{"id":1740,"date":"2023-03-20T10:22:59","date_gmt":"2023-03-20T14:22:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=1740"},"modified":"2023-04-25T09:45:21","modified_gmt":"2023-04-25T13:45:21","slug":"time-retire-agglutinative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/time-retire-agglutinative\/","title":{"rendered":"It&#8217;s time to retire &#8220;agglutinative&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A common trope in computational linguistics papers is the use of the technical term <em>agglutinative\u00a0<\/em>as a synonym for rich inflectional morphology. This is not really what that term means. Properly, a language has agglutinative morphology in the case that it has affixes, each of which has a single syntacto-semantic function. (To really measure this properly, you probably need a richer, and more syntactically-oriented, theory of morphology than is <em>au courant <\/em>among the kind of linguistic typologist who would think it interesting to measure this over a wide variety of languages in the first place, but that&#8217;s another issue.) Thus Russian, for instance, has rich inflectional morphology, but it is not at all agglutinative, because it is quite happy for the suffix <em>-ov<\/em> to mark both the genitive and the plural, whereas the genitive plural in Hungarian is marked by two affixes.<\/p>\n<p>I propose that we take <em>agglutinative<\/em> away from NLP researchers until they learn <strong>even a little bit<\/strong> about morphology. If you want to use the term, you need to state why <em>agglutination<\/em>, rather than the mere matter of lexemes having a large number of inflectional variants, is the thing you want to highlight. While I don&#8217;t think <a href=\"https:\/\/wals.info\/\">WALS<\/a> is very good \u2014certainly it&#8217;s over-used in NLP\u2014it nicely distinguishes between <em>isolation <\/em>(<a href=\"https:\/\/wals.info\/chapter\/20\">#20<\/a>),\u00a0<em>exponence\u00a0<\/em>(<a href=\"https:\/\/wals.info\/chapter\/21\">#21<\/a>), and <em>synthesis<\/em> (<a href=\"https:\/\/wals.info\/chapter\/22\">#22<\/a>). This ought to allow one to distinguish between agglutination and synthesis with a carefully-drawn sample, should one wish to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A common trope in computational linguistics papers is the use of the technical term agglutinative\u00a0as a synonym for rich inflectional morphology. This is not really what that term means. Properly, a language has agglutinative morphology in the case that it has affixes, each of which has a single syntacto-semantic function. (To really measure this properly, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/time-retire-agglutinative\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;It&#8217;s time to retire &#8220;agglutinative&#8221;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dev","category-language","category-nlp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1740"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1761,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1740\/revisions\/1761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}