English

Geometrical morphology

Computation and Language 2017-03-14 v1

Abstract

We explore inflectional morphology as an example of the relationship of the discrete and the continuous in linguistics. The grammar requests a form of a lexeme by specifying a set of feature values, which corresponds to a corner M of a hypercube in feature value space. The morphology responds to that request by providing a morpheme, or a set of morphemes, whose vector sum is geometrically closest to the corner M. In short, the chosen morpheme μ\mu is the morpheme (or set of morphemes) that maximizes the inner product of μ\mu and M.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.04481,
  title  = {Geometrical morphology},
  author = {John Goldsmith and Eric Rosen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.04481},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

42 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:44:30.148Z