I am a big fan of Bill Vanpatten who tends to lean generative but he concedes certain areas to more construction type grammars.

"The aspects of the L2 that are not governed by UG (such as vocabulary, morphology, and discourse structure) will be acquired late, and may not be acquired at all."

Especially for morphology he takes a frequency approach of exemplars where morphology is built up from thousands of similar exemplars. I think he agrees these morphologies can interface with the ug however.

Do most generative agree morphology is not part of UG or does he stand out in this regard. And what might probably tilt his opinion towards this kind of approach? Is this pretty much settled science with morphology?

Google only seems to know of the biological kind of morphologist.

Hi guys...I'll try to explain my problem. I'm attending a MA in Linguistics, and we have a lot of choice for the modules (but with some limitations). In particular, I don't know if I should choose to attend Computational Linguistics this year, or it would be better to attend first Phonetics/Phonology and a module on Morphology and Syntax, while Computational next year. The question is: do I need a high level of knowledge in the subfields (phonetics, syntax etc..) to attend Computational linguistics classes? In my Bachelor (I studied Philosophy) I had two modules (24 credits in total): one in General Linguistics (so some basis in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, a little bit of sociolinguistics) and another in Historical Linguistics and Phonetics/Phonology again, so I feel I have a very general knowledge of the particular subjects, and I always feel I don't know enough things or enough in depth this stuff. Just consider that the level of the Master modules is not too high or research oriented, because here in Italy we don't have Linguistics Bachelors (or maybe just in one city). But one question remains: how much should I be proficient in the linguistics subfields I will learn to analyze through computational methods? Is it a basic knowledge enough? Thanks in advance!

Over in /r/linguistics, there's a thread asking about being able to 'race' someone by hearing their voice. A number of commenters, including moderators, have argued that (1) race in the lay sense is biologically real, and (2) we should not be surprised to find that African Americans have different skulls than other people. The end argument being that it is possible to tell if someone is 'black' by their voice alone, and crucially that such a determination is not based solely on speech community, dialect, language, culture, etc. but is still valid because biologically real race inherently determines cranial and vocal tract structure.

I hope I have done justice to them, but I have been reprimanded for equating the above arguments to phrenology.

A mod suggested I post a link to the relevant discussion here, and ask for anthropologists to weigh in, since I cited, among other things, the AAA statement on race (which it is claimed I do not understand).

The relevant comments are here, although there is more in the full thread.

Thanks!

hey everyone,

I am studying linguistics at the moment. My background degree is German Lang & Lit, but I am branching into TESOL. I am having some difficulties, like many intro students it seems, with morphology. I have a few examples of uncertainties if anyone has the time to lay down some knowledge.

• inflectional vs derivational morphemes.

This I think I understand fairly well, except when it comes to adjectives. for example, the word *stuffed* (as in, they feel stuffed,) is an adjective, containing the free morpheme "stuff."

I understand that the -Ed ending changes it from a verb to an adjective, but what kind of transformation is that? How do you describe that morphological change? Am I overthinking this one, and it's just a derivational affix?

bonus question: what about sociology? -ology is of course a suffix, but is it a derivational morpheme? it seems that stripping "sociology" down to just "socio" does not leave us with a free morpheme, so the entire word "sociology" must be a free morpheme, no?

• the word "to"

another tricky one. in the phrase "to the left," "to" functions as a preposition. in other instances, such as "I know the words to popular songs," I am unsure. "to popular songs" doesn't make sense as a prepositional phrase to me. Same with "of. "The names of state capitals." what function is that fulfilling morphologically?

• irregular verbs

for regular verbs like talk, their inflectional change is easy to describe. if it's progressive, it's affixing the inflectional moprheme -ing. but what about past tense of "grow."

what kind of formation is grow -> grew. it's not affixing, is it? I don't think it's infixing either (i.e. abso-fucking-lutely)

thanks for taking the time to read this. the rest of the coursework is built on having a strong foundation in these topics, and these are a few of the things I am unsure on how to handle.

Why is it that there are so many phonologists, syntacticians, etc.., but very few morphologists (in the US)?

I'm taking a class on Spanish linguistics and I'm writing a short paper on people using "k" or "ke" instead of "que" online. A case of this would be someone commenting "k linda!!" instead of "que linda" on a photo on Facebook. What kind of linguistic trend would this be? I was trying decide between morfológico/morphological and semántico/semantic but I'm not sure.

There are tons of online courses for courses from psychology to maths and sciences, yet I can't find anything on linguistics..

any help appreciated, thanks.

I have a linguistic project about a language of my choice, I chose Korean. I am leaning so much about it, but I want to know more about Morphology and syntax.

