Verbal Inflection in Hindi: A Distributed Morphology Approach

Verbal Inflection in Hindi: A Distributed Morphology Approach* Smrti Singh a, Vaijayanthi Sarma b aDepartment of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai-400076, India smritismriti@gmail.com vsarma@iitb.ac.in Abstract. In this paper, we provide a complete description of Hindi verbal inflection within the framework of Distributed morphology. We discuss the categories that are visible on the verb itself and on associated auxiliaries. We show how both analysis and generation are possible using this model. We also discuss the implementation of such linguistically motivated analysis in a morphological analyzer for Hindi, one of the several NLP tools that we have developed for Hindi, and discuss the outcomes of such an implementation. Keywords: Hindi, Distributed Morphology, verbal inflection, morphological analyzer 1 Introduction In this paper, we present an analysis of Hindi verbal inflection in the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM) (Halle and Marantz 1993 1994, Harley and Noyer 2003). The analysis presented in this paper demonstrates how DM may be used to provide a systematic and economical account of verbal inflection in Hindi. This DM analysis also lends itself straightforwardly to implementation in a Hindi Morphological Analyzer. We begin by detailing the different inflectional categories of Hindi verbs and the morphemes that realize them. Using the tools of DM we demonstrate how Hindi verbal forms can be both generated and analysed. The Hindi Morphological Analyzer that implements this analysis, produces the root, the suffixes and the morpheme analyses for any given verbal form. We would like to show that a linguistically motivated analysis provides a completely natural and successful way of implementing NLP tools. 2 Inflectional Categories of Hindi Verbs There has been much debate about the number of tenses, aspects, moods and modal auxiliaries that may be expressed by a single verb in Hindi. Many grammarians and morphologists including Kellogg (1875), Vajpeyi (1958), Guru K P (1920), Kachru (1966), Olphen (1975), Shapiro (2000) have discussed the inflectional categories of Hindi verbs but these studies are either pedagogical or structural in approach. Singh and Agnihotri (1997) give a word-based description of Hindi verb morphology discounting the concepts of stem, roots or affixes and using word-formation strategies to express lexical relatedness between word forms. Across all approaches, there is much agreement on the kinds of inflectional categories that are seen on Hindi verbs. These categories and their exponents are given in Table 1. _______________________________ * The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their reviews. We have tried to address their comments and incorporate their suggestions in this version. We would also like to thank Shalmalee for help with getting the manuscript ready. Any errors are, of course, the authors. Copyright 2011 by Smriti Singh and Vaijayanthi M. Sarma 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 283–292 283 Table 1: Inflectional categories and their markers for Hindi verbs Verbal Form Grammatical Category Exponents Finite Tense Present ho Past th- Future -g- Aspect Habitual -t- Progressive rəh Perfective -(y)ā, -(y)ī, -(y)ĩ, -(y)e Completive cuk Mood Imperative null, -o, -iye, …

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