tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Explaining German Case through Computational Experiments in Fluid Construction Grammar"

German case syncretism is often assumed to be the accidental by-product of historical development. This paper contradicts this claim and argues that the evolution of German case is driven by the need to optimize the cognitive effort and memory required for processing and interpretation. This hypothesis is supported by a novel kind of computational experiments that reconstruct and compare attested variations of the German definite article paradigm. The experiments show how the intricate interaction between those variations and the rest of the German ‘linguistic landscape’ may direct language change. . | Not as Awful as it Seems Explaining German Case through Computational Experiments in Fluid Construction Grammar Remi van Trijp Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris 6 Rue Amyot 75005 Paris France remi@ Abstract German case syncretism is often assumed to be the accidental by-product of historical development. This paper contradicts this claim and argues that the evolution of German case is driven by the need to optimize the cognitive effort and memory required for processing and interpretation. This hypothesis is supported by a novel kind of computational experiments that reconstruct and compare attested variations of the German definite article paradigm. The experiments show how the intricate interaction between those variations and the rest of the German linguistic landscape may direct language change. 1 Introduction In his 1880 essay Mark Twain famously complained that The awful German Language is the most slipshod and systemless and so slippery and elusive to grasp language of all. A brief look at the literature on the German case system seems to provide sufficient evidence for instantly agreeing with the American author. But what if the German case system were not the accidental by-product of diachronic changes as is often assumed Are there linguistic forces that are not yet fully appreciated in the field but which may explain the German case paradigm This paper demonstrates that there indeed are such forces through a case study on German definite articles. The experiments reconstruct deep language processing models for different variants of this paradigm and show how the linguistic landscape of German has allowed its speakers to reduce their definite article system without loss in efficiency for processing and interpretation. 2 The Problem of German Case German articles adjectives and nouns are marked for gender number and case through morphological inflection as illustrated for definite articles in Table 1. Case SG-M SG-F SG-N PL NOM der die das .