Morphological Classes as Natural Categories

TL;DR: This article presented a theory of language that addresses the nature of grammar, taking into account its variance and gradience, and seeks explanation in terms of the recurrent processes that operate in language use.

Abstract: Abstract Do children’s single words related to motion and change also encode aspects of environmental events highlighted by Talmy’s motion event analysis? If so, these meanings may predict children’s early verb meanings. Analyzing the kinds of meanings expressed in single “dynamic event words” through motion event semantics yields links between early true verbs in sentences and the semantics encoded in these single words. Dynamic event words (e.g., more, allgone, out, down) reflect the sense of temporal and spatial reversibility established in the late sensorimotor period. We propose that these dynamic meanings provide the semantic foundation for the most common verbs included in early sentences, and thus a bootstrap to full development of the verb repertoire. In this study, we followed the spoken language development (from single words to sentences) of five children. We identified dynamic event words as encoding dynamic change in the following dimensions: (1) spatial direction in relation to self; (2) vertical spatial direction; (3) figure/ground relationships; and (4) temporal event sequences. Verbs continuing the semantics previously identified in dynamic event words occurred early and dominated the verb repertoire through 24 months of age.

TL;DR: The interaction of phonological properties of lexical patterns with frequency and the interaction of type and token frequency are shown to influence degree of productivity in three models of morphological storage and processing.

TL;DR: Intensive study of one phenomenon of English grammar and how it is processed and acquired suggest that both theories of language and cognition are partly right.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored the hypothesis that the members of categories which are considered most prototypical are those with most attributes in common with other members of the category and least attributes with other categories and found that family resemblance offers an alternative to criterial features in defining categories.

TL;DR: This paper found that children do have knowledge of morphological rules, and that this knowledge evolves from simple, regular rules to more irregular and qualified rules that are adequate fully to describe English.

TL;DR: The authors reported consistent error patterns in English past-tense forms for three age groups: preschoolers, 8-10-year-olds, and adults, and argued that, although irregular forms are rote-learned, speakers make generalizations about such forms.