On the distinction between regular and irregular inflectional morphology: Evidence from Dinka

Ladd, D. Robert; Remijsen, Bert; Adong, Manyang, Caguor

doi:10.1353/lan.0.0136

Cited by 30 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Frank (1999) describes around sixty distinct operations. This is clearly a manifestation of the same kind of system that Ladd, Remijsen, and Manyang (2009) describe for Dinka, a Western Nilotic language closely related to Nuer. They identify eighty-three distinct operations, which, they observe, 'make it appear entirely possible for a rich inflectional system not to have any patterns that can be identified as regular at all' (Ladd et al 2009:659).…”

mentioning

confidence: 56%

Paradigmatic saturation in Nuer

Baerman¹,

Monich²

2021

Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Nouns in Nuer (Western Nilotic) have been presented as an extreme example of inflectional complexity, where a 'chaotic' distribution of suffixes combines with dozens of different stem modifications to yield dozens of inflection classes (Frank 1999, Baerman 2012. We show that all of the apparent surface variety can be reduced to a handful of operations. The proliferation of inflection classes is due to a property we call paradigmatic saturation: practically every combination of inflectional operations is attested, yielding the maximum variety with the minimum of means.*

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 56%

Paradigmatic saturation in Nuer

Baerman¹,

Monich²

2021

Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Pinker & Ullman, 2002 vs McClelland & Patterson, 2002); however, the relative simplicity of this system, including the dichotomy of regular versus irregular verb forms (Herce, 2019), raises issues relating to representativeness of languages more widely. Morphology in other systems such as Finnish verbs (Räsänen et al, 2016), Jordanian Arabic nouns (Albirini, 2015), Lithuanian nouns (Savičiūtė et al, 2018) and Dinka numerals (Ladd et al, 2009) can be considerably more complex, idiosyncratic and unpredictable than English inflection – yet children come to acquire them. A relatively recent trend in the inflectional acquisition literature is the testing of constructivist-based hypotheses for highly inflected language systems.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input

Price-Williams

Davies

2022

First Language

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Complex systems of inflectional morphology provide a useful testing ground for input-based language acquisition theories. Two analyses were performed on a high-density (12%) naturalistic sample of two Polish-English children’s (2;0 and 3;11) and their parents’ use of Polish noun inflection: first, each child’s use of inflectional affixes and their lexical restrictedness was compared with their father’s equalised sample. Second, the children’s spontaneous case-marking errors were analysed in context and measured against type and token frequencies in both parents’ data and the child-directed speech (CDS) corpus. Findings in both analyses accord with constructivist theory: near adult-like knowledge of Polish inflections hiding a range of use that is more lexically restricted than in their caregivers’ speech; low error rates hiding much higher ‘pockets of ignorance’ for specific inflectional contexts; and patterns of error that correspond closely to token/type frequencies in the CDS, though with the older sibling making some errors that were not frequency-based. Potential effects of syncretism, case ambiguity and semantics are also discussed.

show abstract

“…Additionally, literature on Dinka tends to focus on single dialects (e.g. Andersen 1993;Storch 2005;Ladd et al 2009). Dinka dialects can differ, sometimes considerably, in their morphosyntax.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the nature of adjectives: evidence from Dinka

Blum

2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents a description of the adjective class in Dinka, and an exploration of its typological relevance to the existence of adjectives cross-linguistically. In Dinka, a subset of intransitive verbs can be defined by several morphophonological characteristics. The overwhelming majority of these are property concepts, despite the fact that the defining characteristics are unrelated to semantic properties. This suggests that property concepts provide a useful semantic context in the investigation of adjectives, even in languages where the adjective class is clearly a sub-class of another lexical category. While the analysis is based primarily on the Bor South dialect, it has been corroborated using evidence from other dialects. Therefore, it is likely that this characterization holds across the language.

show abstract

On the distinction between regular and irregular inflectional morphology: Evidence from Dinka

Cited by 30 publications

References 21 publications

Paradigmatic saturation in Nuer

Paradigmatic saturation in Nuer

Acquiring Polish noun inflection: Two children’s productivity and error patterns in relation to parental input

On the nature of adjectives: evidence from Dinka

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About