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What are principal parts, and what can they tell us about an inflectional system's morphological complexity?

Date:
-
Location:
Davis Marksbury Building, 1st floor auditorium

Speaker:  Raphael Finkel

Authors: Raphael Finkel and Gregory Stump

Abstract: In natural-language pedagogy, principal parts are used as a concise way of summarizing a lexeme's full paradigm of inflected forms.  In the context of morphological typology, principal parts may be used as a means of gauging both the nature and the degree of the complexity exhibited by a language's inflectional paradigms.  We show that principal parts afford several different ways of measuring morphological complexity.  We define principal parts, propose desired characteristics (uniqueness, uniformity, optimality), then present seven derived measures of complexity.  We illustrate these measures by referring to Pāli, a middle Indic language.