Kees de Bot
Sveučilište u Groningenu, Nizozemska | University of Groningen, NetherlandsThe methodology of language attrition research
Though it could be argued that language acquisition and language attrition, defined as the loss of language skills in individuals over time, are governed by the same principles, there are significant differences in terms of research methodology. An obvious one is that repeated testing over a short period of time may actually lead to acquisition and wariness raising. There is also the risk of selective mortality: people who are still fluent in the attiring language are more likely to be willing to participate than those who feel they lost most of it. One approach that has been shown to be effective is the savings method in which residual knowledge can be activated through relearning. In addition, several neuro-imaging techniques may be applicable in research on attrition.Krešimir Šojat
Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Hrvatska | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Processing Croatian Morphology – Derivational Lexicon
This talk deals with methods and principles applied in the building of CroDeriV. CroDeriV is a computational lexicon that contains data on the morphological structure and derivational relatedness of Croatian vocabulary. The primary motivation for building this resource is to obtain a complete morphological analysis of the Croatian vocabulary in terms of morpheme structure and derivational families. The secondary motivation for building this resource is to use data structured in this way for further research of derivational and aspectual phenomena, verb valency, semantic structure of the lexicon, semantic relations etc. In the first part of the talk derivational processes in Croatian, a Slavic language with very rich inflectional and derivational morphology, are described. Further, the focus will be on the derivation of verbs and their morphological structure. In the second part of the talk I present how the data in CroDeriV is organized in more detail. I also discuss automatic procedures for morphological analysis and problems faced in this area. This particularly pertains to homography and numerous phonological changes at the morpheme boundaries resulting in several allomorphs for each morpheme. CroDeriV is available for search at: croderiv.ffzg.hr. The database can be searched for various affixes, single roots, combinations of roots and affixes etc. In the final part of the talk I give an outline of further plans for the enlargement and enrichment of CroDeriV.Ida Raffaelli
Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Hrvatska | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia
