School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications

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Author: Mansfield, John × Start date: 2020 × End date: 2020 ×

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    Demorphologization and deepening complexity in Murrinhpatha.
    Mansfield, J ; Nordlinger, R ; Arkadiev, P ; Gardani, F (Oxford University Press, 2020-09-24)
    This volume explores the multiple aspects of morphological complexity, offering typological, acquisitional, sociolinguistic, and diachronic perspectives.
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    UniMorph 3.0: Universal morphology
    McCarthy, AD ; Kirov, C ; Grella, M ; Nidhi, A ; Xia, P ; Gorman, K ; Vylomova, E ; Mielke, SJ ; Nicolai, G ; Silfverberg, M ; Arkhangelskij, T ; Krizhanovsky, N ; Krizhanovsky, A ; Klyachko, E ; Sorokin, A ; Mansfield, J ; Ernštreits, V ; Pinter, Y ; Jacobs, CL ; Cotterell, R ; Hulden, M ; Yarowsky, D ; Calzolari, N (European Language Resources Association (ELRA), 2020-01-01)
    The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological paradigms for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline which creates most of our data, so that it is both more complete and more correct. We have added 66 new languages, as well as new parts of speech for 12 languages. We have also amended the schema in several ways. Finally, we present three new community tools: two to validate data for resource creators, and one to make morphological data available from the command line. UniMorph is based at the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. This paper details advances made to the schema, tooling, and dissemination of project resources since the UniMorph 2.0 release described at LREC 2018.
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    Category clustering: A probabilistic bias in the morphology of verbal agreement marking
    Mansfield, J ; Stoll, S ; Bickel, B (Linguistic Society of America, 2020-06-01)
    Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Rarámuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesize a probabilistic universal of category clustering, with two effects: (i) markers in paradigmatic opposition tend to be placed in the same morphological position (‘paradigmatic alignment’; Crysmann & Bonami 2016); (ii) morphological positions tend to be categorically uniform (‘featural coherence’; Stump 2001). We first show in a corpus study that category clustering drives the distribution of agreement prefixes in speakers’ production of Chintang, a language where prefix placement is not constrained by any categorical rules of sequential ordering. We then show in a typological study that the same principle also shapes the evolution of morphological structure: although exceptions are attested, paradigms are much more likely to obey rather than to violate the principle. Category clustering is therefore a good candidate for a universal force shaping the structure and use of language, potentially due to benefits in processing and learning.