A Conceptual Spaces Model of Socially Motivated Language Change

This paper outlines a formal model of socially motivated language change which unites insights from identity-oriented theories of language change with formal theories of language use and understanding. We use Gärdenfors\u27s (2000) Conceptual Spaces framework to formalize socially motivated ideological change and use signaling games with an iterated best response solution concept (Franke, 2009; Frank and Goodman, 2012) to formalize the link between ideology, linguistic meaning and language use. We then show how this new framework can be used to shed light on the mechanisms underlying socially-motivated change in French grammatical gender

Distributional Effects of Gender Contrasts Across Categories

This paper proposes a methodology for comparing grammatical contrasts across categories with the tools of distributional semantics. After outlining why such a comparison is relevant to current theoretical work on gender and other morphosyntactic features, we present intrinsic and extrinsic predictability as instruments for analyzing semantic contrasts between pairs of words. We then apply our method to a dataset of gender pairs of French nouns and adjectives. We find that, while the distributional effect of gender is overall less predictable for nouns than for adjectives, it is heavily influenced by semantic properties of the adjectives

Assessing the Featural Organisation of Paradigms with Distributional Methods

In this paper, we apply distributional methods to Czech data to compare the predictions of two views of inflectional paradigms, as systems of orthogonal morphosyntactic feature oppositions, or as systems of multilateral contrasts between pairs of morphologically related words, not necessarily reducible to orthogonal features. We define two predictive tasks that probe what it means for two pairs of paradigm cells to contrast in the same features: in the first, we train a~classifier to discriminate between two paradigm cells; in the second, we train a family of models to predict the vector of the word in one cell from that of the word in another cell. By varying the choice of training and test data, we show that (i)~a~model trained on data that contrast in a manner orthogonal to its test data performs on average at chance level, while (ii)~a~model trained on data that contrast in a~manner parallel to its test data performs on average better than chance but still worse than a model trained on the same pair of cell used for testing. This is incompatible with the predictions of a reductive view of paradigms as systems of feature contrasts

DI/PL, Linéarisation, Arbres Polychromes : trois approches de l’ordre des mots

Cet article propose une comparaison de trois approches alternatives de l’ordre des mots dans les grammaires syntagmatiques, et en particulier en HPSG (Pollard & Sag). Après une présentation des trois approches, je montre que certains phénomènes d’ordre récalcitrants en français et en allemand sont difficiles à traiter dans le formalisme classique des grammaires DI/PL (Gazdar, Klein, Pullum & Sag), et demandent la reconnaissance de domaines d’ordre opaques à l’intérieur des constituants. Les grammaires d’arbres polychromes (Cori & Marandin) et les grammaires de linéarisation directe (Kathol) sont mieux armées pour rendre compte de ce type de phénomène.This paper compares three alternative approaches to word order in phrase-structure grammars, with a focus on HPSG (Pollard & Sag). After presenting the three approaches, I show that some intriguing word order phenomena in French and German are difficult to account for in the mainstream framework of ID/LP grammars (Gazdar, Klein, Pullum & Sag) and ask for a notion of opaque word order domain inside constituents. Polychrome tree grammars (Cori & Marandin) and direct linearization grammars (Kathol) are better equipped to account for this type of phenomena

Systemic Polyfunctionality and Morphology-syntax Interdependencies

International audienceno abstrac

The fine implicative structure of European Portuguese conjugation

Recent literature has highlighted the extent to which inflectional paradigms are organised into systems of implications allowing speakers to make full use of the inflection system on the basis of exposure to only a few forms of each word. The present paper contributes to this line of research by investigating in detail the implicative structure of European Portuguese verbal paradigms. After outlining the computational methods we use to that effect, we deploy these methods on a lexicon of about 5000 verbs, and show how the morphological and phonological properties of European Portuguese verbs lead to the observed patterns of predictability

Derivation predicting inflection: A quantitative study of the relation between derivational history and inflectional behavior in Latin

In this paper, we investigate the value of derivational information in predicting the inflectional behavior of lexemes. We focus on Latin, for which large-scale data on both inflection and derivation are easily available. We train boosting tree classifiers to predict the inflection class of verbs and nouns with and without different pieces of derivational information. For verbs, we also model inflectional behavior in a word-based fashion, training the same type of classifier to predict wordforms given knowledge of other wordforms of the same lexemes. We find that derivational information is indeed helpful, and document an asymmetry between the beginning and the end of words, in that the final element in a word is highly predictive, while prefixes prove to be uninformative. The results obtained with the word-based methodology also allow for a finer-grained description of the behavior of different pairs of cells

Inferring inflection classes with description length

International audienceWe discuss the notion of an inflection class system, a traditional ingredient of the description of inflection systems of nontrivial complexity. We distinguish systems of microclasses, which partition a set of lexemes in classes with identical behavior, and systems of macroclasses, which group lexemes that are similar enough in a few larger classes. On the basis of the intuition that macroclasses should contribute to a concise description of the system, we propose one algorithmic method for inferring macroclasses from raw inflectional paradigms, based on minimisation of the description length of the system under a given strategy of identifying morphological alternations in paradigms. We then exhibit classifications produced by our implementation on French and European Portuguese conjugation data and argue that they constitute an appropriate systematisation of traditional classifications. To arrive at such a convincing systematisation, it was crucial for us to use a local approach to inflection class similarity (based on pairwise comparisons of paradigm cells) rather than a global approach (based on the simultaneous comparison of all cells). We conclude that it is indeed possible to infer inflectional macroclasses objectively

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics

The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories

One-to-many-relations in morphology, syntax, and semantics

The standard view of the form-meaning interfaces, as embraced by the great majority of contemporary grammatical frameworks, consists in the assumption that meaning can be associated with grammatical form in a one-to-one correspondence. Under this view, composition is quite straightforward, involving concatenation of form, paired with functional application in meaning. In this book, we discuss linguistic phenomena across several grammatical sub-modules (morphology, syntax, semantics) that apparently pose a problem to the standard view, mapping out the potential for deviation from the ideal of one-to-one correspondences, and develop formal accounts of the range of phenomena. We argue that a constraint-based perspective is particularly apt to accommodate deviations from one-to-many correspondences, as it allows us to impose constraints on full structures (such as a complete word or the interpretation of a full sentence) instead of deriving such structures step by step. Most of the papers in this volume are formulated in a particular constraint-based grammar framework, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The contributions investigate how the lexical and constructional aspects of this theory can be combined to provide an answer to this question across different linguistic sub-theories