Extended exponence in isiNdebele morphology

Ndlovu, Mbulisi; Dube, Progress

doi:10.5842/56-0-788

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…One of these difficulties is the existence of multiple exponence, in which one meaning is expressed more than once in a word. An example can be found in the Bantu language IsiNdebele, spoken in Zimbabwe, which exhibits multiple exponence, amongst others, in the locative (Ndlovu & Dube 2019). The locative is expressed by a prefix and suffix: e-gwalw-eni Loc-book-Loc "in the book".…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Vijver¹,

Uwambayinema²,

Chuang³

2021

Preprint

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How do speakers comprehend and produce complex words? In the theory ofthe Discriminative Lexicon this is hypothesized to be the results of mapping the phonology of whole word forms onto their semantics and vice versa, without recourse to morphemes. This raises the question whether this hypothesis also holds true in highly agglutinative languages, which are oǒten seen to exemplify the compositional nature of morphology. On the one hand, one could expect that the hypothesis for agglutinative languages is correct, since it remains unclear whether speakers are able to isolate the morphemes they need to achieve this. On the other hand, agglutinative languages have so many different words that it is not obvious how speakers can use their knowledge of words to comprehend and produce them.In this paper, we investigate comprehension and production of verbs in Kinyarwanda,an agglutinative Bantu language, by means of computational modeling within the theDiscriminative Lexicon, a theory of the mental lexicon, which is grounded in word andparadigm morphology, distributional semantics, error-driven learning, and uses insightsof psycholinguistic theories, and is implemented mathematically and computationallyas a shallow, two-layered network.In order to do this, we compiled a data set of 11528 verb forms and annotated for eachverb form its meaning and grammatical functions, and, additionally, we used our dataset to extract 573 verbs that are present in our full data set and for which meanings ofverbs are based on word embeddings. In order to assess comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs, we fed both data sets into the Linear Discriminative Learningalgorithm, a two-layered, fully connected network. One layer represent the phonological form and the layer represents meaning. Comprehension is modeled as a mapping from phonology to meaning and production is modeled as a mapping from meaning to phonology. Both comprehension and production is learned with high accuracy in all data and in held-out data, both for the full data set, with manually annotated semantic features, and for the data set with meanings derived from word embeddings.Our findings provide support for the various hypotheses of the Discriminative Lexicon:Words are stored as wholes, meanings are a result of the distribution of words in utterances, comprehension and production can be successfully modeled from mappings from form to meaning and vice versa, which can be modeled in a shallow two-layered network, and these mappings are learned in by minimizing errors.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Vijver¹,

Uwambayinema²,

Chuang³

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

van de Vijver,

Uwambayinema,

Chuang

2023

Linguistics

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The Discriminative Lexicon is a theory of the mental lexicon that brings together insights from various other theories: words are the relevant cognitive units in morphology, the meaning of a word is represented by its distribution in utterances, word forms and their meaning are learned by minimizing prediction errors, and fully connected networks successfully capture language learning. In this article we model comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verb forms in the Discriminative Lexicon model. Kinyarwanda is a highly inflectional language, and therefore particularly interesting, because its paradigms are almost unlimited in size. Can knowledge of its enormous paradigms be modeled only on the basis of words? To answer this question we modeled a data set of 11,528 verb forms, hand-annotated for meaning and their grammatical functions, in the Linear Discriminative Learning (LDL), a two-layered, fully connected computational implementation of the Discriminative Lexicon model. We also extracted 573 verbs from our data set for which meanings are available that are based on empirical word embeddings obtained from large text corpora, and modeled them in LDL. Both comprehension and production is learned accurately: Kinyarwanda verb forms can be comprehended and produced relying on words as cognitive units, in a two-layered network, in which prediction errors are minimized.

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Extended exponence in isiNdebele morphology

Cited by 2 publications

References 7 publications

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

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