Abstract
This paper examines the linguistic distinction between syntax and morphology, focusing on noun-noun compounds in three West Germanic languages (English, Dutch, and German). Previous studies using the Parallel Bible Corpus have found a trade-off between word order (syntax) and word structure (morphology), with languages optimizing information conveyance through these systems. Our research question is whether manipulating English noun-noun compounds to resemble Dutch and German constructions can reproduce the observed distance between these languages in the order-structure plane. We extend a word-pasting procedure to merge increasingly common noun-noun pairs in English Bible translations. After each merge, we estimate the information contained in word order and word structure using entropy calculations. Our results show that pasting noun-noun pairs reduces the difference between English and the other languages, suggesting that orthographic conventions defining word boundaries play a role in this distinction. However, the effect is not pronounced, and results are statistically inconclusive.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Proceedings of the The 22nd SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Morphology, Phonology, and Phonetics |
| Editors | Garrett Nicolai, Eleanor Chodroff, Frederic Frederic, Cagri Coltekin |
| Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics |
| Pages | 15-22 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 979-8-89176-231-2 |
| Publication status | Published - May 2025 |