Knowledge of Maltese singular–plural mappings

Nieder, Jessica; Vijver, Ruben van de; Mitterer, Holger

doi:10.1007/s11525-020-09353-7

Cited by 10 publications

(69 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Concatenative plurals are expressed by additional material in the plural as compared to the singular, as in the pair omm ∼ ommijiet 'mother'. There are different concatenative inflectional plural classes (Nieder et al, 2020). This constitutes a richer system than is usually found in other Semitic languages, which only have two concatentive plural classes (Dawdy-Hesterberg and Pierrehumbert, 2014;Mc-Carthy and Prince, 1990).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

“…The so-called sound plurals make up the majority of plural forms in Maltese (Schembri, 2012) and are expressed concatenatively by one of several different suffixes (Borg and Azzopardi-Alexander , 1997). These are illustrated in Table 1, taken from Nieder et al (2020).…”

Section: Maltese Pluralsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Faced with a great amount of variation within the Maltese plural system the question arises what information native speakers use to generalise to new word forms. Previous studies have shown that Maltese native speakers are aware of the split morphology in their native language, and use sound as well as broken plural pattern as a productive pluralisation strategy for nonce words they never heard before (Drake, 2018;Nieder et al, 2020…”

Section: Plural Suffix Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

“…To ensure that individual plural classes had enough data points during our classification experiments, we simplified the classification of the Maltese plural system in the following way. On the basis of the frequency information provided by Nieder et al (2020) we distinguished between 8 types of plurals: In the case of sound plurals, the three most frequent suffixes in the noun list compiled by Nieder et al (2020) are -i, -iet and -ijiet. 41% of all nouns in their data set show the suffix -i, which has a Romance origin and is used with Romance loanwords only.…”

Section: Data Setmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For the broken plurals, the three most frequent patterns in the noun list compiled by Nieder et al (2020) are CCVVCVC, (C)CVCVC and CCVVC. All of these patterns can be used with both Semitic and Non-Semitic nouns (Borg and Azzopardi-Alexander , 1997).…”

Section: Data Setmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Modeling Maltese Noun Plural Classes without Morphemes

Nieder¹,

Tomaschek²,

Cohrs³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Word and Paradigm morphology proposes that morphologically complex words are stored as wholes in the mental lexicon, and by doing so it avoids problems that are related to the notion of the morpheme. However, it is not yet clear to what degree it is possible to computationally model classification and production of complex word forms without morphemes.We take up this question by modeling the classification and production of the Maltese noun plural system. Maltese is a Semitic language that has two broad classes of plurals: concatenative ones and non-concatenative ones. We model the classification in two models, and the production in a third one. The first model for classification, the Tilburg Memory Based Learner (TiMBL), is a computational implementation of exemplar models. TiMBL is impartial as to the existence of morphemes in the mental lexicon, and allows us to directly compare the classification with and without morphemes. It turns out that the classification with and without morphemes of Maltese nouns is equally good. The second classification model is the Naive Discriminative Learner (NDL). NDL is a computational implementation of discriminative learning. It can be understood as an implementation of the Word and Paradigm model and thus eschews morphemes. It differs from TiMBL in its assumptions about learning, and they way in which the classifications are obtained. NDL, too, classifies Maltese nouns well. A classification task is very different from a production task, and therefore we used neural networks to model the production of plurals. In these models we address the question whether the production of a plural noun for a given singular can be modeled without recourse to morphemes. We used two neural networks architectures (LSTM and GRU) that have been applied to linguistic phenomena, and find that they are able to correctly produce plurals, without making use of morphemes.We conclude that the Maltese noun plural system can be modeled on the basis of whole words alone without morphemes. These results, therefore, support the Word and Paradigm theory of the mental lexicon.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Section: Maltese Pluralsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Plural Suffix Examplementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Data Setmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Data Setmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Modeling Maltese Noun Plural Classes without Morphemes

Nieder¹,

Tomaschek²,

Cohrs³

et al. 2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Priming Maltese plurals

Nieder

Vijver

Mitterer

2021

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We investigate the storage and processing of sound and broken plural forms in the Maltese lexicon by means of a cross-modal priming study. The results show no significant differences in reaction time between sound and broken plurals, but indicate a different priming effect for sound than for broken plurals. We argue that the different priming effect is a result of the phonological overlap between sound singulars and their corresponding plurals forms, while broken singulars and their plurals do not share the same phonological structure. Our results support a single-mechanism model of morphological processing in which both frequency of pattern and morphophonological similarity interact.

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Modelling Maltese noun plural classes without morphemes

Nieder

Tomaschek

Cohrs

et al. 2021

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Word-based models of morphology propose that complex words are stored without reference to morphemes. One of the questions that arises is whether information about word forms alone is enough to determine a noun's number from its form. We take up this question by modelling the classification and production of the Maltese noun plural system, using models that do not assume morphemic representations. We use the Tilburg Memory-Based Learner, a computational implementation of exemplar theory and the Naive Discriminative Learner, an implementation of Word and Paradigm, for classification. Both models classify Maltese nouns well. In their current implementations, TiMBL and NDL cannot concatenate sequences of phones that result in word forms. We used two neural networks architectures (LSTM and GRU) to model the production of plurals. We conclude that the Maltese noun plural system can be modelled on the basis of whole words without morphemes, supporting word-based models of morphology.

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Knowledge of Maltese singular–plural mappings

Cited by 10 publications

References 36 publications

Modeling Maltese Noun Plural Classes without Morphemes

Modeling Maltese Noun Plural Classes without Morphemes

Priming Maltese plurals

Modelling Maltese noun plural classes without morphemes

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