Descriptions of inflection classes usually take the form of broad or fine-grained (Stump & Finkel 2013) partitions of the set of lexeme, or link both in a hierarchic system of classes (Corbett & Fraser 1993; Dressler & Thornton 1996). Recent efforts to infer those automatically (Brown & Hippisley 2012; Lee & Goldsmith 2013; Bonami 2014) all rely on the assumption that the …
We introduce the Romance Verbal Inflection Dataset 2.0, a multilingual lexicon of Romance inflection covering 73 varieties. The lexicon provide verbal paradigm forms in broad IPA phonemic notation. Both lexemes and paradigm cells are organized to reflect cognacy. Such multi-lingual inflected lexicons annotated for two dimensions of cognacy are necessary to study the evolution of inflectional …
Linguists seek insight from all human languages, however accessing information from most of the full store of extant global linguistic descriptions is not easy. One of the most common kinds of information that linguists have documented is vernacular sentences, as recorded in descriptive grammars. Typically these sentences are formatted as interlinear glossed text (IGT). Most descriptive grammars, …
This dissertation adopts the Word and Paradigm approach and elaborates computationaltools to investigate precisely the similarity structure of inflection class systems based on in-flectional lexicon. We study Arabic, Yaitepec Chatino, Zenzontepec Chatino, English, French,Navajo and European Portuguese verbs as well as Russian nouns.
Recent work in Word and Paradigm morphology argues that the implicative structure of paradigms is expressed in terms of relations between surface words, and that studying the structure of paradigms in terms of sub-word units is misleading if not outright impossible (Ackerman et al, 2009; Blevins, 2006, 2016; Bonami & Beniamine, 2016). The argument typically rests on the observation that a word …
We discuss the notion of an inflection class system, a traditional ingredient of the description of inflection systems of nontrivial complexity. We distinguish systems of microclasses, which partition a set of lexemes in classes with identical behavior, and systems of macroclasses,which group lexemes that are similar enough in a few larger classes. On the basis of the intuition that macroclasses …
We present an implemented algorithm for the inference of morphophonological alternation patterns between word-forms. It is universal in that it leads to comparable classifications across languages without expectations on the shape of the alternations it searches for. Alternation patterns are anecessary first step for the quantitative study of morphology in the Word and Paradigm framework.
This paper contributes to addressing the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem (PCFP) in inflectional paradigms, as defined by Ackerman et al. (2009). We define a method for extending the use of conditional entropy to address the PCFP to prediction based on multiple paradigm cells. We apply this method to French and European Portugese and show that, on average, knowledge of multiple paradigm cells is …
Please cite my first name as “Sacha” in references to this talk.