Linguistics Circle Seminar
Title: Investigating the plural formation in Maltese with naive discriminative learning
Date: Wednesday 1 November 2017 at 12:00
Venue: Room 419, Faculty of Economics, Management and Accountancy (FEMA)
Speaker: Jessica Nieder, University of Dusseldorf
The complexity of the plural formation in Maltese raises the question as to what Maltese native speakers use as a basis to set up singular-plural mappings. We hypothesize that the phonotactics of the singular determines the choice of the plural form. To explore this, we conducted a corpus study, a production experiment and used several NDL (Baayen et al., 2011) cue implementations.
A corpus of 2373 Maltese singular-plural pairs compiled from two different sources (Schembri, 2012; Gatt and Čéplö, 2013) served as basis for a production experiment in which we asked native speakers to produce plural forms for existing and phonotactically legal nonce singular nouns. Nonce forms were constructed based on words of our corpus by changing either the consonants or the vowels or both systematically. The nouns used as a base for the changes had either a broken plural form, a sound plural form or both plural forms. The results show that Participants produced significantly more sound plural forms for nonces based on sound plural words and significantly more broken plurals for nonces based on broken plural words.
We modeled our experimental results with the Naive Discriminative Learner, a computational model of morphological processing (Baayen et al., 2011). The NDL model was trained on the nouns of our corpus. We then fitted the model to our experimental data to see if NDL would classify our nonces and existing words in the same way the participants of the production experiment did. A NDL model using bigrams as cues showed an acceptable prediction for both plural types. An abstraction of consonants and vowels into “C” and “V” in the model led to worse performances, which supports our assumption that consonant and vowel identity is important for the generalizations of Maltese plurals. Moreover, we conclude that the phonotactics of the singular determines the plural form as bigrams correspond to the syllable structure of Maltese nouns.
