undergraduate research

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!

Kyle Maycock defends B.A. thesis

Congratulations to Kyle Maycock, who successfully defended his B.A. thesis, A Formal Analysis of Inflectional Marking in the Albanian Noun Phrase! It is exciting stuff that he hopes to present at the upcoming American International Morphology Meeting.

Thesis abstract: The Albanian noun phrase marks four morphosyntactic properties: number, gender, case, and definiteness. Every lexical word in the phrase mark number and gender, but only the first lexical word in the phrase—either a noun or an adjective—marks case and definiteness. Number and gender are straightforwardly morphological, but the placement of case and definiteness is dependent upon the syntax. In this way, this exponent is a clitic. The Albanian clitic is especially informative about the morphology-syntax interface because of its “special” (Zwicky 1977) placement after the first lexical word, or second position (2P), and its cumulative exponence. There are many models of 2P clitic placement that treat 2P clitics as phrasal affixes, notably Halpern (1995) and Anderson (2005), but the Albanian clitic’s cumulative exponence poses a problem for these models due to its noncanonical nature. In this thesis, I develop an analysis of the clitic using Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994) that accounts for the clitic as edge inflection, rather than treating it as phrasal affixation. The clitic’s cumulative exponence results in two paradigms for lexemes depending on their location within the phrase; when the word is in first position, it marks a larger set of properties than when it is in subsequent positions. This poses a problem to morphology, as it suggests morphology is privy to syntactic placement. In this thesis, I develop an analysis using Paradigm Function Morphology that allows morphology to remain blind to phrasal position.

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, 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!

Michelle awarded Undergrad Research Scholarship

Congratulations to Michelle McKenzie, who has been awarded an Undergraduate Research Scholarship from OSU for her B.A. thesis project “Effects of relative frequency on morphological processing in Russian and English”.

Michelle also has received a Schwartz Award from the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, to subsidize the cost of studying abroad in Russia this summer.

Great job, Michelle!

Welcome, Michelle!

Welcome to Michelle McKenzie!

Michelle is an undergraduate (majoring in Linguistics and Russian) who has begun working with Andrea to investigate the semantic properties of Russian and English derived words. In an earlier paper (“Lexical processing and affix ordering”, 2015), Andrea and Jeff Parker show based on corpus data that Russian derivational morphology has distributional properties that are indicative of high rates of decomposition during morphological processing — more so than for similar English derived words. Michelle plans to test predictions that these distributional facts make about the semantic transparency of derived words in each language. Are words with similar frequency profiles more semantically compositional in Russian than in English?

Watch this space for updates as the work progresses…

Chandini White presents at Fall Undergraduate Poster Forum

Congrats to undergraduate Chandini White, who presented her summer research at the Fall Undergraduate Poster Forum! Chandini served as a research intern for Andrea Sims in Summer 2016, on a project that used grammatical descriptions to identify examples of defectiveness (missing grammatical forms of words). A goal was to broaden the range of data on defectiveness, in order to enrich the empirical foundation of theoretical models.

In her poster, “Missing word forms: Interpreting the connection across languages,” Chandini reported on the results of that work. Most interestingly, she found similar patterns of defectiveness in unrelated languages — perhaps suggesting a cross-linguistic tendency in what areas of inflectional systems are susceptible to defectiveness. This was her first research presentation, and it was a great success. Well done, Chandini!

In future work she hopes to look more at defectiveness in Dravidian languages.