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Learning from the computational modelling of Plains Cree verbs

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Abstract

This paper describes the ongoing process of creating a computational morphological model of Plains Cree, a language native to North America, making use of finite-state machines, and with a focus on verbs. We cover prior linguistic theoretical and descriptive models of Plains Cree, moving on to the computational implementation of (chiefly) inflectional phenomena, followed by relevant morphophonological processes. We evaluate the performance of our computational implementation with a hand-verified corpus of Plains Cree, and present a discussion of the morphological complexity found in the corpus, as compared to that of our model and its theoretical underpinnings. The results of this evaluation and research into natural language use inform us about the practical extent of morphological complexity for a polysynthetic language, and allow us to identify avenues for improvement of the model. Finally, this computational model for Plains Cree offers the opportunity to create various digital tools and applications for language users for the maintenance and revitalization of this language in the 21st century.

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Notes

  1. The languages/dialects of Cree-Montagnais-Naskapi continuum share many similarities, as can be seen in the following words for ‘person’, where the reflexes of Proto-Algonquian *l are given in boldface. The dialects are given in roughly west to east geographical distribution:

    1. (1)

      Plains: i y iniw

      Woods:

      Swampy: i n iniw

      Moose: i l iliw

      Atikamekw: i r iniw

      East: i y iyiw/i y iyû/i y inû

      Naskapi: i y iyû

      Innu: i l nu/i n nu

  2. http://altlab.ualberta.ca/itwewina.

  3. It is worth noting that animacy is not consistent across dialects of Cree, or even communities of Plains Cree. Some words, such as sîwinikan ‘sugar’, are animate in some dialects and inanimate in others.

  4. Note that in our analyzer we have used ‘3’ to refer to both inanimate and animate participants. However, ‘0’ has also been used for inanimate entities (e.g. Wolvengrey 2011).

  5. Abbreviations: cnj: Conjunct order; com: comitative; dir: Direction; ind12: First Person (incl.) in Independent Order; ind3: Third Person in Independent Order; indp: Independent order; inv: Inverse; na: Animate Noun; ni: Inanimate Noun; poss: Possesseum; pv-gxn: Number of Grammatical Preverbs; pv-lxn: Number of Hesitation Marker Preverbs; pv-lxn: Number of Lexical Preverbs; pv: Preverb; rdplh: Heavy Reduplication; rdpll: Light Reduplication; thm: Theme sign; vai-n: <n> final Intransitive Animate Verb stem; vai-v: Vowel final Intransitive Animate Verb stem; vai: Verb Animate Intransitive; vii-n: n final Intransitive Inanimate Verb stem; vii-v: Vowel final Intransitive Inanimate Verb stem; vii: Verb Inanimate Intransitive; vta-1: Transitive Animate Verbs not otherwise specified; vta-2: Vowel final Transitive Animate Verb stem; vta-3: c final Transitive Animate Verb stem; vta-4: t final Transitive Animate Verb stem where t is changed to <s> in some forms; vta-5: Catch-all class for oddly behaved Transitive Animate Verbs; vta: Verb Animate Transitive; vti-1: Transitive Inanimate verbs not otherwise specified; vti-2: Semantically transitive inanimate verbs which follow the VAI-v conjugation; vti-3: Select group of odd semantically transitive inanimate verbs which follow the VAI-v conjugation; vti: Verb Inanimate Transitive; 3′: Third person Obviative; 3″: Third Person Further Obviative.

  6. Subjects and objects are conventionally called actors and goals in Algonquian literature (Bloomfield 1946; Wolvengrey 2011). For this paper, however, we make use of the general linguistic terminology of subject/object.

  7. As an alternative interpretation, Wolvengrey (2011) proposes a three-way distinction between verbs, based solely on the number of animate participants: V0 containing any verb forms with no animate participants (corresponding to VII), V1 containing verbs with only one animate participant (corresponding to VAI and VTI), and V2 containing verbs with two animate participants (corresponding to VTA); this alternative interpretation is also morphologically motivated as VAI and VTI verbs share some of the affixes marking the person and number of the subject (Wolvengrey 2011).

  8. One may notice the similarities between the VTI stem and mîciso- in (2). Despite the similarity, any morphological relationship between these two stems can only be posited for Proto-Algonquian, and then only tentatively, and there is no synchronic relationship. However, there are other triplets of VAI, VTI and VTA verb stems which would appear to be based on the same root, such as wâpi- ‘to (be able to) see (generally)’, wâpaht- ‘to see something (inan.)’, and wâpam- ‘to see someone (an.)’ in examples (5) through (8).

