas GDH-II is the typical pattern of the root system. Shoots produce a mixed pattern composed of the GDH-II isoenzymes as well as some GDH-I isoenzymes.These isoenzyme patterns are organ specific. No qualitative change occurs during further development of the plants and during growth in the presence of different inorganic and organic N-sources in the culture medium.All the individual isoenzymes are found predominantly in the particulate fraction. They represent stable forms which are not altered by variation of the conditions of enzyme extraction or during enzyme purification. Re-electrophoresis of the individual isoenzymes following elution from the polyacrylamide gels reveals only one specific band. The molecular weights of all the distinctive isoenzymes are identical.There is some evidence that the different isoenzymes represent conformational forms of one enzyme, and it is postulated that the GDH-I isoenzymes are correlated to a normal metabolic (or catabolic) function of the enzyme, whereas the GDH-II isoenzymes are responsible for a primarily anabolic function of glutamic dehydrogenase.     

Blocking and paradigm gaps

Gaps in morphological paradigms are often explained in terms of blocking: generating one form is blocked by the existence of a paraphrase. Another way of thinking about paradigm gaps dissociates their existence from competition between forms. Unlike in competition-based approaches, systematic gaps can be seen as true gaps; the system might not generate a certain form, but this form is not considered in comparison to others. Adopting this latter approach, we argue that inflectional paradigms are neither morphosyntactic primitives nor the result of competition. This claim is supported by data from two unrelated languages. For Hebrew, we demonstrate that a passive gap is not the result of competition with analytic paraphrases. For Latin, we show that a cyclic, syntax-based approach is superior to a theory that generates nonactive verbs in the lexicon and has them compete against each other. Systematic paradigm gaps are thus argued to result from syntactic structure building, without competition regulating independent morphological constructions.     

Prolegomena to a typology of morphological features

Morphological features characterize variations in morphological form which are independent of syntactic context. They contrast with morphosyntactic features, which characterize variations in form correlated with different syntactic contexts. Morphological features account for formal variation across lexemes (inflectional class), as well as morphosyntactically incoherent alternations within the paradigm of a single lexeme. Such morphological features are not available to the syntax, as is made explicit in the principle of ‘morphology-free syntax’. Building on work on stress patterns in Network Morphology and on stems in Paradigm Function Morphology, we take initial steps towards a typology of these morphological features. We identify four types: inflectional class features (affixal and prosodic), stem indexing features, syncretic index features and morphophonological features. Then we offer a first list of criteria for distinguishing them from morphosyntactic features (independently of the principle of morphology-free syntax). Finally we review the arguments demonstrating the need to recognize morphological features.     

Irregular past tense forms in English: how data from children with specific language impairment contribute to models of morphology

Two cognitive models of inflectional morphology are widely debated in the literature—the Words and Rules model, whereby irregular forms are stored in the lexicon but regular forms are created by rule, and Single Mechanism models, whereby both regulars and irregulars form an associative network, with no rules. A newer model, the Computational Grammatical Complexity (CGC) model, recognises the contribution of hierarchical complexity in three components of the grammar, syntax, morphology and phonology, to the construction of morphologically complex forms. This model has previously been tested for regular past tense inflection in English, and in this study we test its predictions for the English irregular past tense, in four groups of children: a group with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI; aged 9;8–17;8), and three groups of typically developing children (aged 5;4–8;5). Children with G-SLI provide an important test case for the CGC model because they have deficits in syntax, morphology and phonology. As predicted, children with G-SLI produced fewer tense-marked irregulars than expected for their age, and fewer over-regularisations than their language-matched controls. The effect of verb-end phonology on over-regularisation and null-marking errors was the same for all groups: both G-SLI and typically developing children were more likely to over-regularise verbs ending in a vowel, and more likely to null-mark verbs ending in an alveolar consonant. We interpret these results as providing further support for the CGC model.     

The perfective past tense in Greek children with specific language impairment

This study presents experimental results examining the production of perfective past tense forms of Greek in eighteen individuals with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in comparison to typically developing children. We found that both individuals with SLI and typically developing children were more accurate in producing sigmatic than non-sigmatic verb forms. On the other hand, children with SLI were found to be impaired in their use of sigmatic forms and to over-rely on non-sigmatic forms, relative to typically developing children. We discuss linguistic and neuro-psychological accounts of these findings. In addition, we compare the SLI data with data from individuals with a different genetic disorder (Williams Syndrome), and show that individuals with Williams Syndrome exhibit different performance patterns.     

