Phonotactic c(l)ues to Bantu noun class disambiguation
| Autor: | Wm. G. Bennett, Aaron Braver |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2016 |
| Předmět: |
060201 languages & linguistics
Phonotactics Linguistics and Language business.industry 05 social sciences Bantu languages 06 humanities and the arts computer.software_genre 050105 experimental psychology Language and Linguistics Linguistics Noun class 0602 languages and literature 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Artificial intelligence Psychology business computer Natural language processing |
| Zdroj: | Linguistics Vanguard. 2 |
| ISSN: | 2199-174X |
| DOI: | 10.1515/lingvan-2016-0062 |
| Popis: | While a number of phonologists assume that phonotactics can provide clues to abstract morphological information, this possibility has largely gone unconsidered in work on Bantu noun classes. We present experimental evidence from isiXhosa (a Bantu language of the Nguni family, from South Africa), showing that speakers make use of root phonotactics when assigning noun classes to nonce words. Nouns in Xhosa bear class-indicating prefixes, but some of these prefixes are homophonous – and therefore ambiguous. Our findings show that when speakers are presented with words that have prefixes ambiguous between two classes, phonotactic factors can condition them to treat the nouns as one class or the other. This suggests that noun class (and other abstract morphological information) is not only stored in the lexicon, but is also redundantly indicated by phonotactic clues. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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