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Smriti Singh and Vaijayanthi M. Sarma: Hindi Noun Inflection and Distributed Morphology
This paper primarily presents an analysis of nominal inflection in Hindi within the framework of
Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994 and Harley and Noyer 1999). Müller (2002, 2003,
2004) for German, Icelandic and Russian nouns respectively and Weisser (2006) for Croatian nouns
have also used Distributed Morphology (henceforth DM) to analyze nominal inflectional morphology.
This paper will discuss in detail the inflectional categories and inflectional classes, the
morphological processes operating at syntax, the distribution of vocabulary items and the
readjustment rules required to describe Hindi nominal inflection. Earlier studies on Hindi
inflectional morphology (Guru 1920, Vajpeyi 1958, Upreti 1964, etc.) were greatly influenced by the
Paninian tradition (classical Sanskrit model) and work with Paninian constructs such as root and
stem. They only provide descriptive studies of Hindi nouns and verbs and their inflections without
discussing the role or status of affixes that take part in inflection. The discussion on the
mechanisms (morphological operations and rules) used to analyze or generate word forms are missing
in these studies. In addition, these studies do not account for syntax-morphology or
morphology-phonology mismatches that show up in word formation. One aim of this paper is to present
an economical way of forming noun classes in Hindi as compared to other traditional methods,
especially gender and stem ending based or paradigm based methods that give rise to a large number
of inflectional paradigms. Using inflectional class information to analyse the various forms of
Hindi nouns, we can reduce the number of affixes and word-generation and readjustment rules that are
required to describe nominal inflection. The analysis also helps us in developing a morphological
analyzer for Hindi. The small set of rules and fewer inflectional classes are of great help to
lexicographers and system developers. To the best of our knowledge, the analysis of Hindi
inflectional morphology based on DM and its implementation in a Hindi morphological analyzer has not
been done before. The methods discussed here can be applied to other Indian languages for analysis
as well as word generation.
Maintained by Stefan Müller
Created: October 18, 2010
Last modified: September 18, 2012
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