  9. The Future Conditional is more commonly considered a subclass of Conjunct and is marked with similar morphology (Wolfart 1973), though we discuss them separately here as we code them separately in our model.

  10. While the Independent and Conjunct orders do have some differences in their syntactic behaviour (Cook 2014), their semantic differences remain poorly understood; however, there appear to be significant tendencies for individual lexemes to be used in either Independent or Conjunct order forms (cf. Harrigan and Arppe 2015; Arppe et al. 2016a).

  11. While in many of the inverse forms (e.g. niwâpamik, ‘s/he sees me’, the suffix appears to be a portmanteau morpheme, and could be analyzed as such, this suffix may be analyzed as -ikw-w, where the cluster is then simplified by regular phonological rules. Indeed, this form may also occur as -ikow, demonstrating another possible resolution of a C-w-w sequence (A. Wolvengrey p.c. 2016).

  12. For a large (though not yet complete) overview of Plains Cree morphemes (including common preverbs) see Cook and Muehlbauer (2010).

  13. When in the relational form, VAIs and VTIs are not derived to VTAs, and the second animate participant is not marked as for VTAs. The relational only indicates that the VAI or VTI is performed while another animate person is present, or otherwise acknowledges the presence of an animate person that is not directly involved in the action (Cenerini 2014).

  14. The use of absolutive in Algonquian languages is non-standard, and it is not immediately clear what Bakker’s motivation in using this term is. As with other uses of the term, absolutive here refers to the object marking on a transitive verb or the subject marking on an intransitive verb.

  15. The subjective modality and relative tense slots are posited only for the Conjunct order. Subjective modality includes preverbs such as ta-kî- ‘should, can, ought to’ and relative tense is a separate slot for kî-, as tense marking on Conjunct verbs can be relative to previous tense marking on an Independent verb.

  16. The change we have written here as n-hk > hk is in fact an example of a historical sound change rule where a nasal becomes /h/ before a stop. We present the change here in this format to indicate that this is how our model has dealt with the changes in the simplest set of rules. Similarly, many of our rules may appear odd or non-standard, but this is because they are representing how we have written them for the twolc formalism.

  17. Reduplication before o/ô may also occur with w.

  18. http://giellatekno.uit.no/index.eng.html.

  19. https://victorio.uit.no/langtech/trunk/langs/crk/src/.

  20. Our model does not yet allow relative tense to co-occur with absolute tense, though we intend to implement this in the near future.

  21. Wolvengrey (2015) has presented a preliminary corpus-based analysis of the Plains Cree preverbal template, though simply scrutinizing preverbal string sequences identifiable with the use of a separating hyphen, without the use of a grammatical analyzer as we will do later below.

  22. This comitative preverb wîci- is currently the only one for which we have allowed reduplication in our current model.

  23. We intend to expand these with content from the Maskwacîs Cree Dictionary (Maskwachees Cultural College 1997) as well as the Alberta Elders’ Cree Dictionary (LeClaire et al. 1998), but based on preliminary scrutiny we need to carefully review these resources in terms of the dialectal and areal variation we know them to contain and the consequences this may have on their orthographical consistency.

  24. Technically, we have three VTI subclasses, though two of these exist only to mark a stem as VTI before redirecting to VAI suffix morphology.

  25. As a point of reference, the twolc statement in (14) below can be parsed as follows:

    • (a) n:0 represents the deletion of an underlying n in the surface form.

    • (b) < = > represents that the environment always causes the change, while the change cannot happen without the environment to the right.

    • (c) [ a | o | i ] indicates that the n change occurs only when following a, o, or i

    • (d) _ %>:0 (h) k represents the context for n deletion: a morpheme boundary to the right (denoted by ‘>’, which surfaces as nothing/is deleted; since ‘>’ is a special character in the FST formalism (marking the end of a regular expression), it has to be “escaped” by the ‘%’ character), followed by an optional h, followed by k.

  26. It may be the case that our rules can be simplified, which is a ongoing objective of ours.

  27. https://victorio.uit.no/langtech/trunk/langs/crk/src/phonology/crk-phon.twolc.

  28. The notation of (15) is the same as in (14), with the following exceptions:

    • (a) t3:s represents the palatalization of the underlying [t] as [s] in the surface form (where t3 is used only stem-final in the stems of the verb sub-class where the palatalization occurs).

    • (b) %^TS:0 represents the context of a suffix beginning with a trigger (to restrict the change to only specific instances within the paradigm), which surfaces as nothing/is deleted.

