Scope,phonology and morphology in an agglutinating language: Choguita Rarámuri (Tarahumara) variable suffix ordering

What is the nature of the interaction between scope, phonological conditions and morphologically specified precedence relations in determining affix combinatorics in morphologically complex languages? In depth studies of affix ordering patterns in typologically diverse languages reveal intricate interactions among multiple factors. Mixed scope/template systems, for instance, have been characterized as either involving scope taking precedence over templates [Athabaskan (Rice 2000)], or templates overriding scope [Chichewa (Hyman 2002, 2003) and Pulaar (Paster 2005)]. This paper makes an empirical contribution by documenting a novel type of affix order system of a previously unstudied language, Choguita Rarámuri, a Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Mexico, which features free affix permutation, and which cannot be characterized as either ‘template-emergent’ or ‘scope-emergent’. In this agglutinating language, scope and morphological constraints are freely ranked, with phonological subcategorization overriding all other constraints. This paper also documents how semantically non-compositional suffix sequences may arise through priming effects and morphophonologically conditioned multiple exponence.     

Verbal morphology in Murrinh-Patha: evidence for templates

If questions concerning affix ordering are among the central ones in morphological theory, then languages with templatic morphology appear to provide the least interesting answer, since in these languages affix order must be simply stipulated in the form of arbitrary position classes. For this reason, much recent research into templatic morphology has attempted to show that affix order in such languages is in fact governed by underlying semantic or syntactic principles. The most fully articulated position in this respect is that of Rice (Morpheme order and semantic scope, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000), who provides a comprehensive analysis of morpheme order across the Athapaskan languages and argues that it is largely determined by universal principles of semantic (and syntactic) scope. If these principles of word formation are truly universal, we should expect to find evidence for them in all similarly ‘templatic’ systems, including the head-marking languages of Australia. In this context, I discuss the order of verbal affixes in Murrinh-Patha and show that these data cannot be adequately accounted for by syntactic or semantic accounts of affix ordering, but rather provide strong support for the existence of templatic organization in morphological systems.     

Phonological and morphological conditions on affix order in Huave

Huave, a language isolate of Mexico, has “mobile” affixes, which surface as prefixes or suffixes depending on morphophonological properties of the base to which they attach. This paper shows that despite affix mobility, the hierarchical structure of affixes is morphologically fixed. Meanwhile, the linearization algorithm for individual mobile affixes is analyzed with an Optimality-Theoretic P >> M ranking schema, where phonological well-formedness constraints outrank morphological alignment constraints. The proposed model is a revision of previous P >> M models in that morphological constraints are argued to be of the idiosyncratic, language-specific type previously used in subcategorization approaches to the morphology–phonology interface.     

Cross-word morphologically conditioned scalar tone shift in Guébie

This paper presents data bearing on two key issues in morphophonological theory: 1) the domain of phonological evaluation, and 2) the item- versus process-morphology debate. I present data from Guébie (Kru) [Côte d’Ivoire] showing that imperfective aspect is exponed by a scalar shift in surface tone, which can affect either the tone of the inflected verb, or the subject noun phrase. There are four tone heights in Guébie, and the first syllable of a verb can underlyingly be associated with any of the four tones. In imperfective contexts only, that initial verb tone lowers one step on the four-tone scale. If the tone of the verb is already low, the final tone of the subject raises one step instead. This paper demonstrates that in order to account for the cross-word tonal effects of the imperfective morpheme, phonological evaluation must scope over more than one word at a time; specifically, it must scope over a syntactic phase. Additionally, I show that with phonological constraint rankings sensitive to morphosyntactic construction, no abstract phonological underlying form of the imperfective morpheme is necessary.     

Diachronic universals and morpheme order in the Ukrainian synthetic imperfective future

This paper treats the problem of possible correlation between the current order of morphemes in a word and the order of syntactic elements from which they evolved at some point in the language history. A well-documented morpheme formation, the Ukrainian synthetic imperfective future, is examined in the grammaticalization framework, and numerous attested examples from different stages of the change from imati ‘have’ to a future affix are presented. The history of this change clarifies the relation between a single case of grammaticalization and the syntactic structure of a language by showing that the position of the affix has never marked the typological category of the language.     

