Welcome Dunstan Brown

The morphological systems group is excited to be hosting Dunstan Brown, from University of York, for a two month visit to OSU. He is here to work with Andrea on a project modeling Greek nominal stress in DATR, and to talk all things defectiveness. (Check out his and Neil Bermel‘s “Feast and Famine” grant project on defectiveness and overbaundance!) And it is a great opportunity for our local community of morphologists to talk with Dunstan about his/their research: morphology and its interface to syntax, computational linguistics, Slavic languages, Network Morphology, Canonical Typology, inflectional complexity — so many points of shared interest!

Dunstan will be giving a colloquium talk in the department on October 29.

Welcome, Dunstan!

Grace LeFevre defends B.A. thesis

Congratulations to Grace LeFevre, who successfully defended her honors B.A. thesis, Quantifying Paradigm Shape in Spanish Verbs! The thesis was co-advised by Micha Elsner and Andrea Sims. A paper based on the thesis has already been published in the 4th Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics.

Abstract: This thesis computationally models “paradigm shape,” a type of morphological structure that I define by the implicative relations holding among the forms in an inflectional system. Since implicative structure binds the forms in an inflectional system together (Wurzel, 1989), paradigm shape reflects the predictable ways that allomorphs occur in parallel paradigm cells across inflection classes in some languages. Maiden (2005)’s analysis of how certain Romance verbs changed over time in order to conform to existing paradigm shapes highlights the significance of this structure as a historical and cognitive organizing principle. However, paradigm shape has not been computationally formalized in a gradient or replicable way. Using information-theoretic entropy as defined by Shannon (1948), I develop a method to quantify paradigm shape and I apply it to Spanish verbs as a test case. The method bridges the gap between formal work on the organization of the stem space (e.g. Maiden, 2005; Boye and Cabredo Hofherr, 2006) and computational work on quantifying predictability in inflectional systems (e.g. Ackerman and Malouf, 2013; Stump and Finkel, 2015). In doing so, it jointly models the distributions of stems and affixes to compute sets of values that characterize the shapes of Spanish verb classes. Comparison of these values across classes captures partial parallelism between them, enabling identification of both allomorphic and distributional class structures (Baerman et al., 2017). These results with Spanish verbs highlight that my method provides a computational means of capturing multiple aspects of inflection class structure in a way that is replicable and extendable to other languages. Potential directions for future work include testing the limits of the method’s usefulness on known morphologically difficult systems and applying the method to other Romance languages at various stages of historical development.

Society for Computation in Linguistics paper

Grace LeFevre, Micha Elsner and Andrea Sims had their paper “Formalizing Inflectional Paradigm Shape with Information Theory” published in the Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, vol. 4. The paper is based on Grace’s B.A. thesis work. She did really impressive work and we are happy to see it make it out into the world!

Abstract: “Paradigm shape,” our term for the morphological structure formed by implicative relations between inflected forms, has not beenformally quantified in a gradient manner. We develop a method to formalize paradigm shape by modeling the joint effect of stem alternations and affixes. Applied to Spanish verbs,our model successfully captures aspects of both allomorphic and distributional classes.These results are replicable and extendable to other languages.

Welcome, Martha!

Welcome to Martha Johnson, a new Ph.D. student in the Linguistics Department!

Martha is interested in Bantu morphology and phonology. As a Fulbright Fellow to Tanzania she conducted fieldwork on Kihehe, adding to descriptive knowledge about the language. She is currently developing that work into a project on affix ordering in Kihehe verbs. Specifically, the order of subject agreement markers vs. TAM markers differs from the ordering in Swahili and other related languages, and seems to show variation. Martha is examining how this ordering has arisen as a result of morphologization of a former auxiliary as part of the main verb and resulting multiple exponence. She plans to return to Tanzania this summer for more fieldwork.

Joint morphology and computational linguistics seminar

This semester Andrea Sims and Micha Elsner are holding joint meetings of Andrea’s graduate morphology seminar and Micha’s graduate computational linguistics seminar. The joint seminar, focusing on Models of Morphological Learning and Change, is designed to bring together students with backgrounds in morphology, computational linguists, language acquisition, and historical and sociolinguistics… but not necessarily more than one of these. It is an experiment in talking across subdisciplinary boundaries, with the hope that the whole will be more than the sum of its parts (not unlike morphological structure!). We are excited to see what projects will develop!

Seminar description: Where do languages come from, and how do they evolve? We learn the languages we speak as infants or students; as adults, we transmit them to new generations of speakers. In a variety of linguistic sub-areas, researchers have claimed that this process of iterated language learning influences the kinds of languages which exist in the world (language typology) and the process of language change over time. Many of these researchers have proposed computational models of this process, enabling the rapid simulation of “learners” exposed to different language inputs, and of many generations of “teaching” and “learning”.

This seminar will investigate the learning process, with special reference to the case of inflectional morphology (grammatical forms of a word, such as singular cat ~ plural cats). We will bring together research in several areas of linguistics in order to discover how the different perspectives taken across sub-communities combine (or fail to combine!) to address the problem. The reading list will cover:

  1. Typology of inflectional systems: what sort of languages are out there
  2. Learning-based theories of morphological typology and change
  3. Cognitive models of morphological learning
  4. Engineering models of inflection prediction
  5. Computational work on iterated language learning

Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore Conference

OSU-affiliated people at the 2018 Balkan & South Slavic ConferenceYellowstone National ParkThe Biennial Conference on Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore was, as always, a great time. It was full of Balkan food, dancing, nature and wildlife (courtesy of nearby Yellowstone National Park), and even some academic papers. (Andrea presented a talk, “Greek noun stress and the notion ‘head’ in morphology”. Linguistics grad student Rexhina Ndoci also gave a talk titled “Greetings and politeness in Albanian”.) And it was great to catch up with some OSU alums!

Thanks to Elena Petroska and Paul Foster for being great hosts at Montana State University, Billings.

Visit to Universität Leipzig

Christmas Market 2017Thanks to the Institute for Linguistics at the University of Leipzig for an invitation to Andrea to give a colloquium talk in their Interaction of Grammatical Building Blocks colloquium series. It was a great chance to interact with the linguistics community there and talk about the morphology-syntax interface (not to mention attend a really fun department Christmas party). (Pictured here is Andrea’s side trip to Berlin to go to the Christmas markets — a definite ‘bonus’ of the trip!)

Texas Linguistics Society

In September, Andrea Sims gave a keynote talk, “Morphological connectivity in the mental lexicon,” at the 17th Texas Linguistics Society meeting, in Austin, TX.

Check out the slides of the talk: sims-TLS2017-slides.

Thanks to all of the organizers for the invitation and a great conference!

Inflectional Morphology in Belgium!

At the end of April, Andrea Sims taught a one-week intensive Ph.D. course in Inflectional Morphology at Ghent University (Ghent, Belgium). The course focused on the formalist inferential-realizational approach to inflectional theory (its general motivation and theory-specific mechanisms), and comparison of different theoretical analyses of inflectional data.

Equivalent to about half of a semester-long Ph.D. seminar — but in only one week —  the course was certainly challenging for students (and Andrea!). But they really worked hard to deepen their understanding of inflectional theory and made great strides.

Andrea with some of the students (and the Russian nominal system)

The course was arranged by Cindy Johnson, an OSU alum (Ph.D. in Linguistics, 2014). A big thanks to Cindy for the invitation to Ghent, and to all of the students who gamely took the inflectional tour of Albanian, Georgian, Russian (including the analysis sketched on the whiteboard at left), Sahaptin, Swahili, and many other languages.