Contrasting modes of representation for inflectional systems: Some implications for computing morphological complexity
Gregory Stump, Raphael A. Finkel · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2015
This chapter discusses the use of plats to measure the complexity of inflection-class systems. The plat for a given system is a table that specifies the morphological expression of the system’s morphosyntactic property sets in each of its inflection classes. Plats can be subjected to a variety of automatic complexity measurements, including measures of the entropy, predictiveness, and predictability of a given paradigm’s word forms; this chapter shows that the results of these measurements are highly sensitive to the choices one makes in constructing a plat. It distinguishes between hearer‐oriented plats, which only incorporate information about the pronunciation of a system’s inflectional exponents, from speaker-oriented plats, which incorporate various amounts of supplementary grammatical information. Using a plat of each sort to represent forty distinct patterns of verb conjugation in English, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which they differ in their measurable complexity. It urges that research on morphological complexity devote careful attention to a range of variables in plat construction.