A common characteristic of subject-predicate agreement errors (usually termed attraction errors) in complex noun phrases is an asymmetrical pattern of error distribution, depending on the inflectional state of the nouns comprising the complex noun phrase. That is, attraction is most likely to occur when the head noun is the morphologically…

The ending "-ni," a productive morpheme which can be affixed to Swahili nouns, has been called the "locative" by most grammarians. While the author does not object to this term, he does not agree with Sacleux and Seidel, who call it a case. In some Indo-European and Altaic languages, the author argues, the locative is a case in…

Examines patterns of discrepancies in English and Spanish spelling, at the phonetic and morphological level, that result in orthographic false cognates. Twenty-two patterns are revealed at the phonetic level and 21 patterns are revealed at the morphological level (derivational affixes)--7 in prefixes and 12 in suffixes. (MLS)

This article discusses the words formed by the addition of the suffix "-oide" in Spanish. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Offers a detailed analysis of the English suffix "-ee" (employee, refugee, etc.) based on 1,500 naturally occurring tokens of 500 word types. Argues that certain semantic constraints, taken together, amount to a special-purpose thematic role that actively constrains productive use of derivational morphology. (Author/MSE)

The results of three experiments investigating where native speakers have a morpheme boundary between stems and word-final English derivational suffixes are reported. The way speakers organize phonological data is demonstrated. The results challenge the generative phonological hypothesis of maximal generalization and assumptions concerning…

A study examined the applicability of the Ordering Hypothesis to Japanese suffixes. The hypothesis, which claims that affixes that trigger phonological rules (cyclical affixes) do not appear external to affixes that do not, is found to be an inappropriate assumption in Japanese. Examples in English and Chamorro support this finding. It is…

The morphemes /-k/ and /-m/ function as nominal case endings and as verbal syntactic and derivational suffices. They are also polysemous rather than homophonous in Yavapai. Many verbal suffixes are accounted for by the referent-switching rule, indicating the subject of a verb in relation to the next highest verb. (SC)

A procedure, designated "MORPH," has been developed for the automatic morphological analysis of complex English words. Each word is reduced to a stem in canonical or dictionary form, plus affixes, inflectional and derivational, represented as morphemes or as syntactic features of the stem. The procedure includes the task of analyzing as…

In this study the author uses the techniques of modern descriptive linguistics to analyze various features of the Portuguese verb system. The analysis is based on the colloquial, spontaneous speech of educated natives of Rio de Janeiro and is divided into four chapters: Phonology (pp. 6-29), Morphophonemics (pp. 30-49), Morphology (pp. 50-86), and…

Normal students (N=65) in fourth, sixth, and eighth grades were compared to 17 learning-disabled ninth graders on learning derivational morphology and spelling derived forms. Disabled students' knowledge of derivational morphology was equivalent to that of normal sixth graders, but spelling of derived forms was equivalent to that of fourth…

Reports on research on the acquisition of adjectives vs inflectional endings in Italian children. Patterns resulting from a longitudinal study involving two children and an experiment involving 84 children are compared to patterns of adults participating in the latter experiment. (Author/AM)

All the irregularities of all common French verbs are reduced to five categories in the "passe simple." This system facilitates learning the tense without memorizing each irregular verb independently. (PMJ)