Fixing the broken plural in Maltese

Mayer, Thomas; Spagnol, Michael; Schönhuber, Florian

doi:10.1524/9783050065144.129

Cited by 4 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…For example, kaxxa 'box' has a sound plural, kaxxi, and a broken one kaxex. More-over, some noun plurals are formed by combining both plural types, which Mayer et al (2013) call "the plural of the plural", a combination of a broken plural pattern and a sound plural suffix: e.g. tarf -truf -trufijiet 'edges'.…”

Section: The Singular-plural System Of Maltesementioning

confidence: 99%

“…tarf -truf -trufijiet 'edges'. Some collective nouns like dubbien 'fly' can take a suffix -a to denote one entity of a group of flies and a plural suffix -iet for the determinate plural (numbers from two up to ten) (Mayer et al 2013). Another type of plural formation includes suppletion, e.g.…”

Section: The Singular-plural System Of Maltesementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The great amount of different sound and broken patterns would make it possible that the memory of speakers fails for both sound and broken plurals. We excluded responses in which the participants did not provide an answer, repeated the singular word, used unattested plural forms, built "plural of the plural" forms (Mayer et al 2013) or changed the singular word by inserting additional sequences or changing material (in total: 659 forms out of a total of 8973 answers). Examples for these cases are given in Table 5.…”

Section: Frequency Analysis Of Answers To Nonce Words and Distributiomentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Knowledge of Maltese singular–plural mappings

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Which factors determine the choice of a plural allomorph for a new singular form? Are regular mappings stored differently from irregular mappings? Do native speakers only rely on analogical mappings to inflect novel word forms or do they use rules? To answer these questions we used data from Maltese, a language with a split morphology, which has a rich and variable set of concatenative and non-concatenative plural patterns.We conducted a production experiment, in which we investigated the mapping of a singular onto a plural. We show that this is driven by an interplay between the similarity of novel singular forms with existing singular words and their corresponding plural forms. Moreover, knowledge of the frequency of the plural patterns in the mental lexicon serves as a basis for generalization to novel words. Our results support an analogical model of morphological processing. We do not find evidence that native speakers use default rules.

show abstract

Section: The Singular-plural System Of Maltesementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Singular-plural System Of Maltesementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Frequency Analysis Of Answers To Nonce Words and Distributiomentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Knowledge of Maltese singular–plural mappings

2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In addition to sound and broken plurals, Maltese shows other plural types for a small number of nouns, such as the suppletive plural, e.g. mara -nisa 'women' or a double plural marking that is a blend of a broken plural and a sound plural suffix (called plural of the plural by Mayer et al (2013)), the singular tarf has the blended plural trufijiet 'edge'. A few words are pluralized with a dual suffix but grammatically behave like plural words, for example sieq -saqajn 'foot' (Borg & Azzopardi-Alexander, 1997;Mayer et al, 2013).…”

Section: Maltese Pluralsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some models are classifiers for plural classes, others generate full plural forms given the corresponding singulars. Mayer et al (2013) present a computational study of Maltese broken plurals that focuses on the application of rules to form plurals from singulars. In light of the fact that up until around 2010 the consensus among Maltese scholars was that there are no rules governing broken plurals (as discussed in Schembri, 2012), their approach breaks with this desperate tradition.…”

Section: Experimental and Computational Research On Maltese Pluralsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Discriminative Lexicon Approach to Word Comprehension, Production and Processing: Maltese Plurals

Nieder¹,

Chuang²,

Vijver³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This study challenges a computational implementation of Word and Paradigm Morphology with the task of modeling the semi-productive noun system of Maltese, which combines a dozen concatenative plural patterns with eleven non-concatenative plural patterns. We show that our model, trained on 6,511 word forms, generates accurate predictions about what meanings listeners understand and what forms speakers produce. Furthermore, measures derived from the model are predictive for Maltese reaction times. Although mathematically very simple, the linear mappings between form and meaning posited by our model are powerful enough to capture the complexity and productivity of the Maltese noun system.

show abstract

A discriminative lexicon approach to word comprehension, production, and processing: Maltese plurals

Nieder¹,

Chuang²,

Vijver³

et al. 2023

lan

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Comprehending and producing words is a natural process for human speakers. In linguistic theory, investigating this process formally and computationally is often done by focusing on forms only. By moving beyond the world of forms, we show in this study that the Discriminative Lexicon (DL) model operating with word comprehension as a mapping of form onto meaning and word production as a mapping of meaning onto form generates accurate predictions about what meanings listeners understand and what forms speakers produce. Furthermore, we show that measures derived from the computational model are predictive for human reaction times. Although mathematically very simple, the linear mappings between form and meaning posited by our model are powerful enough to capture the complexity and productivity of a Semitic language with a complex hybrid morphological system. 1

show abstract

Fixing the broken plural in Maltese

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Knowledge of Maltese singular–plural mappings

Knowledge of Maltese singular–plural mappings

A Discriminative Lexicon Approach to Word Comprehension, Production and Processing: Maltese Plurals

A discriminative lexicon approach to word comprehension, production, and processing: Maltese plurals

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About