Formalizing Inflectional Paradigm Shape with Information Theory
- Grace LeFevre (The Ohio State University)
- Micha Elsner (The Ohio State University)
- Andrea D Sims (The Ohio State University)
Abstract
“Paradigm shape,” our term for the morphological structure formed by implicative relations between inflected forms, has not been formally quantified in a gradient manner. We develop a method to formalize paradigm shape by modeling the joint effect of stem alternations and affixes. Applied to Spanish verbs, our model successfully captures aspects of both allomorphic and distributional classes. These results are replicable and extendable to other languages.
Keywords: morphology, information theory, inflection classes, paradigm shape, Spanish, entropy
How to Cite:
LeFevre, G., Elsner, M. & Sims, A. D., (2021) “Formalizing Inflectional Paradigm Shape with Information Theory”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 4(1), 102-115. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/jz7z-j842
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