Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics
Charles University, Czech Republic
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
CIWIC
Complexity of inflection and word-formation: An intra- and cross-linguistic perspective
The project investigates the complexity of inflection and word-formation in Czech, English, German, Hungarian, and Modern Standard Arabic, with the possibility of extending the study to additional languages. It examines these two domains jointly, reflecting the fact that they are closely interconnected in linguistic data and that the boundary between them often depends on the descriptive tradition of a particular language.
Using lexical databases and text corpora, the project compares the complexity described in grammatical descriptions with the complexity observed in language use. It also examines the relationship between inflection and word-formation and investigates whether native and borrowed vocabulary differ in their patterns of morphological complexity. Cross-linguistic comparisons are carried out using comparable methods across the languages under study.
The project combines approaches from theoretical and corpus linguistics with methods from Natural Language Processing, bringing together language-specific analyses and cross-linguistic comparison within a unified framework for the study of morphological complexity.
Publications
2026
Diamantopoulos, K., & M. Ševčíková (2026). Comparable Corpora in Cross-linguistic Research: Nominal Number in English, Czech, and Greek . In Proceedings of the 19th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC) @ LREC 2026. Palma Mallorca: ELRA, pp. 30–40. https://doi.org/10.63317/4nz4cptoiwv3.
Posani, E. & M. Ševčíková (2026). Morphological integration of loanwords: A cross-linguistic study of Hungarian, Czech, Hindi, and English. In Book of Abstracts of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, pp. 110–112. To be presented at SLE 2026, Osnabrück, Germany.