More diversity enGENDERed by African languages: an introduction

Güldemann, Tom; Fiedler, Ines

doi:10.1515/stuf-2021-1030

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Bantu languages have complex gender systems (Güldemann and Fiedler, 2021;Hyman, Lionnet, and Ngolele, 2019;Katamba, 2003), in which each noun is marked by a class marker. The nouns in each class are hypothesized to share a semantic property (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, the Kinyarwanda word umuntu is a noun of class 1, meaning 'man', and abantu is its plural, which is a class 2 noun. Noun classes in Bantu have been studied extensively from a historical and typological perspective (Güldemann and Fiedler, 2021;Hyman, Lionnet, and Ngolele, 2019;Katamba, 2003;Wal, 2015), but very few studies have addressed the question how Bantu nouns are represented in the mental lexicon (Ciaccio, Kgolo, and Clahsen, 2020;Kgolo and Eisenbeiss, 2015). Yet, the highly inflectional nature of Bantu languages (Nurse and Philippson, 2006) can shed light on an important theoretical question concerning the mental lexicon: are the cognitive units in the mental lexicon words (Baayen, Chuang, and Blevins, 2018;Baayen, Chuang, Shafaei-Bajestan, and Blevins, 2019;Blevins, 2006;Blevins, 2016a) or morphemes (Ciaccio, Kgolo, and Clahsen, 2020;Goldsmith and Mpiranya, 2018;Kgolo and Eisenbeiss, 2015)?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon

Vijver¹,

Uwambayinema²

2021

Preprint

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What are the cognitive units in the mental lexicon of Bantu speakers, words or morphemes? The very small experimental literature addressing this question suggests that the answer is morphemes, but a closer look at the results shows that this is answer is premature. A novel theory of the mental lexicon, the Discriminative Lexicon, which incorporates a word-based view of the mental lexicon and is computational implemented in the Linear Discriminative Learner (LDL), is put to the test with a data set of 11180 Kinyarwanda nouns. LDL is used to model comprehension and production of the nouns in the data set. LDL predicts comprehension and production of nouns with great accuracy. We conclude that the cognitive units in the mental lexicon of Kinyarwanda speakers are words.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon

Vijver¹,

Uwambayinema²

2021

Preprint

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Restructured Niger-Congo gender systems as another type of concurrent nominal classification

Güldemann

Fiedler

2022

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics

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Recent research looks increasingly at languages with more than one system of nominal classification and first systematic typological assessments of so-called “concurrent noun classification” exist with a focus on cases involving classifiers and gender. We elaborate on this work by dealing with Niger-Congo languages that have restructured their inherited noun classification in a particular way. The inherited system entailing a strong parallelism between agreement-based gender and affix-based noun inflections shifted toward one where the gender system is reduced to an animacy-based opposition while nominal inflection maintains a considerable amount of original complexity with semantic criteria beyond those of the innovative gender distinction. While the phenomenon as such is not a new discovery, its typological relevance has gone unrecognized so far. We argue that such cases of restructured gender systems in Niger-Congo prima facie suggest themselves as candidates for a new type of concurrent noun classification, both from a synchronic and diachronic perspective. We present a detailed description of the phenomenon in the Guang language Gonja and determine whether or how it can be integrated in the available typology. We also survey its wider distribution and discuss some recurrent historical aspects of its emergence in the family.

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Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

van de Vijver,

Uwambayinema,

Chuang

2023

Linguistics

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The Discriminative Lexicon is a theory of the mental lexicon that brings together insights from various other theories: words are the relevant cognitive units in morphology, the meaning of a word is represented by its distribution in utterances, word forms and their meaning are learned by minimizing prediction errors, and fully connected networks successfully capture language learning. In this article we model comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verb forms in the Discriminative Lexicon model. Kinyarwanda is a highly inflectional language, and therefore particularly interesting, because its paradigms are almost unlimited in size. Can knowledge of its enormous paradigms be modeled only on the basis of words? To answer this question we modeled a data set of 11,528 verb forms, hand-annotated for meaning and their grammatical functions, in the Linear Discriminative Learning (LDL), a two-layered, fully connected computational implementation of the Discriminative Lexicon model. We also extracted 573 verbs from our data set for which meanings are available that are based on empirical word embeddings obtained from large text corpora, and modeled them in LDL. Both comprehension and production is learned accurately: Kinyarwanda verb forms can be comprehended and produced relying on words as cognitive units, in a two-layered network, in which prediction errors are minimized.

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More diversity enGENDERed by African languages: an introduction

Cited by 4 publications

References 7 publications

A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon

A word-based account of comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda nouns in the Discriminative Lexicon

Restructured Niger-Congo gender systems as another type of concurrent nominal classification

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

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