On the Typology of Inflection Class Systems

Dressler, Wolfgang U.; Kilani-Schoch, Marianne; Gagarina, Natalia; Pestal, Lina; Pöchtrager, Markus A.

doi:10.1515/flin.40.1-2.51

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…As we saw before, in Natural Morphology, macroclasses are viewed as the top-level partition in an inflection class tree (Dressler et al 2008;Kilani-Schoch and Dressler 2005;Dressler and Thornton 1996). In these accounts, Macroclasses, just as classes of all granularities, are defined by implicational paradigm structure condition (PSCs).…”

Section: 31mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferring inflection classes with description length

Beniamine

Bonami

Sagot

2018

JLM

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We 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.

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Section: 31mentioning

confidence: 99%

Inferring inflection classes with description length

Beniamine

Bonami

Sagot

2018

JLM

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“…-are, to the respective first macroclasses of Italian, Spanish, and French (cf. Dressler 2002;Kilani-Schoch and Dressler 2005;Aguirre and Dressler 2006;Dressler et al 2006). The first Latin macroclass consisted of the most productive Latin verb microclass of the type (12) am-ā-re, am-ā-v-i, am-ā-tum 'love', of the two unproductive minimicroclasses…”

Section: The Rise Of Inflectional Complexity In Diachronic Changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Dressler et al 2006), again a property absent in the ideal agglutinating type. Only very few, often only one, of these microclasses are productive.…”

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confidence: 96%

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The rise of complexity in inflectional morphology

Dressler

2011

Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics

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This contribution is meant to deal, among the papers devoted to complexity in naturalness theory, with the rise of inflectional complexity in first language acquisition and in diachronic change. These two sections are preceded by an introduction devoted to the conceptualisation of inflectional complexity within the theory of Natural Morphology and to explicating factors of morphological complexity. The focus will be on unproductive patterns in acquisition after the child's detection of morphological (de)composition. Additional topics will be the role of the naturalness parameters of transparency, iconicity, (bi)uniqueness, and of figure and ground. Main topics of the third section on diachrony will be distributed exponence and the control of three classical claims on diachronic change by Natural Morphology in studying changes from Latin to Romance languages.

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“…Furthermore, should both be identified as regular? This approach fails even more in the strongly inflecting Slavic and Baltic languages or in Latin, [15][16][17][18] where many productive inflection classes compete with each other. Russian examples for fully productive verb classes are 17 illustrated with loans from English: tap-a-t´'to tape', print-i-t´'print', klik-nu-t´'click' less productive, but very sizable is the class: kompjuter-izir-ova-t´'computerise'.…”

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confidence: 99%

Transdisciplinary Aspects of Morphological Productivity

Dressler

2008

European Review

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This contribution presents a model of morphological productivity that allows some points of comparison with the concept of productivity in economics and in other disciplines. It is a two-step model: in the first step, degrees of productivity of morphological rules are established on the so-called syntagmatic axis of language, i.e. how a word is changed in its linear make-up, e.g. English boy becomes boy-s in the plural or is changed to boy-friend, boy-hood, boy-ish in word formation. In the second step, rule application is compared on the so-called paradigmatic axis with possibly competing productive rules, e.g. in adjective formation from nouns, suffixation with -ish (e.g. boy-ish), is compared with suffixations with -y (e.g. fier-y), -ly (e.g. friend-ly), -ic (e.g. syntact-ic), -ical (e.g. morpholog-ical). Then supportive psycholinguistic evidence is presented from online tests and first language acquisition, an area of crucial evidence for linguistic theories, since any constructs of a model must be learnable by children.

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On the Typology of Inflection Class Systems

Cited by 7 publications

References 4 publications

Inferring inflection classes with description length

Inferring inflection classes with description length

The rise of complexity in inflectional morphology

Transdisciplinary Aspects of Morphological Productivity

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