Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics
Charles University, Czech Republic
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
The aim of this project is a data-intensive study of how word-formation patterns correlate with inflectional features in nouns and adjectives across four European languages: Czech, Greek, German, and English. The research seeks to examine the full spectrum of paradigm behavior across these typologically diverse languages, which differ in paradigm size. Corpus-based evidence increasingly challenges the traditional assumption that lexemes freely appear in all theoretically possible forms, and the project investigates whether specific derivational processes (such as suffixation and compounding) systematically correlate with particular inflectional profiles.
Using large-scale corpora annotated with Universal Dependencies (UD), derivational morphology resources (DeriNet, Universal Derivations, Universal Segmentations), and computational methods including word embeddings and statistical analysis, the project examines three interconnected dimensions: the quantitative distribution of nouns and adjectives across paradigm cells; the semantic relationship between word-formation patterns and inflectional features (such as abstractness, countability, and collectivity); and the syntactic strategies languages employ to compensate for inflectional gaps, such as periphrastic constructions.