Investigating the productivity of Passamaquoddy medials: A computational approach (2024)

Abstract: Little is known about medials in Passamaquoddy, which appear to be involved in the construction of verb stems in the language. Investigating the productivity of such morphemes using traditional fieldwork methods is a difficult undertaking that can be made easier with computational methods. I first generated a list of possible verb stems using a simple Python script, then compared this list against Passamaquoddy text corpora to see how many of these tokens were attested. If a given medial is productive, we should expect to see it in a large portion of possible verb stems that include said medial. If this assumption is correct, the corpora analysis will be a key indicator in determining the productivity of individual medials.

## introduction this work is part of a larger research effort on a certain set of morphemes in the endangered language passamaquoddy (algonquian, iso: pqm). in this language, three distinct classes of morphemes are involved in the construction of verb stems. in the literature, these classes are referred to as inital, medial, and final @xcite . as far as i am aware, though, there has been no systematic work investigating medial productivity. the answer to this question are consequential not only to our understanding of passamaquoddy, but also to those interested in the language's revitalization. if verb stem construction is a regular process, second language instructors should impart this knowledge to learners. however, going about a survey on the matter is not a trivial effort, considering that the current estimate on the number of medials in passamaquoddy is 97. evaluating productivity with a lexical decision task would require a linguist to run through thousands of possible verbs with a native speaker, which can be time-consuming for both the researcher and the consultant. in any effort to document a language of passamaquoddy's vitality, time is of the essence. can this research be streamlined? in this project, i automate this effort by first generating a list of all possible medial-containing verb stems. i then determine which of them are attested by comparing said list against a text corpus. in 2, i situate this work by providing some details on the passamquoddy language and its speakers. in 3, i elaborate on the morphophonology of verb stems. this is followed by 4, where i discuss the procedure employed in generating the possible verb stems and running them against the dictionary. i provide a statistical analysis for the data in 5, and conclude with a discussion of my findings and plans for future work in 6. ## language background passamaquoddy is a member of the northeastern branch of eastern algonquian subfamily, which makes it a close relative of mi'kmaq, penobscot, and abenaki @xcite . there are two mutuallyintelligible dialects of this language, namely passamaquoddy and maliseet (an exonym for wolastoqey, alternatively spelled malecite). the former of these is spoken in eastern maine, usa, while the latter is spoken in new brunswick, canada (grishin, 2023). given their similarities, the language is also referred to as passamaquoddy-maliseet or passamaquoddy-wolastoqey. while there are some differences between the two, none of them are consequential to this work as far as i am aware. for the sake of brevity, i refer to the language as simply passamaquoddy in this article. like other algonquian languages, passamaquoddy is polysynthetic, which is reflected especially clearly in the domain of verbs. interestingly, verbs do a large portion of the semantic legwork in the language; based on some preliminary investigations, there are no adjectives proper, no singular "group nouns" (e.g., team, family) (peter grishin, p.c.), and no non-verb measure functions (e.g., height, weight, cost). in passamaquoddy, equivalent expressions are handled by verbs, which are subject to the tripartite structure introduced in 1. other features include complex agreement patterns, proximate/obviative marking for third person noun phrases, animate/inanimate distinctions for nouns, and free word order @xcite . recent estimates claim that there are approximately 500 native speakers of the language (lewis and fennig, 2016), the majority of which are over the age of sixty (crockett-current, 2020). the risk of language dormancy has spurred the creation of language courses at universities (crockett-current, 2020) and grade schools. detailed knowledge of passamaquoddy grammar is crucial for such pro-grams, and could aid in non-native speakers achieving native-like fluency in the language. foot_1 3 more on verb stems in this section, i present some facts about passamaquoddy verb stems and medials that are relevant to this research and/or may be of interest to the reader. most of the following is based off of @xcite , @xcite and @xcite . to begin, some verbs do not include medials, such as that in (2). in passamaquoddy, a wellformed verb stem consists of at minimum a final. ergo, some verbs do not include an initial or medial. note that the existence of a verb stem with a medial does not necessarily entail the existence of a similar verb stem without a medial. for example, (3) is an attested word in the dictionary (see 4), but a corresponding medial-less form aluwahke is unattested. furthermore, many medials appear noun-like in their translations into other languages, such as atpe 'head' in (4). however, the syntax and morphology of passamaquoddy do not treat these morphemes as though they were nouns. 3 as a result, predicates that may require a transitive verb with an object in other languages can be expressed with a single intransitive verb in passamaquoddy. 