Investigating the productivity of Passamaquoddy medials: A computational approach

James Roberts


Abstract
Little is known about medials in Passamaquoddy, which appear to be involved in the construction of verb stems in the language. Investigating the productivity of such morphemes using traditional fieldwork methods is a difficult undertaking that can be made easier with computational methods. I first generated a list of possible verb stems using a simple Python script, then compared this list against Passamaquoddy text corpora to see how many of these tokens were attested. If a given medial is productive, we should expect to see it in a large portion of possible verb stems that include said medial. If this assumption is correct, the corpora analysis will be a key indicator in determining the productivity of individual medials.
Anthology ID:
2024.computel-1.3
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julians, Malta
Editors:
Sarah Moeller, Godfred Agyapong, Antti Arppe, Aditi Chaudhary, Shruti Rijhwani, Christopher Cox, Ryan Henke, Alexis Palmer, Daisy Rosenblum, Lane Schwartz
Venues:
ComputEL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13–20
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.computel-1.3
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
James Roberts. 2024. Investigating the productivity of Passamaquoddy medials: A computational approach. In Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages, pages 13–20, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating the productivity of Passamaquoddy medials: A computational approach (Roberts, ComputEL-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.computel-1.3.pdf