In most human languages, important components of linguistic structure are carried by affixes, also called bound morphemes. The affixes in a language comprise a relatively small but frequently occurring set of forms that surface as parts of words, but never occur without a stem. They combine productively with word stems and other grammatical entities in systematic and predictable ways. For examp...

Co-occurrence restrictions among affixes are preferably accounted for through GENERAL structural constraints, to do with separations of word-internal domains, with hierarchical rankings of the affixes involved, with processing complexity, or with word-prosodic patterns. Disallowing PARTICULAR designated affixes to combine with one another by (language-particular) stipulation is considered a the...

Accounts of memory that postulate complementary learning systems (CLS) have become increasingly influential in the field of language learning. These accounts predict that generalisation of newly learnt linguistic information to untrained contexts requires offline memory consolidation. Such generalisation should not be observed immediately after training, as these accounts claim unconsolidated r...

This paper provides a novel descriptive and theoretical account for the ‘down-play’ mood marker ge in Mandarin Chinese. One essential property that is not covered by previous studies is its clitic status. Incorporating and enhancing Yang’s (2001) clitic treatment of numeral-less classifiers, I propose a morphosyntactic analysis that identifies the morphological-template for the mood marker ge −...

We propose an unsupervised method to automatically extract domain-specific prefixes and suffixes from biological corpora based on the use of PATRICIA tree. The method is evaluated by integrating the extracted affixes into an existing learning-based biological term annotation system. The system based on our method achieves comparable experimental results to the original system in locating biolog...

It has repeatedly been noted in the literature (Crysmann, 2000a; Spencer, 1991, among others) that weak pronominals in European Portuguese present some diverging evidence as to their status as lexical affixes or postlexical clitics: while their placement properties w.r.t. their host are certainly governed by syntactic and semantic properties (e.g. precedence of a filler or a downward monotone q...

For a language with limited resources, a dictionary may be one of the few available electronic resources. To make effective use of the dictionary for translation, however, users must be able to access it using the root form of morphologically deformed variant found in the text. Stemming and data driven methods, however, are not suitable when data is sparse. We present algorithms for discovering...

Slavic languages have a rich inventory of verb affixes that typically have syntactic and semantic effects on the argument structure of the derived verb. Although verb affixes function as operators on verbs, they often restrict the interpretation of certain nominal arguments in a way in which determiners in a nominal construction do. This intriguing fact has not been systematically described in ...