CAN REINFORCEMENT OCCUR WITH A LEARNED TRAIT?

We use birdsong as a case study to ask whether reinforcement can occur via the spread of a genetically determined female preference for a socially inherited (learned) male trait. We envision secondary contact between two neighboring populations with different song dialects. An individual's ability to learn song is confined by a genetic predisposition: if predispositions are strong, there will be no phenotypic overlap in song between populations, whereas weak predispositions allow phenotypic overlap, or "mixed" song. To determine if reinforcement has occurred, we consider if an allele for within-population female mating preference, based on song, can spread, and whether population specific songs can concurrently be maintained at equilibrium. We model several scenarios, including costs to mating preferences, mating preferences in hybrids, and hybrids having the ability to learn pure songs. We find that when weak predispositions are fixed within a population reinforcement based on song cannot occur. However, when some individuals have strong predispositions, restricting phenotypic overlap between populations in the trait, reinforcement is only slightly inhibited from a purely genetic model. Generalizing beyond the example of song, we conclude that socially learned signals will tend to prohibit reinforcement, but it may still occur if some individuals acquire trait phenotypes genetically.     

Production of Estonian case-inflected nouns shows whole-word frequency and paradigmatic effects

Most psycholinguistic models of lexical processing assume that the comprehension and production of inflected forms is mediated by morphemic constituents. Several more recent studies, however, have challenged this assumption by providing empirical evidence that information about individual inflected forms and their paradigmatic relations is available in long-term memory (Baayen et al. 1997; Milin et al. 2009a, 2009b). Here, we investigate how whole-word frequency, inflectional paradigm size and morphological family size affect production latencies and articulation durations when subjects are asked to read aloud isolated Estonian case-inflected nouns. In Experiment 1, we observed that words with a larger morphological family elicited shorter speech onset latencies, and that forms with higher whole-word frequency had shorter acoustic durations. Experiment 2, for which we increased statistical power by using 2,800 words, revealed that higher whole-word frequency, inflectional paradigm size, and morphological family size reduced both speech onset times and acoustic durations. These results extend our knowledge of morphological processing in three ways. First, whole-word frequency effects of inflected forms in morphologically rich languages are not restricted to a small number of very high-frequency forms, contrary to previous claims (Niemi et al. 1994; Hankamer 1989; Yang 2016). Second, we replicated the morphological family size effect in a new domain, the acoustic durations of inflected forms. Third, we showed that a novel paradigmatic measure, inflectional paradigm size, predicts word naming latencies and acoustic durations. These results fit well with Word-and-Paradigm morphology (Blevins 2016) and argue against strictly (de)compositional models of lexical processing.     

Birds of a feather speak together: Understanding the different dialects of animals can help to decipher their communication

As humans, many animal species that communicate via vocalization show a wide range of accents and dialects driven by environmental and social factors.

All human languages come with dialects not just as a result of geographical distance between different tribes or groups but also as a part of their local culture and heritage. “Dialect or the speech of the people is capable of expressing whatever the people are,” said Sterling K Brown, an American actor. A Southerner in the USA, a Sicilian in Italy or a Bavarian in Germany would be easily recognizable as such, but also often stresses his or her dialect to signal where they come from geographically and culturally.

… many animal species from multiple taxa have evolved forms of vocal communication that are subject to geographic, genetic, environmental, behavioural and social variations.

Dialect and accents are not unique to humans: Many animal species from multiple taxa have evolved forms of vocal communication that are subject to geographic, genetic, environmental, behavioral, and social variations. One more or less universal factor behind the variety of animal dialects is that some convergence or conservation of vocalization can confer selective or competitive advantages.One area of confusion lies in the use of terms such as dialect and accent, which have more clearly defined meanings in the context of human languages. Here, accents refer to the way the same words are spoken, varying in acoustic frequency or intonation but not in enunciation or form. Accents are thus a subset of dialects, which also bring variations in vocabulary, grammatical structure and idiom within a common underlying language.     

