Plural Problems in the Nominal Morphology of Marathi

Plural Problems in the Nominal Morphology of Marathi* Shalmalee Pitale a, Vaijayanthi Sarma a aDepartment of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai-400076, India {shalmaleep, vsarma}@iitb.ac.in Abstract. In this paper, we describe the two tests developed and designed for Marathi using non-words, a) plural formation for non-words b) intuition test for gender assignment in which subjects were asked to assign gender to non-words. We look at the distribution of nouns across noun classes and genders and discuss the congruence between the problematic classes as observed in the tests and the actual class distribution and frequency in the language. Keywords: Marathi, plurals, gender, non-words, morphological rules 1 Introduction Marathi, an Indo Aryan language, makes a two-way number distinction, singular and plural. The number feature is synthetically marked on the noun itself. Two linguistic factors determine the plural formation of Marathi nouns: (a) grammatical gender, whether a noun is masculine, feminine or neuter and (b) the final segment of the noun. As a part of our ongoing research on the acquisition of Marathi morphology, we developed tests to see whether Marathi speaking children and adults apply tacitly known rules of inflectional morphology to new-coined words. One of the tests we developed was designed for plural formation with non-words. In this test, subjects were required to choose the correct plural suffix for a given non-word. Ample agreement cues for gender were also provided. This test was adapted from Jean Berko’s classic study on the acquisition of the inflectional morphology of English (1958) and Bettina Spreng’s work on the acquisition of plural morphology in German (2004). We also developed an intuition test for gender assignment in which subjects were asked to assign gender to non-words to measure the effect of the phonological shape of the token on the choice of gender. This test was inspired by A. Mill’s (1986) work on acquisition of gender in German. The results of these two tests indicated that the performance of the subjects, both adults and children, is better for some noun classes compared to others. In other words, phonological cues were reliable for some of the noun classes and facilitated gender choice, but this was not a reliable or unique cue, and led us to study the distribution of nouns into gender classes in Marathi. In this paper, we describe the two tests and analyze their results in brief. We look at the distribution of nouns across the noun classes and genders and discuss the congruence between the problematic classes as observed in the tests and the actual distribution of the same in the language. _________________________________ *We 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. Any errors are, of course, the authors. Copyright 2011 by Shalmalee Pitale and Vaijayanthi M. Sarma 25th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 178–185 178 2 Testing Plural morphology Singular/bare forms of countable nouns in Marathi may end in a vowel …

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