Analogy, complexity and predictability in the Russian nominal inflection system
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Analogy, complexity and predictability in the Russian nominal inflection system Matías Guzmán Naranjo1
Received: 6 January 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 / Published online: 1 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract The Paradigm Cell Filling Problem (PCFP): “What licenses reliable inferences about the inflected (and derived) surface forms of a lexical item?”Ackerman et al. (2009, p. 54) has received considerable attention during the last decade. The two main approaches that have been explored are the Information Theoretic approach which aims to measure the information contained in the implicative relations between cells of a paradigm; and the neural network approach, which takes an amorphous view of morphology and tries learn paradigms form surface forms. In this paper I present a third alternative based on analogical classification which tries to integrate elements from both approaches. I will present a case study on the Russian nominal inflection system, and will argue that implicative relations between markers, noun semantics and stem phonology all play a role in helping speakers solve the PCFP. Keywords Analogy · Paradigm cell filling problem · Information theory · Paradigm organization
1 Introduction One question in inflectional morphology which has received an increased amount of attention in recent years is called the Paradigm Cell Filling Problem (PCFP). The PCFP is stated by Ackerman et al. (2009) as follows: Paradigm Cell Filling Problem: What licenses reliable inferences about the inflected (and derived) surface forms of a lexical item? (Ackerman et al. 2009, p. 54) This problem arises because speakers of morphologically rich languages must be able to infer the realization of all cells in the paradigm of a lexeme from a limited
B M. Guzmán Naranjo
[email protected]
1
Université de Paris, LLF, CNRS, Paris, France
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M. Guzmán Naranjo
number of attested cells of that lexeme. In a language with paradigms containing multiple cells, lexemes below some frequency threshold will only be encountered by speakers in a subset of their possible inflected forms (Bonami and Beniamine 2016; Boyé and Schalchli 2019).1 This raises the question of how speakers can infer the remaining cells of the paradigm of a lexeme from those they do encounter. The PCFP is also related to the idea of paradigm complexity. Intuitively, more complex inflection class systems should be more difficult to solve from the PCFP perspective, and metrics which measure paradigm organization (like entropy) are also measuring paradigm complexity. There are two main approaches for trying to make sense of the PCFP. The most prominent one is to use entropy to quantify uncertainty and information in the paradigm organization of a language (Ackerman and Malouf 2013, 2016; Blevins et al. 2017; Bonami and Beniamine 2016). The idea is that inflectional paradigms exhibit a clear implicative structure which helps speakers predict one cell of the paradigm of a lexeme from another cell (or group of cells) of that same lexeme. A more recen
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