Integrating Category Acquisition with In ectional Marking: A Model of the German Nominal System

Linguistic categories play a key role in virtually every theory that has a bearing on human language. This paper presents a connectionist model of grammatical category formation and use, within the domain of the German nominal system. The model demonstrates (1) how categorical information can be created through co-occurrence learning; (2) how grammatical categorization and in ectional marking can be integrated in a single system; (3) how the use of co-occurrence information, semantic information and surface feature information can be usefully combined in a learning system; and (4) how a computational model can scale up toward simulating the full range of phenomena involved in an actual system of inectional morphology. This is, to our knowledge, the rst connectionist model to simultaneously address all these issues for a domain of language acquisition.