Geometrical morphology

03/13/2017

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by   John Goldsmith, et al.

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We explore inflectional morphology as an example of the relationship of the discrete and the continuous in linguistics. The grammar requests a form of a lexeme by specifying a set of feature values, which corresponds to a corner M of a hypercube in feature value space. The morphology responds to that request by providing a morpheme, or a set of morphemes, whose vector sum is geometrically closest to the corner M. In short, the chosen morpheme μ is the morpheme (or set of morphemes) that maximizes the inner product of μ and M.