ABSTRACT

In most natural languages, grammatical gender and number features encode semantic attributes concerning animacy, sex, and numerosity. Despite the likely advantage of promptly communicating about such salient attributes, inflectional systems rarely display consistently bijective correspondences between the semantic attributes and the grammatical feature values. In a study on Italian, we explored how this apparently noisy encoding depends on a trade-off between the semantic and the functional aspects of grammatical features. Using entropy metrics, we assessed the primarily functional purpose of gender and number features in the lexicon, observing a distribution of nouns that can optimally serve agreement-based parsing and prediction of words in sentences. A novel context entropy measure, introduced in this study to assess meaning specificity, revealed a semantic underspecification in masculine and singular nouns denoting animate referents. We argue that underspecification is the hallmark of the particular type of information compression occurring in inflectional systems. In binary inflectional systems, one value specifically encodes a semantic attribute, while the other value does not encode any semantic information, and surfaces as a default for functional purposes. By providing an information-theoretical account of the role of grammatical features, we set the basis for a scientifically informed pursue of language inclusiveness.

摘要

在大多数自然语言中，语法性别和数字特征编码有关生命、性别和数量的语义属性。尽管及时交流这些显着属性可能具有优势，但屈折变化系统很少在语义属性和语法特征值之间显示一致的双射对应。在一项关于意大利语的研究中，我们探索了这种明显嘈杂的编码如何取决于语法特征的语义和功能方面之间的权衡。使用熵度量，我们评估了词典中性别和数字特征的主要功能目的，观察了名词的分布，这些名词可以最佳地服务于基于协议的句子中单词的解析和预测。本研究中引入了一种新的上下文熵度量来评估意义特异性，揭示了表示有生命指称的阳性和单数名词的语义规范不足。我们认为，指定不足是屈折系统中发生的特定类型信息压缩的标志。在二进制屈折变化系统中，一个值专门对语义属性进行编码，而另一个值不对任何语义信息进行编码，并且表面上作为功能目的的默认值。通过提供语法特征作用的信息论解释，我们为科学地追求语言包容性奠定了基础。一个值专门对语义属性进行编码，而另一个值不对任何语义信息进行编码，并且表面上作为功能目的的默认值。通过提供语法特征作用的信息论解释，我们为科学地追求语言包容性奠定了基础。一个值专门对语义属性进行编码，而另一个值不对任何语义信息进行编码，并且表面上作为功能目的的默认值。通过提供语法特征作用的信息论解释，我们为科学地追求语言包容性奠定了基础。