Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
9-2021
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.
Program
Linguistics
Advisor
Kyle Gorman
Subject Categories
Computational Linguistics | Russian Linguistics
Keywords
Russian loanwords, inflectional morphology, loanword detection, finite-state transducer, language model
Abstract
This paper investigates recent English loanwords in Russian and explores ways in which computational methods can help further theoretical research. The goal of the study is two-fold: to find new, previously unattested loanwords borrowed over the last decade and to examine the rate of adaptation of the new borrowings, attested by the degree to which they conform to the constraints of the Russian language. First, we train a finite-state pipeline that combines character n-gram language models, which encode phonotactic and lexical properties of loanwords, with a binary classifier to detect loanwords. The model achieves state-of-the-art performance results during evaluation, surpassing previously established benchmarks. Secondly, we introduce a new and extended corpus of recent Russian loanwords that have been detected in Web texts by our model. The corpus includes loanwords together with their morphological features, part-of-speech tags, and sentences in which they occur. We conduct an analysis of inflectional morphology of the identified loanwords, investigating the rate of indeclinability of recent loanwords and stem-final consonant alternations in verbs.
Recommended Citation
Spektor, Yulia, "Detection and Morphological Analysis of Novel Russian Loanwords" (2021). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4572