Abstract
Formal and computational linguistics can enhance descriptive linguistics of endangered languages by providing them with precise models and quantitative perspectives. We exemplify the benefits of such an approach with the case of Asama’s verb inflectional morphology. We show that a Word-and-Paradigm framework can provide interesting insights and allow for both the identification and the quantification of the sources of uncertainty in the implicative relations within Asama’s verb paradigms. We describe Asama’s verb morphology by considering whole forms rather than exponents only, and we factor its alternation patterns in two types: segmental alternations and suprasegmental alternations. Measures of Shannon’s conditional entropy are then used to estimate the respective contributions of these factors to the complexity of the system. Suprasegmental alternations turn out to be the major source of uncertainty in implicative relations, and vowel length and tone alternations cannot be treated separately but strongly interact. We also show how the principal parts of the inflectional system can be determined with conditional entropy measures of n-ary implicative relations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Verbs with a non-past form consisting of a single syllable, such as njuiLH ‘to boil’ or jˀuiH ‘to say’, are very few in number and are highly irregular, and they have thus been excluded from the present study. Two other lexemes, kamjuiLH ‘to eat’ and sɨbujuiH ‘to squeeze’, have also been excluded due to contradictory data.
See Blevins (2016) for a recent general overview of the topic.
Here we base our analyses on phonological forms akin to lexical representations, rather than on surface phonetic forms or underlying morphophonological ones.
We use the symbol ⇒ to denote implicative relationships, i.e. the implication that for any lexeme L, if the set of morphosyntactic features ϕ is realised by x, then the set of morphosyntactic features ψ is realised by y is noted [ϕ:x⇒ψ:y] (Bonami, 2014, 86). Braces ({…}) indicate sets of alternative forms.
We thus follow the way set by an increasing number of works on well-described (Beniamine et al., 2021) or under-described (Jacques et al., 2012; Snoek et al., 2014; Crysmann, 2016; Harrigan et al., 2017; Pellard & Yamada, 2017; Chen et al., 2020) languages and acknowledge the “insufficiency of paper-and-pencil linguistics” (Karttunen, 2006).
Except for some recent loanwords.
Recall however that these cells were arbitrarily chosen as representative of full interpredictibility zones, so that other actual pairs of cells also constitute valid principal parts.
References
Ackerman, F., Blevins, J. P., & Malouf, R. (2009). Parts and wholes: implicative patterns in inflectional paradigms. In J. P. Blevins & J. Blevins (Eds.), Analogy in grammar: form and acquisition (pp. 54–81). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199547548.003.0003.
Ackerman, F., & Malouf, R. (2013). Morphological organization: the low conditional entropy conjecture. Language, 89(3), 429–464. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0054.
Aronoff, M. (1994). Morphology by itself: stems and inflectional classes. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Baerman, M., Brown, D., & Corbett, G. G. (2017). Morphological complexity. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316343074.
Bauer, L. (2016). Classical morphemics: assumptions, extensions, and alternatives. In A. Hippisley & G. Stump (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of morphology (pp. 331–355). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139814720.013.
Beniamine, S. (2018). Classifications flexionnelles: Étude quantitative des structures de paradigmes. Doctoral dissertation. Université Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris. Retrieved from https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01840448.
Beniamine, S., Bonami, O., & Luís, A. R. (2021). The fine implicative structure of European Portuguese conjugation. Isogloss, 7, 1–35. https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.109.
Blevins, J. P. (2016). Word and paradigm morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bonami, O. (2014). La structure fine des paradigmes de flexion: Études de morphologie descriptive, théorique et formelle. Habilitation dissertation. Université Paris Diderot, Paris. Retrieved from https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-01531860.
Bonami, O., & Beniamine, S. (2016). Joint predictiveness in inflectional paradigms. Word Structure, 9(2), 156–182. https://doi.org/10.3366/word.2016.0092.
Brown, D., & Hippisley, A. (2012). Network morphology: a defaults-based theory of word structure. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511794346.
Chen, E., Park, H. H., & Schwartz, L. (2020). Improved finite-state morphological analysis for St. Lawrence Island Yupik using Paradigm Function Morphology. In Proceedings of the 12th language resources and evaluation conference (pp. 2676–2684). Marseille: European Language Resources Association. Retrieved from https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.lrec-1.326.
Corbett, G. G. (2009). Canonical inflectional classes. In F. Montermini, G. Boyé, & J. Tseng (Eds.), Selected proceedings of the 6th Décembrettes: morphology in Bordeaux (pp. 1–11). Somerville: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Crysmann, B. (2016). Representing morphological tone in a computational grammar of Hausa. Journal of Language Modelling, 3(2), 463–512. https://doi.org/10.15398/jlm.v3i2.126.
Finkel, R., & Stump, G. (2007). Principal parts and morphological typology. Morphology, 17, 39–75. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-007-9115-9.
Finkel, R., & Stump, G. (2009). Principal parts and degrees of paradigmatic transparency. In J. P. Blevins & J. Blevins (Eds.), Analogy in grammar: form and acquisition (pp. 13–53). https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199547548.003.0002.
Guzmán Naranjo, M. (2020). Analogy, complexity and predictability in the Russian nominal inflection system. Morphology, 30(3), 219–262. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-020-09367-1.
Harrigan, A. G., Schmirler, K., Arppe, A., Antonsen, L., Trosterud, T., & Wolvengrey, A. (2017). Learning from the computational modelling of Plains Cree verbs. Morphology, 27(4), 565–598. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-017-9315-x.
Hayata, T. (1995). Tokunoshima Amagi-chō Matsubara to Asama no hōgen no meishi akusento taikei: Tango seichō hōgen no rei to shite. Ryūkyū no Hōgen, 18/19, 132–144. https://doi.org/10.15002/00012659.