I know that Korean doesn't have many morphs based on verb tense, or number, and that there are morphs based on relationships of people (hinorifics). Are there any others that I don't know about?

I also know that Korean follows an SOV word order, but I need to know more about how yes/no questions and who,what,where,when,how questions work (or equivilent). I also need a simple explanation for what an Agglutinative language is. This Wikipedia article mentions it, but I don't understand it.

I was recently going through another Wikipedia linguistics wormhole and I ended up on the page of the Northeast Caucasian Archi language, which in addition to a bonkers phonology also boasts a verbal morphological system whereby a verb stem can have around 1,5 million conjugated forms. The article lists one paper as its source for that fact (Kibrik, A. E. (2001). "Archi (Caucasian—Daghestanian)", The Handbook of Morphology, Blackwell, pg. 468 ), but being a recent linguistics graduate/alumnus I can longer make use of university privileges when looking up papers and stuff.

I was wondering if there were people here who are a bit more knowledgeable on the topic/have access to the paper and who are willing to give an explanation of how the Archi verbal morphology works. I can partially imagine it myself, but I'm sure there are people in this community who can explain it nicely.

Thanks!

I've been reading Embick &Noyer 2005 and when I went to look for other papers, I saw that a lot of people really didn't care for DM as a framework but I wanted to know why.

In most languages I know, adverbs are invariable. The only exception I’m aware of is the comparative in certain Germanic languages. Are there other languages in which adverbs can take different morphological forms? What are these forms used for?

Anyone here who currently studies any of the degree programs mentioned? Or anyone who have finished them? What was it like? What did you guys do during college? Did you learn another language as a requirement? Wanna know your firsthand experiences. I'm tired of reading like a textbook definition of those /sigh.

Hello, I am looking for works to read on the morphology of numerals, and specifically cardinals. Derivation, inflection, agreement of nouns with numerals, stuff like this. I am open to any school of thought but I would appreciate literature from the generative school.

Since we intend to start posting more about linguistics, it's a good idea to provide a post explaining some linguistic concepts that not everyone might be familiar with and listing abbreviations used. This post will be gradually edited when needed, i.e. every time a new concept is mentioned or a new abbreviation is used.

CONCEPTS

• Lexicon - the complete set of meaningful units in a language (= words)
• Linguistic genetic relationship - the relationship between languages that are members of the same language family, a group of languages that share common origins. Example: English and Dutch are related because they are part of the Germanic language family.
• Sound changes - changes in the pronunciation of a language over time. All languages are always changing, there is no such thing as a 'static' language. How fast and how much a language changes is not defined by regular standards, therefore not all languages change at the same speed, and a language does not change uniformly across time: many changes may happen during a given period, while in a different period lasting the same amount of years there may be fewer changes.
• Proto-Language - the once-spoken ancestral language from which a number of languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. This linguistic evolution includes (but is not limited to) sound changes; languages also evolve their morphology, syntax, lexicon, and other linguistic aspects. A proto-language is usually unattested and reconstructed, but in some cases it is an attested language. Reconstructed terms are preceded by an asterisk. Examples: Proto-Indo-European is the unattested and reconstructed ancestor of Indo-European languages; Latin is the attested ancestor of Romance languages; Proto-Indo-European *méh₂tēr "mother" is preceded by an asterisk because it is reconstructed; Latin mater is not preceded by an asterisk because it is attested.
• Reflexes - A reflex is an attested word from which a root in the proto-language is reconstructed (or generally any attested linguistic element inherited from the language it descends from). Example: English water is the reflex of Old English wæter, in turn the reflex of reconstructed Proto-West Germanic *watar.
• Cognates - two or more words that have a common etymological origin (= descend from the same root). Example: English mother is cognate with Italian madre, both ultimately going back to Proto-Indo-European *

1. Introduction

This essay mounts a limited critique of the artificial language Lojban and proposes novel solutions to some of Lojban's problems. Part I analyzes and evaluates Lojban. Part II lays the groundwork for a new logical language. My focus will be on phonology and morphology. This is an incomplete treatment of the subject that will form the basis of a future paper.

Lojban, introduced in 1997, is the most successful logical language ("loglang") to date. In addition to its logical features, Lojban also resembles an international auxiliary language ("auxlang") in some respects: it tries to be accessible to people of all cultures and language backgrounds, without bias.

Although other logical languages exist, notably Toaq, Lojban is by far the closest to realizing the ideal of a loglang with the global accessibility of an auxlang. Yet despite its many strengths, Lojban falls short of this goal. In Part II, I will show that it is possible for a language similar to Lojban to be closer to phonological universals and norms, closer to the phonology of the world's major languages, morphologically simpler, and more regular.

