Templatic morphology through syntactic selection: Valency-changing extensions in Kinyarwanda

Banerjee, Neil

doi:10.5334/gjgl.920

Cited by 5 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Kinyarwanda verbs provide a wealth of lexical and grammatical information. They consist of a verbal radical, which encodes the lexical meaning of a verb, preceded by information about subjects, tense, aspect and mood, objects and followed by information about extra differentiation in the meaning of the verb (such as causative, applicative, frequentative, iterative, comative, reversive), aspect, and verbs end in a vowel (Banerjee 2019). As was reviewed in section 1, the order of this information is fixed and historically determined (Hyman 2003;Wal 2015).…”

Section: Kinyarwana Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Verbs in Kinyarwanda are highly inflectional, and are commonly analyzed as consisting of a string of morphemes, the order of which is determined by a template (Banerjee 2019;Creissels 2019;Hyman 2003;Hyman & Inkelas 2017;Wal 2015). In his analysis of Kinyarwanda, Banerjee (2019) follows most literature on Bantu (Hyman 2003;Hyman & Inkelas 2017;Wal 2015) and specifies that this template determines the order of the morphemes as follows: subject -tense -object -verbal radical -extensions -aspect -final vowel. Extension is a collective term for a number of valency changing morphemes (Banerjee 2019), and the final vowel is sometimes analyzed as a mood marker (Goldsmith & Mpiranya 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In his analysis of Kinyarwanda, Banerjee (2019) follows most literature on Bantu (Hyman 2003;Hyman & Inkelas 2017;Wal 2015) and specifies that this template determines the order of the morphemes as follows: subject -tense -object -verbal radical -extensions -aspect -final vowel. Extension is a collective term for a number of valency changing morphemes (Banerjee 2019), and the final vowel is sometimes analyzed as a mood marker (Goldsmith & Mpiranya 2010). Such a templatic analysis is very insightful diachronically, and from the point of view of typology, but it is not clear whether native speakers of Kinyarwanda comprehend and produce complex words in terms of their morphemes, because there are many arguments to show that such morphemes can hardly be isolated in a non-arbitrary way.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Kinyarwanda (Banerjee 2019;Goldsmith & Mpiranya 2010;Nurse & Philippson 2006) exhibits yet another difficulty for a morphemic analysis, namely allomorphy. Negation in Kinyarwanda is expressed differently in infinitives than in non-infinitives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to evaluate the various hypotheses of the Discriminative Lexicon we will analyze comprehension and production of verbs from Kinyarwanda (Banerjee 2019;Nurse & Philippson 2006) in Linear Discriminative Learning. We will do so by modeling comprehension and production of verbs from two datasets and assessing how well LDL predicts their comprehension and production.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Vijver¹,

Uwambayinema²,

Chuang³

2021

Preprint

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How do speakers comprehend and produce complex words? In the theory ofthe Discriminative Lexicon this is hypothesized to be the results of mapping the phonology of whole word forms onto their semantics and vice versa, without recourse to morphemes. This raises the question whether this hypothesis also holds true in highly agglutinative languages, which are oǒten seen to exemplify the compositional nature of morphology. On the one hand, one could expect that the hypothesis for agglutinative languages is correct, since it remains unclear whether speakers are able to isolate the morphemes they need to achieve this. On the other hand, agglutinative languages have so many different words that it is not obvious how speakers can use their knowledge of words to comprehend and produce them.In this paper, we investigate comprehension and production of verbs in Kinyarwanda,an agglutinative Bantu language, by means of computational modeling within the theDiscriminative Lexicon, a theory of the mental lexicon, which is grounded in word andparadigm morphology, distributional semantics, error-driven learning, and uses insightsof psycholinguistic theories, and is implemented mathematically and computationallyas a shallow, two-layered network.In order to do this, we compiled a data set of 11528 verb forms and annotated for eachverb form its meaning and grammatical functions, and, additionally, we used our dataset to extract 573 verbs that are present in our full data set and for which meanings ofverbs are based on word embeddings. In order to assess comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs, we fed both data sets into the Linear Discriminative Learningalgorithm, a two-layered, fully connected network. One layer represent the phonological form and the layer represents meaning. Comprehension is modeled as a mapping from phonology to meaning and production is modeled as a mapping from meaning to phonology. Both comprehension and production is learned with high accuracy in all data and in held-out data, both for the full data set, with manually annotated semantic features, and for the data set with meanings derived from word embeddings.Our findings provide support for the various hypotheses of the Discriminative Lexicon:Words are stored as wholes, meanings are a result of the distribution of words in utterances, comprehension and production can be successfully modeled from mappings from form to meaning and vice versa, which can be modeled in a shallow two-layered network, and these mappings are learned in by minimizing errors.

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Section: Kinyarwana Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Vijver¹,

Uwambayinema²,

Chuang³

2021

Preprint

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Suffix Order Restrictions in Bantu

Gibson,

Kula,

Marten

et al. 2023

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology

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Bantu languages typically have a rich and complex verb structure, where a range of derivational suffixes can be distinguished. Focusing on the interaction of applicative, causative, reciprocal and passive suffixes, different theoretical and analytical models have been used to explain the order of these suffixes. Work over the past 40 years has shown that the phonological shape of the suffixes, a morphological template determining suffix ordering, semantic scope and syntactic derivation all play a role in understanding suffix order in Bantu. In addition, research in this area has shown rich variation between different Bantu languages, including specific developments and restrictions on morphological processes and the interaction of derivational and inflectional suffixes. The area of suffix order restrictions has become a central topic in Bantu linguistics and in studies of the interaction between phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics more broadly.

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Order of Valency‐Changing Morphemes

Alsina

2023

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Morphology

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Valency‐changing morphemes, in those languages that allow more than one in the same word, show ordering restrictions and effects of syntactic and semantic scope. In some languages, a given pair of valency‐changing morphemes (e.g. causative and passive) may be restricted to appearing in a fixed order. When both orders of a given pair of morphemes are attested, often the syntax and semantics associated with one of the orders are different from those associated with the other order. Three different approaches to explaining the constraints on the ordering of valency‐changing morphemes are considered. One line of research assumes that scope is not the primary force at play, but rather a template is, and that scope is stipulated as a constraint that interacts with the template. Another line of research assumes that words with valency‐changing morphemes are derived through syntactic movement and that scope effects (or the mirror principle) follow from the syntactic principles involved in the derivation. The third line of research discussed here assumes that all words, including those with valency‐changing affixes, are formed in the lexicon and that scope effects are derived from the idea that, within a layered morphology, stems are formed through the pairwise combination of a stem with an affix and every such operation implies simultaneously a concatenation of morphs and a composition of syntactic and semantic information. Problems with and advantages of each approach are presented.

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Templatic morphology through syntactic selection: Valency-changing extensions in Kinyarwanda

Cited by 5 publications

References 23 publications

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Suffix Order Restrictions in Bantu

Order of Valency‐Changing Morphemes

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