This study explored morpheme acquisition in learners of English as a Second Language (ESL). Specifically, it looked at the development of eight selected individuals from Korea over the course of an intensive 8-week instruction program and tracked their acquisition of three specific English morphemes: indefinite articles used with singular count nouns, progressive -ing forms, and third person -s markers. The individuals were given an assessment test to place them at the correct level within the program prior to their selection for the study. The participants provided four sets of data in the form of writing samples at fixed intervals during the eight weeks. The results were evaluated and documented in the pages that follow. Improvement was shown in raw performance data on the morphemes, and a significant correlation was found for both the indefinite article and progressive –ing morphemes in number of correct responses.

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF ANGEL MARIA DAVILA, for the Master of Arts degree in TESOL and Applied Linguistics, presented on February 21, 2013, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: SPANISH SPEAKERS' READING PRODUCTION OF ENGLISH PAST TENSE INFLECTIONAL MORPHEME -ed MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Krassimira Charkova The main purpose of the present study was to examine if the accurate pronunciation of the three allomorphs of the -ed ending improves with the level of English proficiency in Nicaraguan Spanish EFL learners' read aloud production. There were 48 participants. They belonged to three English proficiency levels: high beginners, intermediate and high intermediate. Each level consisted of 16 informants, with the same number of women and men. The research instrument included a list of 44 regular past tense verbs to measure the three phonological realizations of the -ed inflectional morpheme. The results revealed that the effect of proficiency level was different for the three allomorphs. It was found that more advanced EFL Spanish learners had a significantly higher level of accuracy on the production of two of the three allomorphs, /t/ and /d/. In fact, their error rate on these two allomorphs was as low as 9% and 8%, respectively. In the case of the /əd, ɪd/ allomorph, no significant differences were found among proficiency levels. Moreover, this allomorph showed the lowest rate of errors overall. These results were interpreted in view of the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (Eckman, 1977) and the Similarity Differential Rate Hypothesis (Major & Kim, 1996). The trends in the data definitely suggested support for Similarity Differential Rate Hypothesis which postulates that markedness by itself cannot explain the development of L2 learners as they improve their L2 level of proficiency. In the context of the present study, this was evident in the significantly better performance of the most advanced group which showed the highest rate of accuracy on the more marked allomorphs /t/ and /d/. In view of these findings, the study offers implications for the teaching of the three phonological realizations of the -ed past tense inflection. Keywords: allomorph, inflectional morpheme, proficiency level

Thesis (M.ED.) --University of Limpopo, 2009. / This study focuses on the morpheme le in Northern Sotho. It is sometimes confusing to establish the correct semantic function which the morpheme le expresses; and also to classify it into a certain word category. This study suggests the morphological features which the morpheme le bears in terms of its word categorization. The morpheme le in Northern Sotho can be used as a conjunction, a demonstrative pronoun, an agreement, a preposition, a copulative, an adverb and a complement as well. It is suggested in this study, ways of identifying the semantic function of the morpheme le in various contexts. This study reflects that the morpheme le in Northern Sotho can be used to denote: possession, accompaniment, location, additive focus, existentialism and honorifics.

This thesis aims to investigate the role of the syllable, a non-meaning bearing unit, in learning high level meaning bearing units---the lexical items of language. A computational model has been developed to learn the meaning bearing units of the language, assuming knowledge of syllables. The input to the system comprises of words marked at syllable boundaries together with their meanings. Using a statistical learning algorithm, the model discovers the meaning bearing elements with their respective syntactic categories. The model&#039 / s success has been tested against a second model that has been trained with the same corpus segmented at morpheme boundaries. The lexicons learned by both models have been found to be similar, with an exact overlap of 71%.

In linguistics, words are usually considered to be composed of morphemes: units that carry meaning and are not further subdivisible. The task of this thesis is to create an automatic method for segmenting Czech words into morphemes, usable within the network of Czech derivational relations DeriNet. We created two different methods. The first one finds morpheme boundaries by differentiating words against their derivational parents, and transitively against their whole derivational family. It explicitly models morphophonological alternations and finds the best boundaries using maximum likelihood estimation. At worst, the results are slightly worse than the state of the art method Morfessor FlatCat, and they are significantly better in some settings. The second method is a neural network made to jointly predict segmentation and derivational parents, trained using the output of the first method and the derivational pairs from DeriNet. Our hypothesis that such joint training would increase the quality of the segmentation over training purely on the segmentation task seems to hold in some cases, but not in other. The neural model performs worse than the first one, possibly due to being trained on data which already contains some errors, multiplying them.

Morphological segmentation is segmentation of words into morphemes - smallest units carrying meaning. It is a low level Natural Language Processing task. Since morphological segmentation is sometimes used as method of preprocessing, achieving better results on this task may help NLP algorithms to better solve various problems, especially in scenarios involving small amount of data, and it may also also help the linguistic research. We propose a novel ensemble algorithm for morphological segmentation of Czech lemmas which makes use of the DeriNet derivation tree dataset. As a sideproduct we also created suggestions for improvements of the DeriNet dataset.