1.1 Note on special symbols

I will use Americanist Phonetic Notation throughout this essay. This choice is motivated by a need to distinguish affricates from homorganic stop-fricative clusters. The following five Americanist symbols will be used, with the IPA values on the right.

• ⟨y⟩ : /j/
• ⟨š⟩ : /ʃ/
• ⟨ž⟩ : /ʒ/
• ⟨č⟩ : /t͡ʃ/
• ⟨ǰ⟩ : /d͡ʒ/

I will also use a few symbols found in regular expressions:

• ⟨?⟩ : zero or one occurrence of the the preceding element (optional occurrence).
• ⟨*⟩ : Kleene star; zero or more occurrences of the preceding element
• ⟨+⟩ : Kleene plus; one or more occurrences of the preceding element [only in Part II)
• ⟨( )⟩ : used for grouping elements together
• ⟨|⟩ : choice between alternatives

1.2 Background

It is necessary to explain some key concepts before proceeding.

1.2.1 Design principles of Lojban

As a logical language, Lojban aims to be syntactically unambiguous. That is, every sentence must have a transparent, unique grammatical structure.

Furthermore, Lojban aims for audio-visual isomorphism (AVI), or a one-to-one correspondenc

I wonder if anyone know any work that compare how these models (or their variants) approach idiom. Idiom, to me, seems like the place where the Lexicon + Syntax models fail. The two models arose to solve the problem, and for my understanding, they seems to took the opposite directions: DM says that it is Syntax all the way down, CG says that it is all Construction (kind of like the Lexicon to me). It would be very interesting to see some comparisons of these two models.

Hello Everyone.

Is there anyone here who knows where I can find books about Linguistics like this one called "Introducing Second Language Acquisition" (https://archive.org/details/introducingsecon0000savi) that provides: theory + exercises + answers to the exercises? I've realized that I need these three aspects (theory + exercises + answers to the exercises) to really understand and master a subject.

If possible, I'd like to have books like the one above for the following topics: morphology, syntax, phonology & phonetics, psycholinguistics, semantics, etc.

Thanks in advance!

Hi there,

Can anyone point me to literature about the morphological behaviour of terms borrowed into Arabic? I'm particularly interested in what factors play a role in whether a borrowed word is adapted to Arabic templatic morphology (e.g 'telephone' to 't-l-f-n') or treated as a 'solid' form. How much variation is there from region to region (e.g. Maghrebi vs Egyptian vs Gulf Arabic)?

I'm also interested in literature about the analysis of the definite article in Arabic. I've seen it described as a prefix that attaches to nouns in one source and as a 'word' that attaches to nouns in another. Is there a good discussion about this anywhere? Again, to what extent is there variation in behaviour across regional varieties of Arabic?

Thanks!

So I want to get a Linguistics MA, but a general one, because I want to learn about semantics, pragmatics, etc. and possibly pursue a PhD in the field. However, I want to also be able to do TESOL as a supplement--I suppose, in reality, as a back-up plan if I can't get a job as a professor.

I want to combine my intellectual desires with practical viability, but it seems as though I can only do one or the other. General Linguistics degrees don't teach many courses on TESOL, and applied linguistics programs for TESOL don't teach much in the way of pragmatics, semantics, or even phonology, morphology, syntax etc.

Will I be a competitive candidate for TESOL jobs with just a general Linguistics MA, or do I really need to do a TESOL program?

Good evening, afternoon, or morning to you, people of r/conlangs. Today's Saturday, and that means it's time for another typological paper! Once again, there will be some prompts for you to discuss in the comments.

Pluractionality: A cross-linguistic perspective (Mattiola)

This week's paper was submitted by my friend u/PyrolatrousCoagulate and presents a cross-linguistic perspective of pluractionality. Mattiola defines pluractionality as being a "morphological modification of the verb or a pair of semantically related verbs that primarily convey a plurality of situations involving a repetition in time, space, and/or participants (Mattiola, 2019, p. 164)." Moreover, the paper distinguishes pluractionality as a subtype of verbal number; the latter may be encoded through any linguistic means (e.g., adverbs), whereas pluractionality refers to the encoding of these semantics by direct morphological modification on the verb. An alternative definition can be found on Wikipedia: "[it] is a grammatical device that indicates that the action or participants of a verb is/are plural." Now onto the prompts:

• Are verbs marked for pluractionality in your language?
  • If not, what are other means to express verbal number?
  • What other functions do these markers encode — besides pluractionality? (e.g., habituality, continuativity)
  • How do pluractional markers behave morphosyntactically?
  • Are there any interesting interactions between pluractional markers and other morphemes?

Remember to try to comment on other people's languages

Submit your papers here!

So, that's about it for this week's edition. See you next Saturday, and happy conlanging!