Dyslexia Impairs Speech Recognition but Can Spare Phonological Competence

Dyslexia is associated with numerous deficits to speech processing. Accordingly, a large literature asserts that dyslexics manifest a phonological deficit. Few studies, however, have assessed the phonological grammar of dyslexics, and none has distinguished a phonological deficit from a phonetic impairment. Here, we show that these two sources can be dissociated. Three experiments demonstrate that a group of adult dyslexics studied here is impaired in phonetic discrimination (e.g., ba vs. pa), and their deficit compromises even the basic ability to identify acoustic stimuli as human speech. Remarkably, the ability of these individuals to generalize grammatical phonological rules is intact. Like typical readers, these Hebrew-speaking dyslexics identified ill-formed AAB stems (e.g., titug) as less wordlike than well-formed ABB controls (e.g., gitut), and both groups automatically extended this rule to nonspeech stimuli, irrespective of reading ability. The contrast between the phonetic and phonological capacities of these individuals demonstrates that the algebraic engine that generates phonological patterns is distinct from the phonetic interface that implements them. While dyslexia compromises the phonetic system, certain core aspects of the phonological grammar can be spared.     

Social Insect Colonies as Complex Adaptive Systems

Social insect societies are complex adaptive systems that self-organize within a set of constraints. Although it is important to acknowledge that global order in social insects can arise as a result of internal interactions among insects, it is equally important to include external factors and constraints in the picture, especially as the colony and its environment may influence each other through interactions among internal and external factors. The scope of this remark goes beyond social insects and applies to a wide range of biological systems, including ecosystems. Received 14 April 1998; accepted 7 July 1998.     

Data collection and capture systems for microbial modeling

Summary Microbial modeling experiments require an integrated and efficient design to overcome constraints on time and human resources. The choice of an experimental system is effected by first determining the goals and scope of the model to be constructed. Kinetic studies, for example, require a different approach from single end-point models, such as time to toxin detection or growth probability. Studies have been conducted in liquid broth tubes or batch culture, agar plates, and food matrices. These traditional systems are labor intensive, however, which constrains experimental size, and thus, a model's scope and validity. To maximize experimental size, experimental systems should be automated and linked to electronic data manipulation, analysis, and presentation. Microbial modelers should also consider the relationship between the experimental environmental factors, such as pH,a _w, or temperature, and their impact on growth, virulence or toxigenesis determinants. Attaining these goals will increase the probability that the model will accurately predict microbial responses in food systems.     

Suffix combinations in Bulgarian: parsability and hierarchy-based ordering

This article extends the empirical scope of the most recent approach to affix ordering, the Parsability Hypothesis (Hay 2001, 2002, 2003) or Complexity-Based Ordering (CBO) (Plag 2002; Hay and Plag 2004; Plag and Baayen 2009), to the inflecting-fusional morphological type, as represented by the South Slavic language Bulgarian. In order to account properly for the structure of the Bulgarian word, I distinguish between suffixes that are in the derivational word slot and suffixes that are in the inflectional word slot and show that inflectional suffix combinations are more easily parsable than derivational suffix combinations. Derivational suffixes participate in mirror-image combinations of AB–BA type and can be also attached recursively. The order of 12 out of the 22 derivational suffixes under scrutiny in this article is thus incompatible with CBO. With respect to recursiveness and productivity, the Bulgarian word exhibits three domains of suffixation (in order of increasing productivity): (1) a non-diminutive derivational domain, where a suffix may attach recursively on non-adjacent cycles; (2) a diminutive domain, where a suffix may attach recursively on adjacent cycles; and (3) an inflectional domain, where a suffix never attaches recursively. Overall, the results of this study conform to the last revision of the Parsability Hypothesis (Baayen et al. 2009); and if we see the derivational suffix slot and the inflectional suffix slot of the Bulgarian word as parallel to the non-native stratum and the Germanic stratum respectively in English word-formation, we can conclude that suffixes that are closer to the root tend to exhibit idiosyncrasies and appear less parsable in both languages.     

