quantitative morphology

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!

Welcome Maria Copot

We’re excited to be hosting Maria Copot for a three month visit to OSU Linguistics! Maria is a PhD student from the Laboratoire de linguistique formelle at Université de Paris, working in the area of quantitative and experimental morphology. She’s here to develop collaborations, share her research, and learn about the research happening locally. Welcome, Maria!

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.

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!

How inflection class systems work

inflection_class_complexityAndrea Sims and Jeff Parker have a paper, “How inflection class systems work: On the informativity of implicative structure”, in the most recent issue of Word Structure, a special issue on information-theoretic approaches to word and pattern morphology.

Abstract: The complexity of an inflection class system can be defined as the average extent to which elements in the system inhibit motivated inferences about the realization of lexemes’ paradigm cells. Research shows that systems tend to exhibit relatively low complexity in this sense. However, relatively little work has explored how structural and distributional aspects of the inflectional system produce this outcome. In this paper we use the tools of information theory to do so. We explore a set of nine languages that have robust inflection class systems: Palantla Chinantec, French, Modern Greek, Icelandic, Kadiwéu, Nuer, Russian, Seri, and Võro. The data show that the extent to which implicative paradigmatic structure does work to minimize the complexity of the system differs significantly. In fact, the nine languages fall into three graph types based on their implicative structure. Moreover, low type frequency classes disproportionately contribute to the complexity of inflectional systems, but we hypothesize that their freedom to detract in this way may depend on the extent to which implicative structure is systemically important. We thus propose that the amount of ‘work’ done by implicative relations in structuring inflection classes should be considered a typological parameter.

Jeff Parker earns Ph.D.

Jeff Parker dissertation defense

Jeff Parker (in the tie) with part of his dissertation committee: Brian Joseph, Andrea Sims, and Greg Stump

On May 26, Jeff Parker successfully defended his dissertation, Inflectional complexity and cognitive processing: An experimental and corpus-based investigation of Russian nouns. The dissertation committee consisted of OSU faculty members Andrea Sims (Chair), Brian Joseph, and Mark Pitt, and University of Kentucky faculty member Greg Stump.

Congratulations, Dr. Parker!

Jeff will be officially hooded in August 2016 and will start a faculty position at Brigham Young University in the fall. We wish him good luck and success in all of his future endeavors!

Read the abstract of Jeff’s dissertation

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).

Inflectional Defectiveness

Inflectional DefectivenessAndrea Sims‘s new book, Inflectional Defectiveness, has just been published by Cambridge University Press. Such a pretty blue cover… And if you are interested in what is between the covers, here is a description of the content:

Paradigmatic gaps (‘missing’ inflected forms) have traditionally been considered to be the random detritus of a language’s history and marginal exceptions to the normal functioning of its inflectional system. Arguing that this is a misperception, Inflectional Defectiveness demonstrates that paradigmatic gaps are in fact normal and expected products of inflectional structure. Sims offers an accessible exploration of how and why inflectional defectiveness arises, why it persists, and how it is learned. The book presents a theory of morphology which is rooted in the implicative structure of the paradigm. This systematic exploration of the topic also addresses questions of inflection class organization, the morphology-syntax interface, the structure of the lexicon, and the nature of productivity. A novel synthesis of established research and new empirical data, this work is significant for researchers and graduate students in all fields of linguistics.

International Quantitative Morphology Meeting

Jeff in Kalemegdan Park, Belgrade

Jeff in Kalemegdan Park, Belgrade

Jeff Parker and Andrea Sims just returned from Belgrade, Serbia, where they presented a paper at the First International Quantitative Morphology Meeting. The trip had a rough start, including a 26-hour travel delay that involved each being stranded in a different airport. Nonetheless, they made it to Belgrade in time to see some interesting talks, and got to show off some pretty cool graphs about the implicative structure of Russian and Greek nouns.

Slides from the talk: On the interaction of implicative structure and type frequency in inflectional systems (PDF)