*ABA effects in kinship allomorphy & syncretism

Feature-Based Allomorphy

Morphotactics and allomorphy are usually modeled in different components, leading to interface problems. To describe both uniformly, we define finite automata (FA) for allomorphy in the same feature description language used for morphotactics. Nonphonologically conditioned allomorphy is problematic in FA models but submits readily to treatment in a uniform formalism. 1 Background and Goals ALLO...

Jewish Teenagers’ Syncretism

Inflectional Syncretism And Corpora

This paper describes a novel undertaking: comparing the relationship between grammatical ambiguity (syncretism) in nouns, as represented in a default inheritance hierarchy, with textual frequency distributions. In order to do this we consider a language with a reasonable number of grammatical distinctions and where syncretism occurs in different morphological classes. We investigated this relat...

Graph Transductions and Typological Gaps in Morphological Paradigms

Several typological gaps have attracted a lot of interest in the linguistic literature recently. These concern the Person Case Constraint and the absence of ABA patterns in adjectival gradation, pronoun suppletion, case syncretism, and singular noun allomorphy, among others. This paper is the first to provide a unified explanation of all these phenomena, and it does so via weakly non-inverting ...

Weakly supervised learning of allomorphy

Most NLP resources that offer annotations at the word segment level provide morphological annotation that includes features indicating tense, aspect, modality, gender, case, and other inflectional information. Such information is rarely aligned to the relevant parts of the words—i.e. the allomorphs, as such annotation would be very costly. These unaligned weak labelings are commonly provided by...