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date: 26 January 2021

Abstract and Keywords

There has been a broad resurgence in word-based approaches and the reconceptualization of classical ‘word and paradigm’ (WP) approaches as general models of morphological analysis. WP models are well adapted to the description and analysis of complex morphological patterns, most transparently clear in inflection. Modern WP models demonstrate how morphological organization is fundamentally implicational: the central role of words (and paradigms) reflects their predictive value in a morphological system. Understanding the nature of morphological organization, within and across languages, requires exploration of the fundamental elements of implicational relations. Descriptively this involves identifying the internal structure of words and the ways this structure facilitates an external organization into patterns of relatedness. Theoretically, it is necessary to identify analytic tools appropriate for specifying and quantifying word-internal and word-external organization. This type of analytic approach encourages the investigation of the types of learning theories that may play a role in determining the patterns observed to occur and thereby help to explain their learnability.

Keywords: word, morphological organization, paradigm, gestalt exponence, implicational relations, information theory, conditional entropy, learnability, analogy

James P. Blevins

James P. Blevins is Reader in Morphology and Syntax in the University of Cambridge. His current research is concerned mainly with the structure and complexity of inflectional systems. These issues are approached from the standpoint of contemporary word and paradigm models, interpreted from a largely information-theoretic and discriminative perspective.

Farrell Ackerman

Professor of Linguistics at UC San Diego. He has focused on periphrastic morphosyntax, A Theory of Predicates (with Gert Webelhuth) CSLI/Chicago 1998, and linking theories, Proto-Properties and Grammatical Encoding (with John Moore) CSLI/Chicago 2001. He is exploring Pattern-Theoretic models of grammatical organization from a Developmental Systems perspective, as in Descriptive Typology and Linguistic Theory (with Irina Nikolaeva) CSLI/Chicago 2014, and quantitative approaches to word-based morphology.

Rob Malouf

Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages at San Diego State University. His research focus is on compu-tational approaches to morphosyntax, and in particular word-based models of inflection. Prior to joining SDSU in 2002, he was a member of the humanities computing department at the University of Groningen. He has a PhD in linguistics from Stanford University.

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