The morph as a minimal linguistic form

Haspelmath, Martín

doi:10.1007/s11525-020-09355-5

Cited by 24 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…The Lego-view of complex words is represented by morpheme-based models of morphology, such as Item and Arrangement or Item and Process models (Hockett, 1954), which assume that complex words consist of morphemes. A morpheme is usually defined as the smallest unit that combines sound and meaning (Bauer, 2016;Bloomfield, 1933;Haspelmath, 2020). 1 According to this view, complex words are built by arranging or combining morphemes into word forms (Blevins, 2006;O'Neill, 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling Maltese noun plural classes without morphemes

Nieder

Tomaschek

Cohrs

et al. 2021

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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Word-based models of morphology propose that complex words are stored without reference to morphemes. One of the questions that arises is whether information about word forms alone is enough to determine a noun's number from its form. We take up this question by modelling the classification and production of the Maltese noun plural system, using models that do not assume morphemic representations. We use the Tilburg Memory-Based Learner, a computational implementation of exemplar theory and the Naive Discriminative Learner, an implementation of Word and Paradigm, for classification. Both models classify Maltese nouns well. In their current implementations, TiMBL and NDL cannot concatenate sequences of phones that result in word forms. We used two neural networks architectures (LSTM and GRU) to model the production of plurals. We conclude that the Maltese noun plural system can be modelled on the basis of whole words without morphemes, supporting word-based models of morphology.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modelling Maltese noun plural classes without morphemes

Nieder

Tomaschek

Cohrs

et al. 2021

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience

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“…A widely accepted definition of the morpheme is that it is the smallest phonological form associated with a meaning (Haspelmath and Sims, 2010;Haspelmath, 2020). As far as non-concatenative broken plurals are concerned, it is not obvious how to isolate one part of the plural word form that carries the meaning of the lexeme, and another part that carries the meaning of the grammatical function "plural".…”

Section: Theories Of Morpheme Representation For Semitic Nounsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Equally problematic is the definition: "A morph is a minimal linguistic form"(Haspelmath, 2020). But this definition is not intended to solve the problems inherent to the (de)composition of complex words into its constituents.…”

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confidence: 99%

Modeling Maltese Noun Plural Classes without Morphemes

Nieder¹,

Tomaschek²,

Cohrs³

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Word and Paradigm morphology proposes that morphologically complex words are stored as wholes in the mental lexicon, and by doing so it avoids problems that are related to the notion of the morpheme. However, it is not yet clear to what degree it is possible to computationally model classification and production of complex word forms without morphemes.We take up this question by modeling the classification and production of the Maltese noun plural system. Maltese is a Semitic language that has two broad classes of plurals: concatenative ones and non-concatenative ones. We model the classification in two models, and the production in a third one. The first model for classification, the Tilburg Memory Based Learner (TiMBL), is a computational implementation of exemplar models. TiMBL is impartial as to the existence of morphemes in the mental lexicon, and allows us to directly compare the classification with and without morphemes. It turns out that the classification with and without morphemes of Maltese nouns is equally good. The second classification model is the Naive Discriminative Learner (NDL). NDL is a computational implementation of discriminative learning. It can be understood as an implementation of the Word and Paradigm model and thus eschews morphemes. It differs from TiMBL in its assumptions about learning, and they way in which the classifications are obtained. NDL, too, classifies Maltese nouns well. A classification task is very different from a production task, and therefore we used neural networks to model the production of plurals. In these models we address the question whether the production of a plural noun for a given singular can be modeled without recourse to morphemes. We used two neural networks architectures (LSTM and GRU) that have been applied to linguistic phenomena, and find that they are able to correctly produce plurals, without making use of morphemes.We conclude that the Maltese noun plural system can be modeled on the basis of whole words alone without morphemes. These results, therefore, support the Word and Paradigm theory of the mental lexicon.

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“…In theories that are based on the construct of the morpheme-the smallest unit with form and meaning (Bauer 2016;Halle & Marantz 1993;Booij 2012;Haspelmath 2020)-it is commonly assumed that the meaning of a complex word is the sum of the meaning of its morphemes. A speaker's knowledge to comprehend and produce complex words consists of rules that formalize how to combine morphemes; for comprehension a speaker needs rules that formalize how to parse words into their constituent morphemes (Zwitserlood 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

Vijver¹,

Uwambayinema²,

Chuang³

2021

Preprint

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How do speakers comprehend and produce complex words? In the theory ofthe Discriminative Lexicon this is hypothesized to be the results of mapping the phonology of whole word forms onto their semantics and vice versa, without recourse to morphemes. This raises the question whether this hypothesis also holds true in highly agglutinative languages, which are oǒten seen to exemplify the compositional nature of morphology. On the one hand, one could expect that the hypothesis for agglutinative languages is correct, since it remains unclear whether speakers are able to isolate the morphemes they need to achieve this. On the other hand, agglutinative languages have so many different words that it is not obvious how speakers can use their knowledge of words to comprehend and produce them.In this paper, we investigate comprehension and production of verbs in Kinyarwanda,an agglutinative Bantu language, by means of computational modeling within the theDiscriminative Lexicon, a theory of the mental lexicon, which is grounded in word andparadigm morphology, distributional semantics, error-driven learning, and uses insightsof psycholinguistic theories, and is implemented mathematically and computationallyas a shallow, two-layered network.In order to do this, we compiled a data set of 11528 verb forms and annotated for eachverb form its meaning and grammatical functions, and, additionally, we used our dataset to extract 573 verbs that are present in our full data set and for which meanings ofverbs are based on word embeddings. In order to assess comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs, we fed both data sets into the Linear Discriminative Learningalgorithm, a two-layered, fully connected network. One layer represent the phonological form and the layer represents meaning. Comprehension is modeled as a mapping from phonology to meaning and production is modeled as a mapping from meaning to phonology. Both comprehension and production is learned with high accuracy in all data and in held-out data, both for the full data set, with manually annotated semantic features, and for the data set with meanings derived from word embeddings.Our findings provide support for the various hypotheses of the Discriminative Lexicon:Words are stored as wholes, meanings are a result of the distribution of words in utterances, comprehension and production can be successfully modeled from mappings from form to meaning and vice versa, which can be modeled in a shallow two-layered network, and these mappings are learned in by minimizing errors.

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The morph as a minimal linguistic form

Cited by 24 publications

References 34 publications

Modelling Maltese noun plural classes without morphemes

Modelling Maltese noun plural classes without morphemes

Modeling Maltese Noun Plural Classes without Morphemes

Comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verbs in the Discriminative Lexicon

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