Category Neutrality

Turkish Emphatic Reduplication (TER) occurs in adjectives and adverbs to accentuate their meanings. The current experimental study to investigate the selection of the linker type in TER indicated that responses from the participants correlate with some lexical statistics. The result relies on the statistics from a corpus with approximately 2 million Turkish words, which we use in lieu of lexical statistics. The frequency order of linker choice reported by the participants was exactly the opposite of the order of frequency of words in which the linker and the first consonant co-occur consecutively in the corpus. Such a direct link to lexicon was unexpected. We suggest that TER, an apparently phonological operation, depends on lexical access for selecting the appropriate linker whose cooccurrence with the initial consonant of the reduplicated word is infrequent. Our results relate morphology and lexicon in more ways than the blocking phenomena, and suggest that TER may be morpholexical.

This study examines the full reduplication processes in Turkish and Bahasa Melayu languages and the aim is to reveal the similarities and differences between these languages in regard to the types of word class involved in the full reduplication process in these languages and the parts of speech of the words reduplicated as a result of the reduplication process. Therefore, the contrastive analysis is applied which is composed of three steps as (1) description; (2) juxtaposition; (3) comparison (Krzeszowski 1990: 35). In pursuit of the description of the reduplication processes in both languages, they are juxtaposed and compared in regard to only the full reduplication process that both languages have. In regard to the types of word class involved in the full reduplication process, this contrastive study showed that both Bahasa Melayu and Turkish has the full reduplication of nouns and adjectives while neither of them has full reduplication of adverbs. On the other hand, while full reduplication of verbs exist in Bahasa Melayu, any full reduplication of verbs is not observed in Turkish. As for the the function of new words at the end the full reduplication process, reduplication of nouns in Bahasa Melayu makes plural while in Turkish it occurs with an adverbial function. In Bahasa Melayu, with reduplication of nouns, function may change or maintains the word class. However in Turkish, no new word maintains the word class with reduplication of nouns. In addition, both Bahasa Melayu and Turkish may maintain and change the word class with full reduplication of adjectives. This contrastive study shows that these languages share many differences as well as similarities in regard to both the types of word class involved in the process and the ones at the end of the process. As contrastive analysis provides better understanding of linguistic difference between two languages, this study might be applied to the field of translation and help the learners of Turkish and Bahasa Melayu languages.

The language described in this paper has been referred to as "Western Naskapi". It is a palatalized ^-dialect spoken in the northeast of the Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi continuum. The data are from speakers resident at the Naskapi community of Kawawachikamach, near Schefferville, Quebec. PRODUCTION PROCESS Like other languages in the Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi continuum, one very productive means employed to form new words in Naskapi is the process referred to as nominalization. Essentially, this is accomplished by adding a kaa-prefix to a verb inflected for conjunct indicative neutral, third person singular. Although kaa-is homophonous with the prefix that marks a conjunct verb as past reference, Lynn Drapeau (1978:214) points out that in Montagnais this kaa-functions as a relative particle referring to an antecedent, meaning roughly 'the one who...' or 'the thing that...', forming a relative clause. As in Montagnais, it is from these relative conjunct verbs that Naskapi nominalizations arise, when they are lexicalized as nouns by the speech community. Once thus lexicalized, nominalizations function syntactically as nouns and are (for the most part) inflected as nouns: 1 (1) a. chiskutimaachaa-w Al 's/he teaches' b. kaa-chiskutimaachaa-t NomA 'teacher' (2) a. nituutiihkwaa-w Al 's/he is hunting caribou' b. kaa-nituutiihkwaa-t NomA 'caribou hunter'

This study examines the second language (L2) acquisition of English nominal system and the count/mass nouns by Turkish learners. The aims are (1) to examine the percentages of success in the usage of the count/mass nouns at different levels, (2) to identify the errors regarding the numbering system and the count/mass distinction in the sentences and compositions the learners have produced, (3) to provide possible explanations for the causes of the errors the participants produced. In English, there is a difference between singularity and plurality at the lexical level. On the other hand, when the number system of Turkish is considered, a different paradigm is observed. Related to the count/mass nouns, unlike English, there is no grammatical distinction between countable and uncountable nouns in Turkish. 90 students at prep-class from engineering department at the levels of beginner, preintermediate, and intermediate were tested via a translation task and the participants' paragraphs written in a quiz.

