Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer

On the Complexity and Typology of Inflectional Morphological Systems

Abstract

We quantify the linguistic complexity of different languages’ morphological systems. We verify that there is a statistically significant empirical trade-off between paradigm size and irregularity: a language’s inflectional paradigms may be either large in size or highly irregular, but never both. We define a new measure of paradigm irregularity based on the conditional entropy of the surface realization of a paradigm—how hard it is to jointly predict all the word forms in a paradigm from the lemma. We estimate irregularity by training a predictive model. Our measurements are taken on large morphological paradigms from 36 typologically diverse languages.

Article at MIT Press (Presented at ACL 2018)