4 (4) masksmelly initial -atpe head medial -mahsu smell ai final 's/he has a smelly head/hair' medials can not be consistently interpreted as the theme of their respective verb. in (5) for example, ocok has an arguably instrumental interpretation. there are a number of (semi-regular) phonological alternations that occur within verb stems. in the remainder of this section, i will briefly summarize these alternations; specifically, i present those that have an overt effect on a verb stem's orthographic representation, as these are most relevant to the current study. if the synthesis of a word stem creates a consonant cluster at a morpheme boundary, an epenthetic [i] is inserted between the two consonants. ## procedure using a python script, i begin by generating a comprehensive list of medial-bearing possible verb stems. this is produced by exhaustively combining every initial, medial, and final from a machinereadable list. 5 for each verb stem, the phonological rules sketched in 3 are applied. these are modeled computationally using base python functions (if/elif/else, find-replace functions, truncation, etc.). the phonological alternations are broken into two separate series, which i have dubbed precompounding phonology and post-compounding phonology. as the nomenclature implies, precompounding rules act on individual morphemes prior to synthesis into a verb stem, while postcompounding rules apply after. the former houses phonological rules that apply at morpheme boundaries, while the latter is for alternations that apply to the entire verb stem or at the word boundary. a sketch of the rules and their application order is provided in figure 1 . the ordering is not trivial as some rules appear to feed others (e.g., i-epenthesis and t-palatilization). this process yields 14,949,058 possible verb stems (502 initials * 97 medials * 307 finals). this list is then compared against a list of verbs from the passamaquoddy-maliseet language portal (pmp), an online dictionary and language resource. over a hundred hours of transcribed conversation between native speakers are also available on the language portal. according to the website, at least 85 speakers are represented in the corpus. the transcriptions are particular helpful for finding token frequencies, which is relevant to the quantitative analysis of productivity presented in 5. it should be noted here that the list of verbs from the dictionary contains only 14,941 elements, so just a fraction of the possible verb stems in the generated list can be attested. this asymmetry in sizes may be jarring, but this analysis will nevertheless provide some insight into the behavior of passamaquoddy medials. ## data & analysis of the ≈15 million possible verb stems generated, exactly 697 of them had exact matches in the dictionary. 84 of the 97 medials have attested forms, with figure 2 (see a ) showing a zipf-like distribution in frequency. the highest frequency of any medial was 77 (atok), while the lowest was 1 (akomite, altoqe, many others). a similar graph with additional information on mean token frequency is provided in figure 3 . with this data, there are a number of ways to calculate the productivity of each medial. one established method in the morphological productivity literature is baayen's criterion @xcite . this method defines the productiveness of a morphological process by the function n 1 n , where n is the total number of words formed by said process and n 1 is the number of hapax legomena (words that only occur once in a corpus) derived by that process. the greater the number of hapax legomena in a set of derived words, the more productive a process is said to be. unfortunately, none of the verbs in the corpus used in this study are hapax legomena, so this is not an acceptable option. 6 another way of quantifying productivity is yang's sufficiency principle @xcite , which states that a process is productive if it meets the following criterion: one final method i consider in this work compares type frequency (number of forms derived by a process) with the mean token frequency of words formed by that process. under this method, a construction is said to be more productive when the type frequency is high and the mean token frequency is low @xcite . in figure 3 , we see evidence for the productivity of some medials under this view. specifically, atok, amk, ek, ak, apsk, and alok are plausibly so. for medials of lower type frequencies, though, there is no evidence to indicate that they are productive. ## concluding discussion considering several different techniques for operationalizing productivity, i find evidence to support the productivity of a small handful of medials. at the very least, figure 3 is a helpful indicator of which morphemes are more productive than others. yang's sufficiency principle has a much less charitable view of the data, but this is arguably a case of the method not fitting the data we have. the amount of things a single medial can combine with is massive, and it alone trumps the size of the dictionary many times over. it is curious why so few of the possible verb stems had attested forms in the dictionary. of course, there are many things outside of initial + medial + final in the passamaquoddy verbal lexicon. as previously stated, some verbs lack a medial and even an initial. so, it makes sense that some verbs in the dictionary do not have a companion in the comprehensive verb stem list. more puzzling are the missing medials from the attested forms list. i mention in 5 that only 84 medials are represented in the 697 attested forms; this indicates to me that there may have been an error in generating the possible verb stems. i am uncertain whether this was due to an unforeseen consequence of my own code or the result of a phonology rule i neglected to add, but it warrants further investigation. regardless, the results of this study provide a number of interesting avenues for future research. for the seemingly-productive medials, one question is their semantic import. are their semantics consistent across every verb stem? do they consistently have instrumental/theme/classificatory interpretations, or are the meanings of their respective verb stems more opaque or idiomatic? conversely, for medials with less attested forms, are their semantics consistent? returning to the question of productivity, i plan to continue investigating this matter through lexical decision tasks with native speakers. it would make sense to start with medials that already have a large number of attested cases, then moving on to medials with fewer. in this work, i present a simple yet (as far as i am aware) novel approach to investigating morphological productivity in an endangered polysynthetic language. while the findings of this study are interesting, passamaquoddy is only a small part of the full story concerning algonquian verbal morphology; i am hopeful that the methodology i introduce here will be employed by others working on algo-nquian languages with similar questions. in conclusion, this work proposes a computational approach to to investigating the productivity of medials in passamaquoddy. for languages with low vitality, such methods are especially valuable for research and revitalization efforts. while only a small number of generated verbs were actually attested in the dictionary, there is evidence for some medials being productive. regardless, this work provides a foundation for future fieldwork and more "traditional" linguistic inquiry.