tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Much ado about nothing: A social network model of Russian paradigmatic gaps"

A number of Russian verbs lack 1sg nonpast forms. These paradigmatic gaps are puzzling because they seemingly contradict the highly productive nature of inflectional systems. We model the persistence and spread of Russian gaps via a multi-agent model with Bayesian learning. We ran three simulations: no grammar learning, learning with arbitrary analogical pressure, and morphophonologically conditioned learning. We compare the results to the attested historical development of the gaps. | Much ado about nothing A social network model of Russian paradigmatic gaps Robert Daland Andrea D. Sims Janet Pierrehumbert Department of Linguistics Northwestern University 2016 Sheridan Road Evanston IL 60208 USA r-daland andrea-sims jbp@ Abstract A number of Russian verbs lack 1sg nonpast forms. These paradigmatic gaps are puzzling because they seemingly contradict the highly productive nature of inflectional systems. We model the persistence and spread of Russian gaps via a multi-agent model with Bayesian learning. We ran three simulations no grammar learning learning with arbitrary analogical pressure and morphophonologically conditioned learning. We compare the results to the attested historical development of the gaps. Contradicting previous accounts we propose that the persistence of gaps can be explained in the absence of synchronic competition between forms. 1 Introduction Paradigmatic gaps present an interesting challenge for theories of inflectional structure and language learning. Wug tests analogical change and children s overextensions of regular patterns demonstrate that inflectional morphology is highly productive. Yet lemmas sometimes have missing inflected forms. For example in Russian the majority of verbs have first person singular 1sg non-past forms . posadit to plant posazu I will plant but no 1sg form for a number of similar verbs . pobedit to win pobezu I will win . The challenge lies in explaining this apparent contradiction. Given the highly produc tive nature of inflection why do paradigmatic gaps arise Why do they persist One approach explains paradigmatic gaps as a problem in generating an acceptable form. Under this hypothesis gaps result from irreconcilable conflict between two or more inflectional patterns. For example Albright 2003 presents an analysis of Spanish verbal gaps based on the Minimal Generalization Learner Albright and Hayes 2002 . In his account competition between mid-vowel diphthongization .