Abstract
Welsh grammatical gender exhibits several unusual properties. This paper argues that these properties are necessarily connected. The argument is based on a series of corpus investigations using techniques from statistical natural language processing, specifically distinguishing properties that exhibit significant statistical patterns from those which can be used to make useable predictions. Specifically, it’s shown that the grammatical properties of Welsh gender are such that its unusual statistical properties follow.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to audiences in Tucson and Aberystwyth. Thanks also to Diane Ohala, Dalila Ayoun, Lionel Mathieu, several anonymous reviewers, and the editor for helpful feedback at various stages. All errors are my own.
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©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- A lesson from associative learning: asymmetry and productivity in multiple-slot constructions
- Predicting the gender of Welsh nouns
- Choosing between zero and pronominal subject: modeling subject expression in the 1st person singular in Finnish conversation
- Mismatches in verb complements: A corpus-based study of the complement coercion operation in Chinese
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- A lesson from associative learning: asymmetry and productivity in multiple-slot constructions
- Predicting the gender of Welsh nouns
- Choosing between zero and pronominal subject: modeling subject expression in the 1st person singular in Finnish conversation
- Mismatches in verb complements: A corpus-based study of the complement coercion operation in Chinese
- The diminishing role of inalienability in the Hebrew possessive dative
- DART – The dialogue annotation and research tool
- Why frequency and morphological irregularity are not independent variables in Spanish: A response to Fratini et al. (2014)