JOURNAL LINGUISTICS

Pirkko Kukkonen

Aphasic Errors as Evidence for the Mental Organization of

Morphology

Abstract

In morphological errors, Non-existent temporary word forms is one of the most interesting errors because its provide a possibility for distinguishing between affixation and analogy as means of constructing word forms during speech production. When existing patterns are randomly actuated, the produced word forms often violate some morphophonemic variation rules. The errors prove that some composition of even frequent word forms takes place during speech production.

Lexicalization and decomposition

In morphological organization itself there are two opposing views, the first one is full-listing hypothesis and the last one is the decomposition hypothesis. The dual route hypothesis serves as a compromise between the two models (Clahsen 1997, 1999). One of the possibility is when a redundant system is full of decomposition and full of  listing. All the unproductive words have to be lexicalizes, but instead of full listing they may bear some kind of a property where the speakers enable to tell them apart from the productive words.

In full listing hypothesis its need to include some sort of a fall back procedure or a lexical tool because it will make the speakers are able to inflect new loan word. The word itself can be divided to several forms that usually based on different mechanism such as affixation and analogy according to a model offered by another word form or by a group of word. One of the close analysis about erroneous is delivered by Ahseln 1994, “illegal word forms may reveal the mental mechanisms by which the word forms have been constructed by the speaker.

Data

         

          The present analysis has shown that all the morphological errors were selected. The error usually happens in the case like the disconnected speech, incorrect diction, pronunciation or in distinguishing between sounds substitutions and morphological errors.

           

The classifications of the errors resulted in certain groups such as the substitutions of the base form for an inflected word form, neologistic compounds or derivations, substitutions of a plural form for a singular one, errors in agreement, and the others errors.

       

The frequencies of the errors categories are listed below.

Uninflected form used instead of an inflected form

            Nominative singular                                                    25%

            Verb root                                                                     7%

          Verb stem (with derivational affixes)                    5%

Non- existent word forms                                                       16%

Neologistic compound or derived words                               8%

Partitive plural instead of partitive singular                            10%

Errors in agreement                                                                 5%

Others errors                                                                           24%    

In addition there were syntactic errors which could in principle be selection errors. Such errors are irrelevant to the present research question.

Base Forms                                               

         

The concept of base forms is very essential for the affixation hypothesis. This is the form of the content word to which affixes are attached. Besides that, the base form also has function in Finnish noun where the base form is a kind of word stem that serves as the citation form (nominative singular).

           

In conventionally words are referred to by their citation forms which serve as dictionary entries, but in the production models the base form may serve as the pivot of the lexical entry and also the lexical access takes place via the pivot which may substitute for other word forms.

           

Neologistic compounds and derived words provide firmer evidence for the use of construction produces in speech production. The analysis of the non-existent word may provide further evidence over the mental lexicon and the composition of words forms, whether it is based on stems or on prototypical word forms.

Regularization     

           

Regulation errors usually during the speaker’s construction of word form. Full regularization refers to the concatenation of elements retrieved from the lexicon, while in partial regularization some but not all morphological rules seem to have applied. For the present purposes it suffices to assume that the affixes are selected on the basis of some functional information. In the productions models the phonological form of the suffixes is determined late in the derivation process, because suffixes are stranded and accommodate to the exchange of content words.

Analogy and gang effects

          In processing to constructing words one alternative is analogical composition. Bybee 1985, Prideaux 1984, Stemberger & MacWhinney 1988, Skousen 1989 and Stemberger 1998 delivered that in the regularization errors, words join the most productive paradigsm, where the gang effects refer to cases where unproductive paradigsm attract new members.

            All the productions errors need not be selection errors, even if all the stems were listed in the lexicon, but new stems may result from the application of lexical redundancy rules. In addition the error may be due to phonological complication, baside that the interaction between morphology and articulation may create opportunities for such errors to arise.

Discussion

In processing of production of speech may use the application of various strategies. In production the speakers has the choice of retrieving or composing the word to be used. The speaker that has difficulties in retrieving lexical information may compose the word form.

 Regularization is somewhat more common than rendering words irregular. The erroneous words were relatively frequent, and analogical composition can account better for the errors than the affixation hypothesis.

The performance itself may also play role in genesis of morphological errors, as the speaker’s failure in selecting one of the word forms competing for the same place in the utterance may result in the contamination of the two stylistic variants.

Linguistic analysis does not explain the errors completely because it ignores, for example is the psychological factors such as attentiveness.  For normal speech, experimental elicitation of slips is a more appropriate approach, and it should obviously be accompanied by a careful analysis of morphological variation.

Comment

This paper is a good paper because shows about the kind of errors that usually happens in morphology system. One of the errors that always happens is Non-existent temporary word forms is one of the most interesting errors because its provide a possibility for distinguishing between affixation and analogy as means of constructing word forms during speech production. The errors like this is often happens in speech process and to solve this errors someone may use several strategies and one of it is the speakers has the choice of retrieving or composing the word or sentences that will be used.

This paper give a positive effect for us especially in speech process because we get the information about the errors that usually do in speech such as disconnected speech, incorrect diction, pronunciation or in distinguishing between sounds substitutions and morphological errors and how the ways to avoid this errors. More than that in this paper also tells about lexicalization, decomposition, analogy and the functions of it in language.