Nominals with the suffix -ač in Croatian

This paper argues for the implementation of phase theory in morphology. On the basis of evidence from two types of structure, i.e. nominal root compounds and incorporated nominal gerunds (INGs), it is shown that phase theory interacts with linearization and antisymmetry in a principled way; thus allowing for a uniform account of syntactic word-formation processes below the word-level and well-known and thoroughly discussed syntactic operations in phrasal syntax. Hence, the position taken in this paper follows the trend set in the pioneering work of 4 While the form in (3a) is non-compositional, the forms in (3b) -(3d) -other than the lexicalized and possibly preferred interpretationall allow for a compositional interpretation in (3b) --(3d). In other words, the forms in (3b) -(3d) show the properties of their English counterparts and the form in (3a) is most likely the result of a lexical process of word formation. 5 Additionally, Keyser & Roeper (1992) argue that the ACP can be filled with more than one element of the same category type, as has been illustrated above for the nominal root compounds already, but it is not possible to insert several elements of different category types into that position:

Acta Linguistica Hungarica, 2000

Action nouns are often claimed to be sensitive to the actional properties of verbs. In this paper, an attempt will be made to consider the possible interactions between the morphological rules that form action nouns and the actional content o f v erbs. In this respect, a notion of internal and of external actionality of an a x will be distinguished, which are respectively responsible for the a x's selection properties and for its global semantics. The accurate analysis of the Italian su x -ATA w i l l r e v eal that both internal and external actionality p l a y a crucial role in delimiting the input and in de ning the semantics of the output.

Psihologija

In this study we investigated whether and how the cognitive system uses morphological markedness of animacy and gender pairs. In the Serbian language masculine nouns are marked for animacy (i.e., genitive-accusative syncretism), while for feminine nouns the animacy distinction is purely semantic. Thus, in Experiment 1 we used this natural, linguistic differentiation to test whether morphological markedness of animacy influences lexical processing. In the same experiment, we tested whether the cognitive system is sensitive to the fact that some animate nouns have a sibling in the other gender (e.g., dečak /"boy"/devojčica /"girl"/), while others do not have it (e.g., vojnik /"soldier"/ or žirafa /"giraffe"/). We labeled this indicator sibling presence. The analysis did not confirm the effect of animacy, neither between nor within genders. However, animate nouns with a sibling were processed faster than those without a sibling. Since the majority of sibling nouns are morphologically related (like konobar /"waiter"/ -konobarica /"waitress"/), while the rest are not (e.g., petao /"rooster"/ -kokoška /"hen"/), in Experiment 2 we tested whether morphological relatedness contributed to the effect of sibling presence. Results showed that this is not the case: morphologically related and unrelated masculine-feminine pairs of nouns (siblings) were processed equally fast. Furthermore, an interaction between the target's frequency and the frequency of its sibling was observed: nouns with a more frequent sibling benefited more from their own frequency than those with a less frequent sibling. We argue that sibling support is realized through semantic, not morphological relations. Taken together, our findings suggest that morphological markedness is not used in lexical processing, which is in line with an amorphous approach to lexical processing.

Factors contributing to prefixation of biaspectual verbs in Croatian, 2021

One of the distinctive features of Slavic verbs is their aspectual morphology: typically each finite and non-finite form of a verb has a constant aspectual value: either perfective (PFV) or imperfective (IPFV). Nevertheless, in all Slavic languages, besides these prototypical verbs with only one assigned aspectual value, there are also verbs with underspecified aspectual value, usually called biaspectual verbs (BVs). As argued in the literature, on the sentence level such verbs have the potential to express both aspectual values, PFV and IPFV, without any further aspectual affixation. However, some scholars assert that the intended aspectual value of such verbs can rarely be unambiguously signaled. To resolve the ambiguous aspectual value, native speakers often provide additional context signals or derive a new aspectually defined verb to indicate the intended aspectual value. The latter possibility has been addressed in numerous papers, but mainly with the goal of detecting the (most common) prefixes used in this process. This study aimed to examine the patterns behind BV prefixation in Croatian. In order to detect factors with a statistically significant impact on prefixation of BVs in Croatian, a random stratified sample of 237 Croatian BVs (BVs of Slavic origin and biaspectual borrowings) was compiled. The data regarding the existence of perfective derivatives were extracted from three different corpora of contemporary Croatian and one subcorpus: the Croatian National Corpus, the Croatian Language Repository, and the Croatian Web Corpus and its subcorpus Forum, and afterwards analyzed using R software with the help of the lme4 package. The results obtained with the generalized linear mixed model revealed five factors statistically significant for prefixation of BVs in Croatian, which can be attributed to the lexical (semantical), morphological and sociolinguistic domains.