Social media is said to have an impact on the public discourse and communication in the society. It is increasingly being used in the political context. Social networks sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other microblogging services provide an opportunity for public to give opinions about some issues of interest. Twitter is an ideal platform for users to spread not only information in general but also political opinions, whereas Facebook provides the capability for direct dialogs. A lot of studies have shown that a need exists for stakeholders to collect, monitor, analyze, summarize and visualize these social media views. Some authors have tended to categorize these comments as either positive or negative ignoring the neutral category. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of the neutral category in the clustering of sentiments from the social media. We then demonstrate the use of fuzzy clustering for this kind of task.

Proto-Algonquian had a rule of allomorphy where a verb stem of the conjunct order ending in a vowel required *-t 'third person singular (animate) [conjunct]' while those ending in a consonant required *-k 'third person singular (animate, inanimate) [conjunct]' This rule is kept in many Algonquian languages including North East Cree.. However, with certain AI verb stems ending in t, an epenthetic i is inserted after the allomorph selection of-k as in /iht-/ > â=iht-i-k 'as s/he fares, does.' This rule ordering is opaque on the surface (since -k occurs after a vowel) and there is only a handful of AI verb stems ending in t. In this article I trace the comparative history of the archaic t-stem class and claim that in North East Cree and Western Innu, AI stems split not simply into vowel vs. consonant stem classes (as is commonly assumed) but into vowel stems, nasal consonant stems, and t-stem classes as shown by the distribution of the third person conjunct inflection-k. However, while the archaic t-stem class is kept in North East Cree and Western Innu, it has been, or is on the verge of being regularized in other dialects of Cree and Innu by reordering the i-epenthesis and allomorphy selection.

In this paper I argue that Blackfoot (Algonquian) relative clauses are not nominalizations. I show that relative clauses are not agent nominalizations based on their morphology and the availability of nonagentive relative clauses. I show that relative clauses are not nominalized clauses based on the impossibility of possession and adjectival modification. After situating Blackfoot relative clauses in the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie 1977), I present a preliminary proposal that Blackfoot relative clauses are full CPs. I hypothesize that these constructions have a nominal superstructure that always contains a (possibly null) N projection, because they are always countable.

In this paper we demonstrate that there are two related, but distinct types of animacy in the Plains Algonquian language, Blackfoot – morphological animacy (m-animacy) and high animacy (H-animacy). We argue that the two types of animacy are constructed in different ways: M-animacy is a head feature that determines noun class and plays a role in syntactic agreement operations, whereas H-animacy is a selectable feature of arguments. The two kinds of animacy also have different distributions: Only languages that have animacy-based form classes have m-animate nominals, but H-animate nominals are universal because all languages have predicates that select for high animates. We discuss empirical differences between m-animate and H-animate nominals that are intended to serve as diagnostics for the exploration of animacy in other languages.

Turkish Emphatic Reduplication (TER) occurs in adjectives and adverbs to accentuate their meanings. The current experimental study to investigate the selection of the linker type in TER indicated that responses from the participants correlate with some lexical statistics. The result relies on the statistics from a corpus with approximately 2 million Turkish words, which we use in lieu of lexical statistics. The frequency order of linker choice reported by the participants was exactly the opposite of the order of frequency of words in which the linker and the first consonant co-occur consecutively in the corpus. Such a direct link to lexicon was unexpected. We suggest that TER, an apparently phonological operation, depends on lexical access for selecting the appropriate linker whose cooccurrence with the initial consonant of the reduplicated word is infrequent. Our results relate morphology and lexicon in more ways than the blocking phenomena, and suggest that TER may be morpholexical.

