Slavic Derivational Morphology between Contact and Inheritance: A Corpus Driven Approach

On November 14 a research seminar on linguistics took place at the HSE.   Ruprecht von Waldenfels (Bern University) spoke on ‘Slavic Derivational Morphology between Contact and Inheritance: A Corpus Driven Approach’. The  event was organized  by the Faculty of Philology.

Abstract:

In a closely related set of languages such as that of the Slavic genus, differences in the use of derivational morphology are difficult to analyze because of the multitude of functions and factors which are rarely clear cut. The talk presents a method to investigate divergence and convergence in the use of derivational morphology on the basis of translationally equivalent texts. This investigation is part of a more general system which allows for the simple investigation of many, heterogenous linguistic variables.

Using a word aligned, morphologically tagged and lemmatized parallel corpus of prose in all major Slavic languages (ParaSol), I compare the use of nominal suffixes and verbal prefixes in translationally equivalent verb forms across languages. This gives me an extensionally defined handle on the domain of use for each derivational type and makes a comparison of interlanguage differences as well as differences between types possible. The data are evaluated both using clustering algorithms as well as qualitatively using a web interface that visualizes the contrasting prefixed forms in context.