Nouns more similar to the nominative form are more frequent

Autor(en)
Emmerich Kelih, Ján Mačutek, Michaela Koščová, Vladimír Benko
Abstrakt

Grammatical cases of nouns are expressed by inflectional endings in Slovak. Therefore, nouns have several word forms, with the nominative considered the basic form. In addition to the endings, in some word forms there are morphophonological changes also in stems. The differences between the basic form and inflected forms are evaluated using the Levenshtein distance. We show that word forms more similar to the basic form occur more often. The category of animacy plays a very important role in the frequency behaviour of masculine nouns. The overall idea of the present paper is to give some insights into phenomena of noun inflection and to test various factors influencing and regulating the overall complexity of expressing certain required morphological information. It seems that word frequency, but also word length plays an important role. Moreover, it is shown that also gender and animacy has to be considered to understand noun declension in Slovak properly.

Organisation(en)
Institut für Slawistik
Externe Organisation(en)
Slovak Academy of Sciences (SAS), Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Univerzita Komenského v Bratislave
Journal
Glottotheory
Band
14
Seiten
69-80
Anzahl der Seiten
12
ISSN
1337-7892
Publikationsdatum
06-2023
Peer-reviewed
Ja
ÖFOS 2012
602047 Slawistik
Schlagwörter
ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
History, Linguistics and Language
Link zum Portal
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/75798797-bc38-441c-b036-94d2d83c8021