Allomorphy and the question of abstractness: evidence from German

A model of grammar needs to reconcile the undesirability inherent to allomorphy, the apparent extra burden on learning and memory, with its occurrence and possible stability. OT approaches this task by positing an anti-allomorphy constraint, henceforth referred to as “OO-correspondence”, which requires leveling (i.e. sameness of sound structure) in related word forms (Benua 1997). The occurrence of allomorphy then indicates crucial domination of OO-correspondence by other constraints.To assess the adequacy of this proposal it is necessary to establish the level of abstractness at which OO-correspondence applies and to examine the consequences of this decision for ranking order. While proponents of OT tacitly assume the level in question to be rather concrete, the notion of allomorphy as originally envisioned in Structuralism was defined by distinctness at a more abstract level referred to as “phonemic” (Harris 1942; Nida 1944). The basic intuition here is that the defining property of subphonemic sound properties, their conditionedness by context, entails that whatever burden they put on learning and memory is of a fundamentally different nature than that entailed by phonemic distinctness. The evidence from German supports that intuition in that leveling can be shown to target phonemic sound structure to the exclusion of subphonemic properties. Allomorphy, defined by phonemic alternation, tends to serve phonological optimization in closed class items (function words, affixes) while serving to express morphological distinctions in open class items. The key to demonstrating the correlations in question lies in the discernment of phonemic structure, which is therefore at the core of the article.     

Restrictions on productivity: defectiveness in Swedish adjective paradigms

A well-known phenomenon in Swedish is that some adjectives are ‘defective’ in the sense that they are not possible in neuter gender. In previous explanations, it has usually been argued that the defective forms could be distinguished from non-defective forms by phonological and/or semantic criteria. Showing that such proposals cannot account for the data, I will argue that the defective paradigms are caused by a number of phonological constraints which block morphological productivity not only in defective forms, but also in many nondefective forms. Thus, contrary to what has traditionally been assumed, common patterns of vowel shortening and dental assimilation in Swedish adjective paradigms are not the result of productivity, but the result of a type of creative generalization where new formations require a sufficient degree of communicative need in order to be perceived as grammatical.     

Distinct genetic influences on grammar and phonological short-term memory deficits: evidence from 6-year-old twins

Children with language impairments have limitations of phonological short-term memory (STM) and have distinctive problems with certain aspects of grammar. Both deficits have been proposed as phenotypic markers of heritable language impairment. We studied 173 twin pairs, selected to be over-representative of children with risk of developmental language impairment, using a battery of standardized language and intelligence tests, a test of nonword repetition to index phonological STM and two elicitation tasks to assess use of verb tense marking. As predicted, the phonological STM and the verb tense measures both discriminated children with risk of language impairment from low risk children, and DeFries-Fulker analysis showed that impairments on both tasks were significantly heritable. However, there was minimal phenotypic and etiological overlap between the two deficits, suggesting that different genes are implicated in causing these two kinds of language difficulty. From an evolutionary perspective, these data are consistent with the view that language is a complex function that depends on multiple underlying skills with distinct genetic origins.     