Source- and product-oriented strategies in L2 acquisition of plural marking in German

This article deals with the acquisition of the German plural system. It raises the question how morphologically complex words are represented in the mental grammar and in the lexicon of children and how this representation emerges.There are several theoretical accounts dealing with this question. These accounts are basically of two kinds. One approach models the German number system as rule-based; i.e. source-oriented rules are postulated that operate on the singular form of the noun. The second approach is schema-based. Essential to this approach is the idea that speakers form the plural of a given noun according to prototypical plural shapes. Empirical evidence can be found for both approaches, but neither of them seems to be able to fully explain acquisitional paths on its own.On the basis of the analysis of acquisitional data, this article argues for an expanded schema account that embraces both source- and product-oriented mechanisms. We propose an acquisition model according to which learners start out with storing plural forms holistically in an associative network; then they abstract product-oriented schemas from these stored forms that focus on the typical gestalts of German plural forms. In a last step, they establish source-oriented schemas that relate singular schemas with plural schemas.The data for this study were gathered in a nonce word elicitation experiment from children aged 6 to 10 learning German either as their native or second language. In the latter case, the children’s L1 was either Russian or Turkish.     

Skin waste, vertex angle, and scar length in excisional biopsies: comparing five excision patterns--fusiform ellipse, fusiform circle, rhomboid, mosque, and S-shaped

The common excision skin pattern is either a fusiform ellipse or another pattern with dissimilar length and width. The purpose of this study was to define the most advantageous skin pattern regarding skin waste, vertex angle, and scar length. Five skin excision patterns used traditionally for closure of round lesions were analyzed: fusiform ellipse, fusiform circle, rhomboid, mosque, and S-shaped. In the analysis, the pattern characteristics were formulated by geometric principles, from which the results were compared. The smallest skin waste was found in rhomboid and mosque patterns, whereas the largest skin waste was found in the fusiform circle and ellipse. The vertex angle was found to decrease monotonously with the excision length-to-width ratio for all patterns except the mosque shape, which is zero per definition. The paradigm stating that a vertex angle of 30 degrees or less is maintained for length-to-width ratios below 4 in the surgical ellipse was found incorrect. It holds only for rhomboid and S-shaped excisions. The scar length was found almost independent of the pattern, with a variance of 3 percent. The authors conclude that the most advantageous surgical skin patterns are the rhomboid and mosque excisions.     

Isoelectric forms of alpha-L-fucosidase in mouse teratocarcinoma-derived cell lines

The alpha-L-fucosidase isoenzyme pattern of mouse teratocarcinoma-derived cell lines was analyzed by isoelectric focusing and compared with the pattern of a mammary carcinoma as an example of a malignant somatic cell line. In addition, these isoenzyme patterns were compared with those of normal fetal and adult mouse tissues from an earlier study. In the normal early fetal and placental tissues as well as in embryonal carcinoma and yolk sac carcinoma cells the alpha-L-fucosidase activity is predominantly associated with basic forms of the enzyme. This embryonic pattern of alpha-L-fucosidase is characterized by one to three isoelectric forms of the enzyme with pI values ranging from 7 to 9.5 accounting for more than two-thirds of the total activity. In contrast, the mammary carcinoma pattern resembles adult somatic tissues and primarily expresses acidic enzymatic forms (which comprise approximately 80% of total activity). The somatic cell malignancies arising in retransplantable teratocarcinomas show varying isoenzyme patterns. Thus, a malignant fibrous histiocytoma expresses predominantly basic forms of the enzyme, whereas a leiomyosarcoma expresses approximately equal amounts of acidic and basic forms of the enzyme resembling in this respect late fetal or immature neonatal tissues. These findings show that the embryonal carcinoma and yolk sac carcinoma cells of the mouse express the embryonic isoenzyme pattern of alpha-L-fucosidase in contrast to malignant cells originating in somatic tissue, like mammary carcinoma, which express the adult pattern. Malignancies arising in somatic tissues of teratocarcinomas may retain the embryonic alpha-L-fucosidase phenotype or show a phenotype corresponding to late fetal or neonatal tissues in normal ontogeny.