It has often been argued that the (type or token) frequency of an affix in the lexicon cannot be used to predict the degree to which that affix is productive. Affix type frequency refers to the number of different words which contain an affix, token frequency refers to the summed lexical frequency of those words. The observation that neither of these counts relates straightforwardly to producti...

It has often been argued that the (type or token) frequency of an affix in the lexicon cannot be used to predict the degree to which that affix is productive. Affix type frequency refers to the number of different words which contain an affix, token frequency refers to the summed lexical frequency of those words. The observation that neither of these counts relates straightforwardly to producti...

(in alphabetical order of author’s last name) Measuring the unobservable: quantifying paradigm gaps and morphological retreat Adam Albright, MIT Observing the non-occurrence of ‘expected’ forms is a well-known problem for language acquisition and corpus studies (the problem of negative evidence). In morphology, expected forms may be missing for a variety of reasons, including paradigms gaps, se...

We propose a technique to prepare the Google 1T n-gram data set for wildcarded frequency queries with a very low turnaround time, making unbatched applications possible. Our method supports token-level wildcarding and – given a cache of 3.3 GB of RAM – requires only a single read of less than 4 KB from the disk to answer a query. We present an indexing structure, a way to generate it, and sugge...

The present study explores the effects of frequency in learning to parse novel morphological patterns. In two experiments, suffixes were divided into three classes: high, medium and low frequency, based on the proportion of stems in the input that each suffix attached to (high frequency = 12/12, medium frequency = 6/12, and low frequency = 2/12). In Experiment 1, learners were better at segment...