Abstract

The noun lexica of many natural languages are divided into several declension classes with characteristic morphological properties. Class membership is far from deterministic, but the phonological form of a noun and/or its meaning can often provide imperfect clues. Here, we investigate the strength of those clues. More specifically, we operationalize this by measuring how much information, in bits, we can glean about declension class from knowing the form and/or meaning of nouns. We know that form and meaning are often also indicative of grammatical gender—which, as we quantitatively verify, can itself share information with declension class—so we also control for gender. We find for two Indo-European languages (Czech and German) that form and meaning respectively share significant amounts of information with class (and contribute additional information above and beyond gender). The three-way interaction between class, form, and meaning (given gender) is also significant. Our study is important for two reasons: First, we introduce a new method that provides additional quantitative support for a classic linguistic finding that form and meaning are relevant for the classification of nouns into declensions. Secondly, we show not only that individual declensions classes vary in the strength of their clues within a language, but also that these variations themselves vary across languages.

Highlights

  • To an English speaker learning German, it may come as a surprise that one cannot necessarily predict the plural form of a noun from its singular

  • We find that both form and lexical semantics significantly interact with declension class in both Czech and German

  • Declension classes associated with masculine nouns (g = MSC) have smaller MI(C = c; W | G) than classes associated with feminine (g = FEM) and neuter (g = NEU) ones of a comparable size—the exception being ‘special, masculine, plural -ata’

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Summary

Introduction

To an English speaker learning German, it may come as a surprise that one cannot necessarily predict the plural form of a noun from its singular. This is because pluralizing nouns in English is relatively simple: Usually we merely add an -s to the end (e.g., cat → cats). Compared to English, German has comparatively many common morphological rules for inflecting nouns. The plural is formed by changing a stem vowel: Mutter ‘mother’ → Mutter, or Nagel ‘nail’ → Nagel. Some others form plurals with both suffixation and vowel change: Haus ‘house’ → Haus-er and Koch ‘chef’ → Koch-e. The problem only worsens when we consider other inflectional morphology, such as case

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