Reliable short-term memory in the trion model: toward a cortical language and grammar

 It has previously been shown that Hebb learning in a single column in the trion model of cortical organization occurs by selection. Motivated by von Neumann's solution for obtaining reliability and by models of circulating cortical activity, we introduce Hebb intercolumnar couplings to achieve dramatic enhancements in reliability in the firing of connected columns. In order for these enhancements to occur, specific temporal phase differences must exist between the same inherent spatial-temporal memory patterns in connected columns. We then generalize the criteria of large enhancements in the global firing of the entire connected columnar network to investigate the case when different inherent memory patterns are in the columns. The spatial rotations as well as the temporal phases now are crucial. Only certain combinations of inherent memory patterns meet these criteria with the symmetry properties playing a major role. The columnar order of these memory patterns not in the same symmetry family can be extremely important. This yields the first higher-level architecture of a cortical language and grammar within the trion model. The implications of this result with regard to an innate human language and grammar are discussed. Received: 14 June 2000 / Accepted in revised form: 25 July 2000     

Artificial Grammar Learning of Melody Is Constrained by Melodic Inconsistency: Narmour's Principles Affect Melodic Learning

Considerable evidence suggests that people acquire artificial grammars incidentally and implicitly, an indispensable capacity for the acquisition of music or language. However, less research has been devoted to exploring constraints affecting incidental learning. Within the domain of music, the extent to which Narmour''s (1990) melodic principles affect implicit learning of melodic structure was experimentally explored. Extending previous research (Rohrmeier, Rebuschat & Cross, 2011), the identical finite-state grammar is employed having terminals (the alphabet) manipulated so that melodies generated systematically violated Narmour''s principles. Results indicate that Narmour-inconsistent melodic materials impede implicit learning. This further constitutes a case in which artificial grammar learning is affected by prior knowledge or processing constraints.     

Combining features in a graphical model to predict protein binding sites

Large efforts have been made in classifying residues as binding sites in proteins using machine learning methods. The prediction task can be translated into the computational challenge of assigning each residue the label binding site or non‐binding site. Observational data comes from various possibly highly correlated sources. It includes the structure of the protein but not the structure of the complex. The model class of conditional random fields (CRFs) has previously successfully been used for protein binding site prediction. Here, a new CRF‐approach is presented that models the dependencies of residues using a general graphical structure defined as a neighborhood graph and thus our model makes fewer independence assumptions on the labels than sequential labeling approaches. A novel node feature “change in free energy” is introduced into the model, which is then denoted by ΔF‐CRF. Parameters are trained with an online large‐margin algorithm. Using the standard feature class relative accessible surface area alone, the general graph‐structure CRF already achieves higher prediction accuracy than the linear chain CRF of Li et al. ΔF‐CRF performs significantly better on a large range of false positive rates than the support‐vector‐machine‐based program PresCont of Zellner et al. on a homodimer set containing 128 chains. ΔF‐CRF has a broader scope than PresCont since it is not constrained to protein subgroups and requires no multiple sequence alignment. The improvement is attributed to the advantageous combination of the novel node feature with the standard feature and to the adopted parameter training method. Proteins 2015; 83:844–852. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Simulated herbivory does not constrain phenotypic plasticity to shade through ontogeny in a relict tree

Ecological limits to phenotypic plasticity (PP), induced by simultaneous biotic and abiotic factors, can prevent organisms from exhibiting optimal plasticity, and in turn lead to decreased fitness. Herbivory is an important biotic stressor and may limit plant functional responses to challenging environmental conditions such as shading. In this study we investigated whether plant functional responses and PP to shade are constrained by herbivory, and whether such constraints are due to direct effects based on resource limitation by considering ontogeny. We used as a model system the relict tree Prunus lusitanica and implemented an indoor experiment to quantify the response of saplings of different ages to shade and herbivory. We measured five functional traits and quantitatively calculated PP. Results showed that herbivory did not constrain functional responses or PP to shade except for shoot:root ratio (SR), which, despite showing a high PP in damaged saplings, decreased under shade instead of increasing. Damaged saplings of older age did not exhibit reduced constraints on functional responses to shade and generally presented a lower PP than damaged saplings of younger age. Our findings suggest that herbivory‐mediated constraints on plant plasticity to shade may not be as widespread as previously thought. Nonetheless, the negative effect of herbivory on SR plastic expression to shade could be detrimental for plant fitness. Finally, our results suggest a secondary role of direct effects (resource‐based) on P. lusitanica plasticity limitation. Further studies should quantify plant resources in order to gain a better understanding of this seldom‐explored subject.     

