The information-theoretic turn

Abstract

Over the past decade, information theory has been applied to the analysis of a successively broader range of morphological phenomena. Interestingly, this tradition has arisen independently of the linguistic applications of information theory dating from the 1950’s. Instead, the point of origin for current work lies in a series of studies of morphological processing in which Kostić and associates develop a statistical notion of ‘morphological information’ based on ‘uncertainty’ and ‘uncertainty reduction’. From these initial studies, analyses based on statistical notions of information have been applied to general problems of morphological description and typological classification, leading to a formal rehabilitation of the complex system perspective of traditional WP models.

Keywords

• inflectional paradigms
• word and paradigm morphology
• information theory
• morphological processing