Morphological analysis is a critical enabling technology for polysynthetic languages. We present a neural morphological analyzer for case-inflected nouns in St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered polysythetic language in the Inuit-Yupik language family, treating morphological analysis as a recurrent neural sequence-to-sequence task. By utilizing an existing finite-state morphological analyzer to create training data, we improve analysis coverage on attested Yupik word types from approximately 75% for the existing finite-state analyzer to 100% for the neural analyzer. At the same time, we achieve a substantially higher level of accuracy on a held-out testing set, from 78.9% accuracy for the finite-state analyzer to 92.2% accuracy for our neural analyzer.
In this paper, we introduce a morphologicallyaware electronic dictionary for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered language of the Bering Strait region. Implemented using HTML, Javascript, and CSS, the dictionary is set in an uncluttered interface and permits users to search in Yupik or in English for Yupik root words and Yupik derivational suffixes. For each matching result, our electronic dictionary presents the user with the corresponding entry from the Badten et al. (2008) Yupik-English paper dictionary. Because Yupik is a polysynthetic language, handling of multimorphemic word forms is critical. If a user searches for an inflected Yupik word form, we perform a morphological analysis and return entries for the root word and for any derivational suffixes present in the word. This electronic dictionary should serve not only as a valuable resource for all students and speakers of Yupik, but also for field linguists working towards documentation and conservation of the language.
Data from the perfect in Classical Greek provide empirical evidence for inwardly-and outwardly-sensitive span-conditioned allomorphy and indicate the need for a post-Vocabulary Insertion linearization process. The data also support the extremely late computation of the phonology of reduplicants. Perfect aspect in Classical Greek is realized via three distinct exponents: a reduplicative prefix, a suffix -/k/ (for some verbs) or stem allomorphy (for others), and a dedicated set of agreement suffixes. I argue that this case of Multiple Exponence results from one direct exponent of the Aspect[perfect] head and two cases of allomorphy at other nodes conditioned by spans that include the Aspect[perfect] head. The reduplicant is a Vocabulary Item (RED) that instantiates Aspect. Its phonology is determined after both Vocabulary Insertion and linearization. The -/k/ suffix is an outwardly-sensitive allomorph of Voice[active] conditioned by the span ⟨Aspect, Tense⟩, and perfect stem allomorphy in verbs that show it is conditioned by ⟨Voice, Aspect, Tense⟩. The agreement suffixes are inwardlysensitive allomorphs conditioned by the span ⟨Voice, Aspect, Tense, Mood⟩. When taken together, the data indicate that Vocabulary Insertion must proceed cyclically, and that linearization must happen very late -after Vocabulary Insertion -since the realizations of both Voice[active] and AGR are conditioned by spans of hierarchically adjacent, rather than surface-contiguous, heads. The Greek data are essential for our understanding of the post-syntactic order of operations.
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