Jezikoslovlje, 2016

: Inflectional doubletism is a linguistic phenomenon in which two or more forms occupy the same cell in an inflectional paradigm. Slavonic languages, with their rich morphological systems, abound in examples of this phenomenon. Croatian, a South Slavonic language, does not differ in that respect. This article looks at one specific example of inflectional doubletism in Croatian: the instrumental singular of the first declension type. There are three families of masculine nouns that allow two endings in this case: nouns ending in the morpheme -ar, nouns ending in a palatal sound and nouns ending in -io. The two endings in question are -om and -em. However, even though both forms are equally possible, they are not used to the same extent. The present study first considers the actual distributions of the two endings in a corpus of Croatian. After that, it reports the results of two questionnaire studies in which sentences with the forms in question were given to native speakers to evaluate. We perform a quantitative analysis to determine whether the intuitions of native speakers mirror the corpus distributions of the respective forms.

We examine two types of deverbal nominalisations in Serbo-Croatian, both derived by the same suffix -VV.je (suffix -je which lengthens the final syllable of the stem). One type is derived from imperfective verbs; it involves productive nominalizations with gerund semantics, and it is characterized by a prosodic pattern matching at least one paradigmatic form of the verb. The other is derived from perfective verbs; it involves idiosyncratic nominalisations, both in terms of the verbs which can or cannot derive them, and in terms of the semantic interpretation, and they are characterized by a prosodic pattern that never fits any of the forms in the paradigm of the verb: the high tone on the two final syllables, and the stress on the penultimate. We propose that the notion of paradigm should be defined as the domain of systematic productivity of a stem, under full semantic transparency. Our analysis of the facts observed is that members of the paradigm - in our case the imperfective nominalisations - are subject to Steriade's Lexical Conservatism, which presses them to use a prosodic pattern available within the paradigm. When the result of the morphological process (adding the suffix -VV.je to the stem) is a new stem with an own paradigm, the new stem is fused and treated as a simplex without a prosodic specification in the lexicon. While it has been shown that the post-lexical, i.e. default, prosodic pattern in S-C is that with the high tone on the initial syllable (Zec 1999, Simonović 2012), we argue that lexical items with a long vowel select for a different post-lexical default, namely the one with the high tone on the final syllable. The surface prosody is then the result of the general rule of tone spreading in S-C (e.g. Zec 1999). We argue that this picture fits well a more general view that the lexicon has the structure of a coconut: a soft core with productive elements deriving large paradigms connected by shared lexical prosodic shapes, a hard outer layer of extreme idiosyncratic items in respect of productivity, semantics and prosody, and a middle semi-hardened layer of derived words exiled from the paradigms of their stems, with both semantics and prosody somewhere between the two extremes.

1987

Repetition priming is examined for alternating and nonalternating morphologically related inflected nouns. In Experiments 1 and 2, latencies to targets in nominative and dativellocative cases, respectively, were invariant over case of prime. In Experiment 3, latencies to nominativecase nouns were the same whether the nouns were primed by forms in which the spelling and pronunciation of the common stem were shared (nonalternating) or not (alternating) with the nominative form. Results are interpreted 88 reflecting lexical organization among the members of a noun system. In Experiments 1 and 2, the pattern of latencies to primes suggests a satellite organization in which nominative forms are more strongly linked to oblique forms than oblique forms are to each other. In Experiment 3, atypical cases of alternating forms showed a different pattern of prime latencies, suggesting .that the organization within a noun system may differ for alternating and nonalternating forms.

2015

The aim of this thesis is to explore the Croatian noun inflection classes, with focus on the category of gender. Moreover, the aim is to build a computer model that would be able to induce gender. Since the inflection of nouns in this thesis tackles Computer Science, Linguistics and therefore Cognitive Science, a further aim is to explore cognitive correlatives of the acquisition of inflectional morphology.