Most morphological theories assume that a morphological change affects the meaning of a lexical item or indicates a specific relationship of the lexical item to some other lexical items in the utterance. Moreover, for item and arrangement morphology, most theories assume that a given morphological change may have only one lexical category in its scope. Most theories do not envision the existenc...

This paper deals with adjectives describing surface texture (‘slippery’, ‘smooth’, ‘level’, ‘rough’, etc.). The language sample comprises Russian, English, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and a set of the Uralic languages (Finnish, Estonian, Erzya, Mari, Komi, Udmurt, Hungarian, Khanty, Nenets, Selqup). Their indepth study was aimed at exploring the dependence between the genetic proximity of languag...

It is generally assumed that the phonetic categories of speech are not indissoluble wholes, but rather can be characterized in terms of a bundle of phonetic or distinctive features. These features may be defined in terms of either acoustic or articulatory attributes of the speech signal. However, it is also the case that at least from an acoustic or perceptual point of view, each of these phone...

Naba, also known as Bilala, is a Nilo-Saharan (Sara-Bagirmi) language of Chad with about 410,000 speakers from three ethnic groups. This paper gives basic description the Naba phonological system, using segmental phonology and lexical approaches. Topics covered include phonemic inventory, syllable structure phonotactic restrictions, tone system its interaction other processes, main post-lexical...

This paper investigates the prominence patterns of nominal triconstituent compounds in English. The standard assumption for such NNN compounds is that the branching-direction is responsible for stress assignment. In left-branching compounds, i.e. those of the structure [[NN] N], the leftmost noun is assigned highest prominence whereas in right-branching compounds, i.e. [N [NN]], the second noun...

Our study looks at the effect of lexical frequency, lexical categories and phrase boundaries on syllable duration in Vietnamese. We use durational data to shed light on the status of some ambiguous lexical categories such as kinship terms and positional nouns, and to gather additional evidence on the behaviour of some verbs that have grammaticalized homophones. Our results show that high freque...

The thesis tries to adopt the method used by Leech and Short in their book Style in Fiction to make a relatively overall and objective analysis of the novel’s language from lexical and grammatical Category. As far as the lexical features are concerned, the author employs special lexical items and lexical clusters. The lexical deviation and word connotations are mainly used for characterization ...

This paper describes the University of Sydney’s WSD and Lexical Substitution systems for SemEval-2007. These systems are principally based on evaluating the substitutability of potential synonyms in the context of the target word. Substitutability is measured using Pointwise Mutual Information as obtained from the Web1T corpus. The WSD systems are supervised, while the Lexical Substitution syst...