LingLunch : M. Guzmán Naranjo et L. Becker

Jeudi 09 Avril 2020, 12:00 to 13:00
Organisation: 
Philip Miller et Ewan Dunbar

Matías Guzmán Naranjo (LLF), Laura Becker (Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Coding efficiency in nominal inflection: Expectedness and type frequency effects

The Form-Frequency Correspondence Hypothesis predicts more frequent linguistic material to be shorter than less frequent material. Going back to Zipf (1939,1949) who proposed this for lexical items, it has been adopted to various grammatical patterns (syntactic, morphological, and phonological) and related to predictability or expectedness in the typological literature. However, the exact interactions of frequency and expectedness, their effect on shortening, and the mechanisms involved are still not well understood. This talk explores the FFCH in the domain of nominal inflection from a quantitative perspective.