An interpretation of paradigmatic morphology

The thesis has as its goal the extension of current approaches in the description of natural languages, based on logics of partial information, to the area of morphology. I review work in a number of areas which may inform the study of morphology. I define a system for the representation of lexical and morphological information similar in descriptive aims to the system of Word and Paradigm (WP) morphology developed by Matthews, although somewhat different in technical details. I show that this system has a simple mathematical structure and indicate how it is related to current proposals in the field of feature value logics for linguistic description. The descriptive use of the system is demonstrated by an analysis of verbal paradigms from Latin.The attested shortcomings of WP are reanalysed in the light of the formalization developed above, and I show that, contrary to previous claims, the structures developed for the formalization of WP may be both adequate for describing the morphology of non-inflecting languages and concise in so doing. These assertions are supported by sample analyses of the morphology of Turkish, taken as an exemplary agglutinating language, and of Semitic

The morphology of Silliot Greek: paradigmatic defectiveness, paradigmatic levelling, and affix pleonasm

In this chapter, I discuss the synchrony and diachrony of three morphological features of Silliot Greek: the defective inflection of the definite article; the levelling of the parisyllabic and imparisyllabic declensions in masculine and feminine nouns into two unified inflectional classes; and, the formation of the imperfective past by means of the pleonastic suffixes -inondʒisk- and -inosk-. I show that all three phenomena have sporadic parallels in the other dialects of the inner Asia Minor Greek group (Cappadocian, Pharasiot as well as in Pontic), which I take to suggest that their development must have been set in motion at some earlier point in the history of the Asia Minor Greek dialects. I also show that, in Silliot, these innovations exhibit an increased degree of systematicity and regularity, and that they provide evidence for a tendency to reduce morphological contrasts and material in the dialect. I argue that, with the exception of some aspects of the diachrony of the defective definite article, this has been achieved largely through language-internal processes of change

Paradigm Completion for Derivational Morphology

The generation of complex derived word forms has been an overlooked problem in NLP; we fill this gap by applying neural sequence-to-sequence models to the task. We overview the theoretical motivation for a paradigmatic treatment of derivational morphology, and introduce the task of derivational paradigm completion as a parallel to inflectional paradigm completion. State-of-the-art neural models, adapted from the inflection task, are able to learn a range of derivation patterns, and outperform a non-neural baseline by 16.4%. However, due to semantic, historical, and lexical considerations involved in derivational morphology, future work will be needed to achieve performance parity with inflection-generating systems.Comment: EMNLP 201

A broad-coverage distributed connectionist model of visual word recognition

In this study we describe a distributed connectionist model of morphological processing, covering a realistically sized sample of the English language. The purpose of this model is to explore how effects of discrete, hierarchically structured morphological paradigms, can arise as a result of the statistical sub-regularities in the mapping between word forms and word meanings. We present a model that learns to produce at its output a realistic semantic representation of a word, on presentation of a distributed representation of its orthography. After training, in three experiments, we compare the outputs of the model with the lexical decision latencies for large sets of English nouns and verbs. We show that the model has developed detailed representations of morphological structure, giving rise to effects analogous to those observed in visual lexical decision experiments. In addition, we show how the association between word form and word meaning also give rise to recently reported differences between regular and irregular verbs, even in their completely regular present-tense forms. We interpret these results as underlining the key importance for lexical processing of the statistical regularities in the mappings between form and meaning

Morphonette: a morphological network of French

This paper describes in details the first version of Morphonette, a new French morphological resource and a new radically lexeme-based method of morphological analysis. This research is grounded in a paradigmatic conception of derivational morphology where the morphological structure is a structure of the entire lexicon and not one of the individual words it contains. The discovery of this structure relies on a measure of morphological similarity between words, on formal analogy and on the properties of two morphological paradigms

Paradigmatic morphology: splinters, combining forms, and secreted affixes

Splinters, combining forms, and secreted affixes are three morpheme (or morpheme-like) elements which are often conflated in the literature on English word-formation. Scholars have differently focused on their morphological origin (i.e. blending, paradigmatic substitution, analogy) or on their semantics (i.e. secretion vs. mere abbreviation) (Warren 1990; Fradin 2000; Mattiello 2007; Bauer et al. 2013). This paper investigates these phenomena as part of paradigmatic morphology, or similarity among words. In particular, the investigation of five case studies (i.e. -(a)holic, docu-, -exit, -umentary, -zilla) shows that they are frequently used to create new words and even to produce series, through analogy via schema (cf. Köpcke 1993, 1998). In the paper, diachronic study combined with corpus-based analysis help us 1) categorise these phenomena as ‘marginal’ vs. ‘extra-grammatical’, and as ‘productive’ vs. ‘creative’, and 2) shed some light on their role in the development of morphological rules and in the expansion of the English lexicon

Wetting films on chemically heterogeneous substrates

Based on a microscopic density functional theory we investigate the morphology of thin liquidlike wetting films adsorbed on substrates endowed with well-defined chemical heterogeneities. As paradigmatic cases we focus on a single chemical step and on a single stripe. In view of applications in microfluidics the accuracy of guiding liquids by chemical microchannels is discussed. Finally we give a general prescription of how to investigate theoretically the wetting properties of substrates with arbitrary chemical structures.Comment: 56 pages, RevTeX, 20 Figure

Evidentiality in Dena'ina Athabaskan

Dena'ina evidentials are enclitics with a complex paradigmatic morphology. Their first component varies with person, while the second com- ponent varies with animacy and number, thus marking source and nature of knowledge. Although evidentiality in Dena'ina is not coded as an obligatory inflectional category on the verb, it is also not scattered throughout the gram- mar. The existence of an incipient inflectional evidential system demonstrates the ability of Athabaskan languages to innovate morphological structures outside the verb. The uniqueness of the Dena'ina system demonstrates the heterogeneity of Athabaskan grammar beyond the verb word