Graph of the Day

Russian nominal inflectional structureCheck out this awesome visualization of the inflection class structure of Russian nouns. Pretty (and informative!) graphs make us happy…

The nodes are Russian nominal inflection classes — 87 in total, representing a fairly fine-grained description of inflectional information. The size of the nodes reflects the log type frequency of each class, i.e., how many words it contains. Classes that share at least half of their inflectional exponents are connected by an edge, with a darker line for more overlap.

The graph was produced in R using the igraph package, one of Andrea’s new favorite tools.

Russian is one of nine languages that Andrea Sims and Jeff Parker are investigating for an ongoing project on the implicative structure of inflectional systems (paper in progress).