Nouns more similar to the nominative form are more frequent: a case study in Slovak

Abstract

Abstract Grammatical cases of nouns are expressed by inflectional endings in Slovak. Therefore, nouns have several word forms, with the nominative considered the basic form. In addition to the endings, in some word forms there are morphophonological changes also in stems. The differences between the basic form and inflected forms are evaluated using the Levenshtein distance. We show that word forms more similar to the basic form occur more often. The category of animacy plays a very important role in the frequency behaviour of masculine nouns. The overall idea of the present paper is to give some insights into phenomena of noun inflection and to test various factors influencing and regulating the overall complexity of expressing certain required morphological information. It seems that word frequency, but also word length plays an important role. Moreover, it is shown that also gender and animacy has to be considered to understand noun declension in Slovak properly.