typology

Morphological Systems Group organizes AIMM5

 

Screenshot of AIMM5 GatherTown spaceScreenshot of AIMM5 poster session in GatherTown

We got to welcome more than 160 morphologists from around the world to OSU (virtually) for the 5th American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM5) last weekend. It was four busy but exciting days of stimulating talks and interesting discussion. (Check out this picture of one of the poster sessions that took place in Gather.Town!) We hope that everyone enjoyed the conference. We certainly did!

It was also an opportunity to show off some of the morphological research happening here at OSU. The program included five presentations from our group:

  • Martha Booker Johnson and Andrea D. Sims, “Using word vectors to investigate semantic transparency cross-linguistically”
  • Kyle Maycock and Andrea D. Sims, “Albanian second-position clitics as edge inflection: Evidence from cumulative exponence in the noun phrase”
  • Connor Rouillier, “The effect of event structure on subject-verb agreement in Najdi Arabic”
  • Noah Diewald, “Wao Terero lexical suffixes: Realization at the lexical semantic-discourse interface”
  • Micha Elsner and Andrea D. Sims, “Analogical modeling of morphology for L1 effects in language contact”

There were also presentations from OSU “friends of the morphology lab” Brian Joseph, Shuan Karim, and John Grinstead (with colleagues).

We look forward to AIMM6, to be held at the University of California, San Diego in 2023!

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.

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

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.

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)