Not as Awful as it Seems: Explaining German Case through Computational Experiments in Fluid Construction Grammar

Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 829–839, Avignon, France, April 23 - 27 2012. c⃝2012 Association for Computational Linguistics Not as Awful as it Seems: Explaining German Case through Computational Experiments in Fluid Construction Grammar Remi van Trijp Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris 6 Rue Amyot 75005 Paris (France) remi@csl.sony.fr Abstract German case syncretism is often assumed to be the accidental by-product of historical development. This paper contradicts this claim and argues that the evolution of Ger- man case is driven by the need to optimize the cognitive effort and memory required for processing and interpretation. This hy- pothesis is supported by a novel kind of computational experiments that reconstruct and compare attested variations of the Ger- man definite article paradigm. The exper- iments show how the intricate interaction between those variations and the rest of the German ‘linguistic landscape’ may direct language change. 1 Introduction In his 1880 essay, Mark Twain famously com- plained that The awful German Language is the most “slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to grasp” language of all. A brief look at the literature on the German case system seems to provide sufficient evidence for instantly agreeing with the American author. But what if the German case system were not the accidental by-product of diachronic changes as is often as- sumed? Are there linguistic forces that are not yet fully appreciated in the field, but which may ex- plain the German case paradigm? This paper demonstrates that there indeed are such forces through a case study on German def- inite articles. The experiments ‘reconstruct’ deep language processing models for different variants of this paradigm, and show how the ‘linguistic landscape’ of German has allowed its speakers to reduce their definite article system without loss in efficiency for processing and interpretation. 2 The Problem of German Case German articles, adjectives and nouns are marked for gender, number and case through morpholog- ical inflection, as illustrated for definite articles in Table 1. Case SG-M SG-F SG-N PL NOM der die das die ACC den die das die DAT dem der dem den GEN des der des der Table 1: German definite articles. The system is notorious for its syncretism (i.e. the same form can be mapped onto different func- tions), a riddle that has fascinated many formal and historical linguists looking for explanations. 2.1 Historical Linguistics Studies in historical linguistics and grammatical- ization often propose the following three forces to explain syncretism (Heine and Kuteva, 2005, p. 148): 1. The formal distinction between case markers is lost through phonological changes. 2. One case takes over the functional domain of another case and replaces it. 3. A case marker disappears and its functions are usurped by another marker. Syncretism is thus considered as the accidental by-product of such forces, and German case syn- cretism is typically analyzed according to these lines (Barðdal, 2009; Baerman, 2009, p. 229). However, these forces are not explanatory: they only …

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