A Feature Percolation Convention of Affixation Processes in Urhobo

This paper seeks to examine headedness in affixation processes in Urhobo using a feature percolation approach.Affixation is a rich source of word formation process in the Urhobo language.The specific objectives are to identify affixation processes in Urhobo,investigate how they are used to derive words and determine headedness in the Urhobo language using a feature percolation theory as a framework.This paper reveals three affixation processes in Urhobo,which are prefixes,circumfixes and suffixes.Affixation is a derivational aspect of morphology and it brings about change in the grammatical class of the word or rather,provides additional semantic information to a word.The paper discovers that new words are derived in the language by attaching an affix either at the beginning(prefix),or to the end(suffix)of a word.This process is very productive in the language.The paper reveals that the head of a word using prefix is left-right branching while for suffixes,it is right-left branching.The prefix and suffix attached to a root to form the circumfix project to be the head of a word.The study observes circumfixes to have two heads.Feature percolation theory is also used to determine the head of a word in Urhobo.The paper concludes by recommending further researches on the use of theories especially morphological theories in analysing morphological processes in Urhobo.

How New Words Are Formed

With the development of the society and culture, English vocabulary change rapidly. English has always been in a state of evolution. In recent years new words enter the English language at an increasing rate. This paper makes an attempt to analyze eight ways of new English word formation, creating, blending, shortening, functional shift, back- formation, affixation, compounding and borrowing — by presenting mainly English examples.

英语缀合构词法小语

本文系统地介绍英语缀合构词法中较常用、较固定而又较具代表性的构词法项目,旨在帮助英语初学者认识缀合构词法规则,从而较快地增加词汇量和提高“猜读”的能力。

汉语与英语的共有词缀化趋势:文化顺涵化的镜像

当代汉语日益风行的词缀化倾向是英语日益鲜明的词缀化倾向的影响所致。这是中西跨文化交际中汉语文化顺涵化的标志。

Derivation Versus Compounding

In English language,affixation is a significant way of forming new words,This essay intends to explore the concepts of two fundamental ways of forming new words,namely,derivation and compounding.They are different in a lot of cases,yet,it is also argued that there is a clear dividing line between compounding and derivation.

The Value of Effective Strategies Employed in Vocabulary Instruction in College English Reading

Vocabulary teaching is one aspect of language teaching that has not been given the attention it deserves until recent years. For a long period of time, vocabulary is simply taught in the way by asking students to study and memorize its meaning and spelling, its part of speech and its general function in a sentence. Thus, a student with a command of five thousand English vocabulary still finds it hard to adapt himself to the requirement of our demanding reading assignments, in particular, to the extensive reading task, which is more demanding due to its wide range of materials and large amount of vocabularies. According to Wilkins (1979: 111) "Without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed." Yet without a deeper understanding of how vocabulary is taught in the classroom and which methods of teaching are more effective for learners, the teaching of vocabulary may not achieve the desired effects. By researching the topic on vocabulary learning and instruction, this essay intends to bring the attention of both teachers and learners to the weaknesses of the traditional approach of teaching vocabulary and some different strategies in vocabulary instruction with the aim of improving the students’ reading comprehension.\;

Approaches to Building up English Vocabulary

English Vocabulary study is of great importance because it is related to comprehesive skills on English learning.That is,it is a key factor to learn English well.Therefore we must study and know how to develope vocabulary.This article mainly explores how to build up our English vocabulary.

Negation in English

Every language has its own unique ways of negation and English is no exception. More importance should be attached to when a negative English sentence is translated into its Chinese equivalent. Negation in English can be realized in many different ways. In the first place, the different types of negation in English will be analyzed. In addition, the affixes and lexicons used to denote negation will be investigated. The last part is mainly concerning the idioms and other expressions which denote negative meanings. In order to make the views much more clearly, some Chinese equivalents of the English sentences will be offered here.

A Corpus-based Study on the Use of Affixal Negation in Chinese EFL Learners' Writing

This paper reports a comparative study on the use of affixal negation in the writing of Chinese EFL learners based on data collected from a learner corpus,WECCL and a native-speaker corpus,LOCNESS.The findings revealed that the overall frequency of affixal negation used by Chinese students was nearly the same as that of native speakers.And the top three most frequently used negative affixes of the two groups were the same in terms of their rankings and proportion.However,when it comes to individual negative affixes,some were underused while others overused.The reasons behind were explored in the analysis of un-,dis-and in-,the top three most frequently used negative affixes by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers.Pedagogical implications and suggestions for future research were presented at the end of the paper.

An Algorithm for Finding Conserved Secondary Structure Motifs in Unaligned RNA Sequences

Several experiments and observations have revealed the fact that small localdistinct structural features in RNA molecules are correlated with their biological function, forexample, in post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. Thus, finding similar structuralfeatures in a set of RNA sequences known to play the same biological function could providesubstantial information concerning which parts of the sequences are responsible for the functionitself. Unfortunately, finding common structural elements in RNA molecules is a very challengingtask, even if limited to secondary structure. The main difficulty lies in the fact that in nearlyall the cases the structure of the molecules is unknown, has to be somehow predicted, and thatsequences with little or no similarity can fold into similar structures. Although they differ insome details, the approaches proposed so far are usually based on the preliminary alignment of thesequences and attempt to predict common structures (either local or global, or for some selectedregions) for the aligned sequences. These methods give good results when sequence and structuresimilarity are very high, but function less well when similarity is limited to small and localelements, like single stem-loop motifs. Instead of aligning the sequences, the algorithm we presentdirectly searches for regions of the sequences that can fold into similar structures, where thedegree of similarity can be defined by the user. Any information concerning sequence similarity inthe motifs can be used either as a search constraint, or a posteriori, by post-processing theoutput. The search for the regions sharing structural similarity is implemented with the affix tree,a novel text-indexing structure that significantly accelerates the search for patterns having asymmetric layout, such as those forming stem-loop structures. Tests based on experimentally knownstructures have shown that the algorithm is able to identify functional motifs in the secondarystructure of non coding RNA, such as Iron Responsive Elements (IRE) in the untranslated regions offerritin mRNA, and the domain IV stem-loop structure in SRP RNA.