The current study investigates how native speakers of a morphologically complex language handle uncertainty related to linguistic forms that have gaps in their inflectional paradigms. We analyze their strategies of dealing with paradigmatic defectivity and how these strategies are motivated by subjective contemporaneousness, frequency, acceptability, and other lexical and structural characteristics of words. We administered a verb production task with Finnish native speakers using verbs from a small non-productive inflectional type that has many paradigmatic gaps and asked participants to inflect (...) the verbs in a given context. Inflectional uncertainty was measured by the number of different forms the participants produced for each verb. We classified produced forms that were not expected as either synonymous or novel and measured their optimal string alignment distance to expected forms. Our analyses revealed that a usage-based approach to paradigmatic defectivity fits better with the obtained results than a classical approach typically met in dictionaries and descriptive grammars. Thus, we argue, that paradigmatic defectivity can be better described as a dynamic rather than a static system, where gaps represent a continuum of possible inflectional choices rather than a lack of an inflectional variant. (shrink)

The human body is central to myriad metaphors, so studying the conceptualisation of the body itself is critical if we are to understand its broader use. One essential but understudied issue is whether languages differ in which body parts they single out for naming. This paper takes a multi-method approach to investigate body part nomenclature within a single language family. Using both a naming task and colouring-in task to collect data from six Japonic languages, we found that lexical similarity for (...) body part terminology was notably differentiated within Japonic, and similar variation was evident in semantics too. Novel application of cluster analysis on naming data revealed a relatively flat hierarchical structure for parts of the face, whereas parts of the body were organised with deeper hierarchical structure. The colouring data revealed that bounded parts show more stability across languages than unbounded parts. Overall, the data reveal there is not a single universal conceptualisation of the body as is often assumed, and that in-depth, multi-method explorations of under-studied languages are urgently required. (shrink)

We examined how language supports the expression of temporality within sentence boundaries in English, which has a rich inventory of grammatical means to express temporality. Using a computational model that mimics how humans learn from exposure we explored what the use of different tense and aspect combinations reveals about the interaction between our experience of time and the cognitive demands that talking about time puts on the language user. Our model was trained on n-grams extracted from the BNC to select (...) the TA combination that fits the context best. It revealed the existence of two different sub-systems within the set of TA combinations, a “simplex” one that is supported lexically and is easy to learn, and a “complex” one that is supported contextually and is hard to learn. The finding that some TA combinations are essentially lexical in nature necessitates a rethink of tense and aspect as grammatical categories that form the axes of the temporal system. We argue that the system of temporal reference may be more fruitfully thought of as the result of learning a system that is steeped in experience and organised along a number of functional principles. (shrink)