    • (c) [ .#. | i ] restricts the change to instances where, after the trigger, there is either a full word boundary ( .#. ) or <i>.

  29. Cree vowel length is not simply a matter of duration, but includes contrast through quality (Muehlbauer 2012; Harrigan and Tucker 2015).

  30. This figure excludes punctuation tokens, but includes Arabic and Roman numerals, foreign words, and proper names; including punctuation raises the count to approximately 142,000.

  31. Upon request, this corpus is available for research purposes on the corpus server maintained by the Alberta Language Technology Lab (ALTLab) at: http://altlab.ualberta.ca/korp/.

  32. We were also given a wealth of knowledge directly from last author, Professor of Algonquian Languages and Linguistics at the First Nations University of Canada and author of nêhiyawêwin: itwêwina / Cree: Words (2001).

  33. The 76 other word form types were English words or proper names (English or French), Arabic numerals, or non-linguistic codes/abbreviations.

  34. The rest include 25,240 punctuation tokens (32 types), 980 tokens (12 types) of Arabic or Roman numerals, 5,915 tokens (906 types) of English, French, or Latin words, 619 tokens (202 types) non-Cree proper names.

  35. Missing morphology generally refers to minor inflectional patterns, frequently obsolete, that are not thoroughly described in the literature or well-represented in the corpus. These include initial change (a conjunct-marking phenomenon), rare inverse forms, and inanimate subject paradigms (e.g. Wolfart 1973). Other morphological issues include verbal derivation such as those processes discussed above.

  36. Wolvengrey (2015) presents an artificial complex verb form with incorporating a maximal amount of elements, i.e. nikî-kakwâhyaki-nôhtê-pê-mâci-nipahi-kakwê-mâh-misi-miyo-kitohcikân ‘I had desperately wanted to come start really trying to play music extremely well.’

  37. Underlying details on the individual types of morphological structure for the verbs studied can be found in the Supplementary materials for this issue, or on the authors’ website at http://altlab.artsrn.ualberta.ca/.

  38. As there are a number of common grammatical preverbs that can be formally identical to reduplication in particular contexts, e.g. ka- ‘future/optative: will, shall, ought, should’ and kâh- ‘would, ought to; likely to’, and this results in some structural ambiguity in the Gold Standard analyses leading to a certain degree of uncertainty about the numbers and analyses presented here, as deciding which of the theoretically equally possible analyses would require context-based disambiguation or even more detailed scrutiny of the semantic and pragmatic context, which we have not yet had the time to pursue. Since this is key to forming the most accurate picture, we are planning to improve the Gold Standard in this respect in the near future.

  39. Vowel sandhi refers to a series of phonological changes that occur when a vowel-final word or preverb is adjacent to a vowel-initial word or preverb. Typically, the first vowel is deleted and the second, if short, is lengthened. However, some vowel pairs result in different vowels arising. For example, kâ-itwêt ‘s/he says’ is often realized as k-êtwêt in the corpus.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the guest editors of this issue for their helpful and insightful comments, as well as Dustin Bowers for his comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. Moreover, we appreciate the comments, feedback and suggestions we received during the Workshop on Computational Methods for Descriptive and Theoretical Morphology organized by Olivier Bonami and Benoît Sagot at the 17th International Morphology Meeting.

This research was made possible by a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (# 890-2013-0047), a SSHRC Joseph Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (Master’s), a Kule Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) Research Cluster Grant, and a Killam Cornerstones Grant (University of Alberta).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Alberta, 4-32 Assiniboia Hall, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2E7, Canada

    Atticus G. Harrigan, Katherine Schmirler & Antti Arppe

  2. Universitetet i Tromsø—Norges arktiske universitet, SVfak/HUMfak bygget, SVHUM A 3020A, Tromso, Norway

    Lene Antonsen

  3. Universitetet i Tromsø—Norges arktiske universitet, ISK A 3006, Tromso, Norway

    Trond Trosterud

  4. First Nations University of Canada, 1 First Nations Way, Regina, Saskatchewan, S4S 7K2, Canada

    Arok Wolvengrey

Authors
  1. Atticus G. Harrigan
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  2. Katherine Schmirler
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  3. Antti Arppe
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  4. Lene Antonsen
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  5. Trond Trosterud
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  6. Arok Wolvengrey
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Atticus G. Harrigan.

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Harrigan, A.G., Schmirler, K., Arppe, A. et al. Learning from the computational modelling of Plains Cree verbs. Morphology 27, 565–598 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-017-9315-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-017-9315-x

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