The program for the 5th American International Morphology Meeting (August 26-29, 2021) is now available. Check it out on the conference website. The program features invited keynote talks by Dunstan Brown (University of York), Gabriela Caballero (University of California, San Diego), Laura Kalin (Princeton University), and Ryan Lepic (Gallaudet University), as well as 36 regular talks and 24 posters.
morphology
Voices of Excellence podcast
Andrea was recently featured on the Arts and Sciences’ Voices of Excellence podcast, talking about her research. Listen to her discussion with David Staley on Soundcloud and iTunes.
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.
AIMM5
We’re excited to announce the 5th American International Morphology Meeting, which will be hosted virtually by OSU Linguistics, August 26th-29th. Check out the details on the conference website.
Andrea joins Word Structure
Andrea is excited to join the journal Word Structure as Co-editor, together with Mary Paster, Franz Rainer, and Andrew Spencer.
Talk for Abralin ao Vivo — Linguists Online series
Andrea recently gave a talk, “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally: The Importance of Localized Analogy” in the Brazillian Linguistics Association’s Abralin ao Vivo — Linguists Online series. You can check out the talk on YouTube!
Welcome, Michael!
Welcome to Michael Sullivan! Michael is an undergraduate major in Linguistics. He is working with Bob Levine and Andrea Sims on his B.A. thesis project. For his thesis, Michael is developing a new, formal theory of the morphology-syntax interface and testing it on the relationship between passive and impersonal constructions in Croatian. Watch this space as the work develops!
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:
- Typology of inflectional systems: what sort of languages are out there
- Learning-based theories of morphological typology and change
- Cognitive models of morphological learning
- Engineering models of inflection prediction
- Computational work on iterated language learning
Balkan and South Slavic Linguistics, Literature and Folklore Conference
The 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.