Nonadditivity in conformational entropy upon molecular rigidification reveals a universal mechanism affecting folding cooperativity

Previously, we employed a Maxwell counting distance constraint model (McDCM) to describe α-helix formation in polypeptides. Unlike classical helix-coil transition theories, the folding mechanism derives from nonadditivity in conformational entropy caused by rigidification of molecular structure as intramolecular cross-linking interactions form along the backbone. For example, when a hydrogen bond forms within a flexible region, both energy and conformational entropy decrease. However, no conformational entropy is lost when the region is already rigid because atomic motions are not constrained further. Unlike classical zipper models, the same mechanism also describes a coil-to-β-hairpin transition. Special topological features of the helix and hairpin structures allow the McDCM to be solved exactly. Taking full advantage of the fact that Maxwell constraint counting is a mean field approximation applied to the distribution of cross-linking interactions, we present an exact transfer matrix method that does not require any special topological feature. Upon application of the model to proteins, cooperativity within the folding transition is yet again appropriately described. Notwithstanding other contributing factors such as the hydrophobic effect, this simple model identifies a universal mechanism for cooperativity within polypeptide and protein-folding transitions, and it elucidates scaling laws describing hydrogen-bond patterns observed in secondary structure. In particular, the native state should have roughly twice as many constraints as there are degrees of freedom in the coil state to ensure high fidelity in two-state folding cooperativity, which is empirically observed.     

Genetic and phenotypic effects of phonological short-term memory and grammatical morphology in specific language impairment

Deficits in phonological short-term memory and aspects of verb grammar morphology have been proposed as phenotypic markers of specific language impairment (SLI) with the suggestion that these traits are likely to be under different genetic influences. This investigation in 300 first-degree relatives of 93 probands with SLI examined familial aggregation and genetic linkage of two measures thought to index these two traits, non-word repetition and tense marking. In particular, the involvement of chromosomes 16q and 19q was examined as previous studies found these two regions to be related to SLI. Results showed a strong association between relatives' and probands' scores on non-word repetition. In contrast, no association was found for tense marking when examined as a continuous measure. However, significant familial aggregation was found when tense marking was treated as a binary measure with a cut-off point of −1.5 SD, suggestive of the possibility that qualitative distinctions in the trait may be familial while quantitative variability may be more a consequence of non-familial factors. Linkage analyses supported previous findings of the SLI Consortium of linkage to chromosome 16q for phonological short-term memory and to chromosome 19q for expressive language. In addition, we report new findings that relate to the past tense phenotype. For the continuous measure, linkage was found on both chromosomes, but evidence was stronger on chromosome 19. For the binary measure, linkage was observed on chromosome 19 but not on chromosome 16.     

VARIATION IN DEVELOPMENTAL CONSTRAINTS IN SIGMODON

Developmental constraints can be interpreted as factors of developmental origin responsible for covariation among measured variables. Several hypotheses have been proposed to link the possession of such constraints to subsequent evolution. Using confirmatory factor analysis, we compare developmental factors across selected taxa of cotton rats, genus Sigmodon. Three factors explain well the covariation among orofacial measurements: (1) responses to body size variation, (1) coordinated growth of traits of the occluding-tooth complex, and (3) responses to musculoskeletal interactions. Sigmodon taxa share these factors, but differ in the variance-covariance matrix of factors, and the unique variances of individual traits. Patterns of covariation among measurements of the neurocranial complex reflect responses to body size variation, and perhaps also responses to fetal brain growth. While there are no significant differences across taxa in factorpattern, variance-covariance matrix of factors, or unique variance of measured neurocranial variables, the neurocranium is only weakly constrained. We doubt that even the relatively stronger developmental constraints on the orofacial complex would prevent evolutionary divergence because differences in the variances and covariances of factors, and in levels of unique variance of individual traits can provide different opportunities for selection to act in different Sigmodon taxa.