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Previous research has demonstrated that children pick up even small differences in the lexicalization patterns of closely related languages quickly and successfully. This study examines verbal prefixation in German child and adult language, using a particularly detailed case study. The data show that the child starts to produce prefixed verbs and prepositional phrases within a few months. More crucially, the child's speech gets attuned to the precise frequency distribution of these constructions in the input. These findings support theories of linguistic relativity whichemphasize the importance of the conventionality in language use for language processing and acquisition. A look at the input language reveals that the adults use hundreds of lexical items per hour which provide information about the use of verbal prefixation. Also, input frequencies did not change over time. This suggests that the structural properties of a given language are very stable, and help the child to become a proficient speaker.
According to the communis opinio it is arbitrary whether a Tibetan verb takes the prefix g- or ḥ- in its present stem. This paper instead argues that ḥ- [ɣ] originated as a phonetically conditioned variant of g-; a pattern that became obscured through the coinage of denominative verbs and analogical developments.
This article investigates two strategies of relative clause formation in Zulu, a Bantu language spoken in South Africa. The standard way of forming a relative clause in Zulu involves a prefix (a so-called 'relative concord') which is attached to the predicate of the relative clause. In this strategy, the relative concord expresses agreement with the subject of the relative clause. In a second strategy, the relative concord seems to be prefixed to the first word of the relative clause; in this position, it agrees with the head noun. The main claim of this article is that the second strategy of relative clause formation in Zulu is an example of phrasal affixation. I show that the relative concord does not merge morphologically with the first word of the relative clause, but is attached to the whole relative clause. Following Anderson (1992), I analyse this kind of phrasal affixation as an inflectional process; the relative clause is a predicate, and the relative concord in the second strategy expresses agreement between this phrasal predicate and the head noun.
The paper reports on work carried out within Corbin's associative morphological model which postulates that form and meaning are deducible from one another. It is assumed that in French there is a neat semantic distribution between prefixes and suffixes because each affix is specified by its semantic instructional identity. If this is the case, then the affixes a-, en-, é- and -is(er), -ifi(er) seem to constitute exceptions and represent semantic equivalence because each of them constructs deadjectival change of state verbs. In order to explain this apparent discrepancy, it is proposed here that the notion of 'paradigm of morphological processes' is to be abandoned when characterizing the semantic scope of a rule and we should adopt the principle that one and only one affix corresponds to one and only one word formation rule.
Corpus-based cross-linguistic studies that have examined the word-formation features of source vs. target texts and non-translated vs. translated language have found that source-language interference and language-pair specific properties noticeably influence the over- and underuse of certain affixes in the target language. They have also highlighted translation-related trends such as the normalization of creative lexis, which may lead to a marked morphological decrease in target texts vis-à-vis their source texts. This article sets out to investigate another facet of the word-formation features of source and target texts, viz. genre-sensitivity, by reporting on a case study of evaluative prefixation in English and French (e.g. mini-, super-, over-). The study is based on two translation corpora (TED Talks and Europarl), representing two spoken genres (oral presentations and parliamentary debates) and two written translation modes (subtitling and translation). The results show that English evaluative prefixation fulfills different functions in the two genres investigated (attitudinal stance in debates vs. intensification in presentations). Translation data also reveal striking differences between the two corpora, with TED Talks displaying a strong preference towards prefix-by-prefix translation. However, at this stage, it is difficult to assess to what extent this is due to source text genre, translation mode or translator expertise (TED Talks are subtitled by non-professional volunteers).
Amiot, Dany 2004. Préfixes ou prépositions? Le cas de sur(-), sans(-), contre(-) et les autres. In: Lexique 16: 67–83. Amiot D. Préfixes
prefissazione dei verbi nel latino classico e nell'italiano. Il prefisso ex- [tesi di laurea]. Budapest (Università degli Studi Eötvös Loránd) 2008. 2 Jekl, Á.: Verbal Prefixation in Classical Latin and in Italian. The Prefix ex- . In Oniga, R. - Iovino, R
result of prefixing /n-/ to initial stem consonants with the features [+nasal, +sonorant], e.g., /n-midd/→[mmidd] ‘we extend.’ Furthermore, according to Kiparsky (2003) , initial geminates in Syrian Arabic can be derived from the assimilation of the
The time course of processing perfective and imperfective aspect in Polish
Evidence from self-paced reading and eye-tracking experiments
evaluative superstructure of language . Albany, NY : State University of New York Press . Biały , Adam . 2012 . The multilayer analysis of prefixes in Polish . In J. Błaszczak , B. Rozwadowska and W. Witkowski (eds.) Current issues in