Le pronom-adverbe y en espagnol ancien a disparu à la fin du XVe siècle. Il a survécu néanmoins à travers les signes hay, soy, estoy, doy et voy. L’objet de la présente thèse est d’expliquer les raisons de sa disparition, d’une part, et de sa survivance dans ces cinq formes verbales, d’autre part. Elle se divise en deux parties. La première porte sur l’analyse du morphème stématique y et implique l’étude du système de représentation de l’espace. La seconde concerne l’étude des formes verbales dans lesquelles on retrouve ce morphème sous forme astématique et implique une approche sémantique des verbes existentiels. En fonction de la façon dont ses usagers perçoivent le monde, chaque langue élabore un système de représentation de l’espace, qui lui est propre. Dans la langue espagnole deux systèmes s’offraient aux locuteurs médiévaux : l’un représenté par les anaphoriques y et ende, l’autre par les déictiques aquí, acá, ahí, allí, allá, acullá, aquende et allende. Ces deux systèmes – qui se sont opposés jusqu’à la disparition de l’un d’eux, –représentaient une conceptualisation de l’espace différente. Dans le premier de ces systèmes y signifie l’espace indivis. Le deuxième, en revanche, divise l’espace en fonction du MOI locuteur et du lieu que celui-ci occupe. La sémiologie des formes verbales, quant à elle, montre un ensemble spécifique dont les éléments sont marqués dans leur signifiant par ce -y et dont la cohésion est assurée par la sémantèse des verbes existentiels. L’hypothèse présentée ici va à l’encontre de la théorie de la subduction, défendue en particulier par Maurice Molho, qui fonde la coalescence des quatre premières formes verbales sur analogie avec hay. / The adverbial pronoun y vanished from Old Spanish at the end of the XVth century. It survived, however, in the signs hay, soy, estoy, doy et voy. The purpose of the present doctoral dissertation is to explain why the pronoun as such disappeared , in the first place, and why, on the other hand, it did survive in the five above-mentioned verbal forms. The present work is comprised of two sections. The first one analyses the stematic morpheme y, a task which implies studying the system of spatial representations. The second one deals with the verbal forms containing this same morpheme in astematic form and this in turn implies a semantic approach of existential verbs. Every language generates its own system of spatial representation, depending on how its users perceive the world. In Spanish, two different systems were available to the medieval speakers: one represented by the anaphoric elements y and ende, the other one represented by the deictic words aquí, acá, ahí, allí, allá, acullá, aquende and allende. These two systems were harbouring two different conceptualizations of space. In the first system, y signifies space as a whole. The second one, on the contrary, splits the space in relation to the EGO as SPEAKER and to the locus of that EGO. The semiology of the five verbal forms delineates a specific set of elements, the signifiers of which are marked by -y and whose general consistency is based on the semantesis of existential verbs. The hypothesis presented in the present work runs contrary to the subduction theory, advocated in particular by Maurice Molho, which explains the coalescence in the first four verbal forms through an analogy with hay.

The purpose of the current study was to examine into which groups of meaning the derivational morpheme – skap can be grouped in Swedish. 340 Swedish words formed with – skap were collected from SAOL and grouped into different groups of meaning based on 1) their meaning, and 2) their part(s) of speech. For example, words that express a state of being, such as galenskap (madness) and havandeskap (pregnancy) were placed into one group. Words that refer to a work or a title, such as ridderskap (knighthood), presidentskap (presidency), and författarskap (authorship), were grouped together in another group. Using this method, the results show that the gathered 340 words could be divided into 11 different groups expressing 1) state of being, 2) environment, 3) belonging, 4) kinship, 5) work, title, office, 6) tools, 7) sport events, 8) economy and finances, 9) information and forms of knowing, 10) mischief, and 11) remaining words. This study also aimed at examining to what extent an intervention focusing on word formation, and derivational morphemes in particular, affect Swedish upper-secondary school students’ metamorphological awareness. The intervention was a quasi-experimental study in which 58 students participated. The participants were first given a pre-test to determine whether they had a high or low metamorphological awareness. This was determined by their ability to define five different Swedish derivational morphemes. Afterwards, they participated in an intervention in the form of a lesson where they were taught basic word formation with the focus on derivational morphemes, which was succeeded by a post-test, which examined the effect the intervention had had on the participants’ metamorphological awareness. The post-test was identical to the pre-test, with the exception of five additional words formed with – skap, with the purpose to compare the students’ definitions to the groups of meaning presented in the first part of this study. The results show that the intervention had a great effect on the participants’ metamorphological awareness. For example, in the pre-test, most of the participants had either one or two correct definitions, but in the post-test, the majority of the participants had either four or five correct definitions, which indicate an increase of metamorphological awareness.

Thesis (M.A (African Languages)) --University of Limpopo, 2010 / This study focuses on the morpheme le in Northern Sotho. It is sometimes confusing to establish the correct semantic function which the morpheme le expresses; and also to classify it into a certain word category. This study suggests the morphological features which the morpheme le bears in terms of its word categorization. The morpheme le in Northern Sotho can be used as a conjunction, a demonstrative pronoun, an agreement, a preposition, a copulative, an adverb and a complement as well. It is suggested in this study, ways of identifying the semantic function of the morpheme le in various contexts. This study reflects that the morpheme le in Northern Sotho can be used to denote: possession, accompaniment, location, additive focus, existentialism and honorifics.

This thesis aims to investigate the role of the syllable, a non-meaning bearing unit, in learning high level meaning bearing units---the lexical items of language. A computational model has been developed to learn the meaning bearing units of the language, assuming knowledge of syllables. The input to the system comprises of words marked at syllable boundaries together with their meanings. Using a statistical learning algorithm, the model discovers the meaning bearing elements with their respective syntactic categories. The model&#039 / s success has been tested against a second model that has been trained with the same corpus segmented at morpheme boundaries. The lexicons learned by both models have been found to be similar, with an exact overlap of 71%.