Hockett, C. F. (1987). Refurbishing our foundations: elementary linguistics from an advanced point of view. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.56.
Hulden, M. (2009). Foma: a finite-state compiler and library. In Proceedings of the demonstrations session at EACL 2009 (pp. 29–32). Association for Computational Linguistics. Retrieved from https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/E09-2008.
Jacques, G., Lahaussois, A., Michailovsky, B., & Rai, D. B. (2012). An overview of Khaling verbal morphology. Language and Linguistics, 13(6), 1095–1170. Retrieved from https://hal.science/hal-01361190.
Karttunen, L. (2006). The insufficiency of paper-and-pencil linguistics: the case of Finnish prosody. In M. Butt, M. Dalrymple, & T. Holloway King (Eds.), Intelligent linguistic architectures: variations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan (pp. 287–300). Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications. Retrieved from http://roa.rutgers.edu/article/view/828.
Lawrence, W. (2015). Tokunoshima Asama hōgen no meishi onchō ni tsuite nidai: Kōki onchō to shishō gokei no onchō. Ryūkyū no Hōgen, 40, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.15002/00013673.
Lévêque, D. (2021). Grammaire de l’asama. Doctoral dissertation. Inalco, Paris.
Matthews, P. H. (1972). Morphology (1st ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Niinaga, Y. (2014). A grammar of Yuwan, a northern Ryukyuan language. Doctoral dissertation. University of Tokyo, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.15083/00007642.
Niinaga, Y. (2015). Amami grammar. In P. Heinrich, S. Miyara, & M. Shimoji (Eds.), Handbook of the Ryukyuan languages: history, structure, and use (pp. 323–344). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614511151.323.
Okamura, T., Sawaki, M., Nakajima, Y., Fukushima, C., & Kikuchi, S. (Eds.) (2009). Tokunoshima hōgen nisen bun jiten (revised). Matsumoto: Tokunoshima Hōgen no Kai.
Parker, J., & Sims, A. D. (2020). Irregularity, paradigmatic layers, and the complexity of inflection class systems: a study of Russian nouns. In P. Arkadiev & F. Gardani (Eds.), The complexities of morphology. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198861287.001.0001.
Pellard, T. (2015). The linguistic archeology of the Ryukyu Islands. In P. Heinrich, S. Miyara, & M. Shimoji (Eds.), Handbook of the Ryukyuan languages: history, structure, and use (pp. 13–37). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614511151.13.
Pellard, T., & Yamada, M. (2017). Verb morphology and conjugation classes in Dunan (Yonaguni). In F. Kiefer, J. P. Blevins, & H. Bartos (Eds.), Perspectives on morphological organization (pp. 31–49). https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004342934_004.
Robins, R. H. (1959). In defence of WP. Transactions of the Philological Society, 58(1), 116–144. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-968X.1959.tb00301.x.
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3), 379–423. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb01338.x.
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication [(concluded from July 1948 issue)]. The Bell System Technical Journal, 27(4), 623–656. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1948.tb00917.x.
Shimoji, M. (2017). A grammar of Irabu: a Southern Ryukyuan language. Fukuoka: Kyushu University Press.
Snoek, C., Thunder, D., Lõo, K., Arppe, A., Lachler, J., Moshagen, S., & Trosterud, T. (2014). Modeling the noun morphology of Plains Cree. In Proceedings of the 2014 workshop on the use of computational methods in the study of endangered languages (pp. 34–42). https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/W14-2205.
Stump, G. (2016). Inflectional paradigms. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781316105290.
Stump, G., & Finkel, R. A. (2013). Morphological typology: from word to paradigm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Uwano, Z. (1977). Tokunoshima Asama hōgen no akusento (1). In Iwate Kokugo Gakkai Ronshū Kankōkai (Ed.), Kokugogaku ronshū: Komatsushiro Yūichi kyōju taishoku, Shima Minoru kyōju taikan kinen (pp. 188–220). Morioka: Iwate Kokugo Gakkai Ronshū Kankōkai (1–33).
Uwano, Z. (2001). Tokunoshima Asama hōgen no katsuyōkei akusento shiryō. Ryūkyū no Hōgen, 25, 1–61. https://doi.org/10.15002/00012560.
Uwano, Z. (2016). Tokunoshima Asama hōgen no meishi akusento taikei. In Y. Takubo, J. Whitman, & T. Hirako (Eds.), Ryūkyū shogo to Kodai Nihongo: Nichiryū sogo no saiken ni mukete (pp. 209–234). Tokyo: Kuroshio Shuppan.
van der Lubbe, G., & Tokunaga, A. (2015). Okinoerabu grammar. In P. Heinrich, S. Miyara, & M. Shimoji (Eds.), Handbook of the Ryukyuan languages: history, structure, and use (pp. 345–378). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614511151.345.
Wilmoth, S., & Mansfield, J. (2021). Inflectional predictability and prosodic morphology in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara. Morphology, 31(4), 355–381. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-021-09380-y.
Wurzel, W. U. (1989). Inflectional morphology and naturalness. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Yokoyama Tokunaga, A. (2017). Ryūkyū Okinoerabu-jima Kunigami hōgen no bunpō. Doctoral dissertation. Hitotsubashi University, Kunitachi. https://doi.org/10.15057/30419.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank their main informant, Okamura Takahiro, who has for several decades devoted his time to the documentation and preservation of his native language. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as the editor for their useful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Lévêque, D., Pellard, T. The implicative structure of Asama verb paradigms. Morphology 33, 261–286 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-023-09410-x
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-023-09410-x