How inflection class systems work

What is it about?

New words enter languages all the time, forcing speakers to decide on the different grammatical forms of those words. What is the plural form? Or the genitive? Recent work has shown that languages have relatively low levels of complexity in their word structure (formally, inflectional morphology), making this task manageable for speakers. However, this previous work has not looked specifically at what is doing that 'work' to reduce complexity. In this paper we find, based on a sample of nine languages, that languages differ significantly in the 'tools' that are available for reducing the complexity of the system. We use metrics from information theory to quantify how much each language in our data set uses two different kinds of tools -- interpredictability of word forms (e.g. how easy it is to predict plural from singular) and the frequency of different word form patterns (formally, inflection class type frequency).

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Why is it important?

This paper helps linguists to better understand similarities and differences across languages, specifically where constraints on the complexity of word structure come from, and how these constraints operate.