This paper describes the ongoing process of creating a computational morphological model of Plains Cree, a language native to North America, making use of finite-state machines, and with a focus on verbs. We cover prior linguistic theoretical and descriptive models of Plains Cree, moving on to the computational implementation of (chiefly) inflectional phenomena, followed by relevant morphophonological processes. We evaluate the performance of our computational implementation with a hand-verified corpus of Plains Cree, and present a discussion of the morphological complexity found in the corpus, as compared to that of our model and its theoretical underpinnings. The results of this evaluation and research into natural language use inform us about the practical extent of morphological complexity for a polysynthetic language, and allow us to identify avenues for improvement of the model. Finally, this computational model for Plains Cree offers the opportunity to create various digital ...

This paper investigates the properties of similative plurals, focusing on m-reduplication in Persian and -toka and -tari in Japanese. Although these expressions are associated with what I refer to as a non-homogeneous plural inference in upward-entailing contexts, I demonstrate that this inference is not an entailment of sentences with these morphemes, but is merely implicated, much like the multiplicity condition associated with English bare plurals (Krifka 2004; Spector 2007; Zweig (2009); de Swart & Farkas 2010). I propose an analysis of similative plurals as mereological mixtures of a set with a set of contextually similar objects, and derive the non-homogeneous plural reading via scalar implicature. I demonstrate that deriving this implicature requires both the calculation of implicature at a subsentential level (Chierchia 2004; Chierchia 2006; Zweig 2009) and appeal to an abstract alternative (Buccola et al. 2020; Charlow 2019). This latter point provides a challenge for theor...

This paper describes the ongoing process of creating a computational morphological model of Plains Cree, a language native to North America, making use of finite-state machines, and with a focus on verbs. We cover prior linguistic theoretical and descriptive models of Plains Cree, moving on to the computational implementation of (chiefly) inflectional phenomena, followed by relevant morphophonological processes. We evaluate the performance of our computational implementation with a hand-verified corpus of Plains Cree, and present a discussion of the morphological complexity found in the corpus, as compared to that of our model and its theoretical underpinnings. The results of this evaluation and research into natural language use inform us about the practical extent of morphological complexity for a polysynthetic language, and allow us to identify avenues for improvement of the model. Finally, this computational model for Plains Cree offers the opportunity to create various digital ...

Social media is said to have an impact on the public discourse and communication in the society. It is increasingly being used in the political context. Social networks sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other microblogging services provide an opportunity for public to give opinions about some issues of interest. Twitter is an ideal platform for users to spread not only information in general but also political opinions, whereas Facebook provides the capability for direct dialogs. A lot of studies have shown that a need exists for stakeholders to collect, monitor, analyze, summarize and visualize these social media views. Some authors have tended to categorize these comments as either positive or negative ignoring the neutral category. In this paper, we demonstrate the importance of the neutral category in the clustering of sentiments from the social media. We then demonstrate the use of fuzzy clustering for this kind of task.

Pluralization of nouns is an intricate issue. On the one hand, languages make use of different plural marking strategies. On the other hand, even within one language, different strategies and/or different morphological markers may find use, depending on lexical, phonological, or morphological properties of the base noun. In this paper, we shall have a closer look at the pluralization of nouns in German Sign Language (DGS). It will be shown that DGS patterns with spoken languages in that (a) different plural marking strategies are available, (b) within one strategy (reduplication) there are different types of realization, and (c) the choice of strategy and the choice of type crucially depend on phonological properties of the base noun, in particular, on the noun's location and movement features. The description of basic plural patterns will be supplemented by an investigation of how and where the plural feature is realized within a particular phrasal domain. Finally, we will propose an optimality-theoretic analysis that accounts for the pluralization patterns in DGS.