The noun plural system in Modern Standard Arabic lies at a nexus of critical issues in morphological learnability. The suffixing "sound" plural competes with as many as 31 non-concatenative "broken" plural patterns. Our computational analysis of singular-plural pairs in the Corpus of Contemporary Arabic explores what types of linguistic information are statistically relevant to morphological ge...

Semantic theories of number currently debate whether the plural is weak (referring to both collections and individuals) or strong (referring to collections but not individuals). The former view holds that the plural is ‘unmarked’ as it is less specific; for the latter view, the singular is simpler and therefore ‘unmarked’. This paper examines the inverse number marking system of Dagaare (Gur; N...

OBJECTIVES Studies investigating language skills of children after cochlear implantation usually present general measures of expressive/receptive vocabulary and grammar and rarely tackle the acquisition of specific language phenomena (word classes, grammatical constructions, word forms, etc.). Furthermore, research is largely restricted to children acquiring English. Cross-linguistic comparison...

(1) a. Inflectional paradigms aspire to “avoid homophony”. The Russian nominative singular and genitive plural endings reflect a transderivational attempt to minimize homophony across inflectional endings. b. Inflectional paradigms require transderivational reference: one cannot compute the Russian genitive plural without knowing what the nominative singular ending is. c. Markedness-based neutr...

This paper presents an extension to the Reference Domain Theory (Salmon-Alt, 2001) in order to solve plural references. While this theory doesn’t take plural reference into account in its original form, this paper shows how several entities can be grouped together by building a new domain and how they can be accessed later on. We introduce the notion of super-domain, representing the access str...

introduction: different etiologies of pleural effusion are diagnosed based on serum and plural fluid characteristics. the aim of this study was to assess and compare the serum and pleural fluid protein to lactate dehyrogenase (pr/ldh) ratio in exudative pleural effusions. materials and methods: this study was conducted on 60 patients with exudative pleural effusion including: 20 cases with para...

We describe an eye-tracking experiment that tested the effect of syntactic predictability on skipping rates during reading. We found that plural noun phrases were skipped more often than singular noun phrases, in syntactic contexts which induced a high expectation for a plural. We interpret this effect as evidence that the plural noun phrase has been predicted ahead of time. The results indicat...

The referents of plural NP's denote groups, by their nature, but at the same time, we want to say that they denote atomic individuals in some cases. By analyzing such dual nature of plural Np's in Situation Semantics, we o er a straightforward and uni ed analysis which accounts not only for various readings of plural NP's but also for the so-called Committee and Judge/Hangman Puzzles.