@inproceedings{mosteiro-etal-2025-west,
    title = "{W}est {G}ermanic noun-noun compounds and the morphology-syntax trade-off",
    author = "Mosteiro, Pablo  and
      Blasi, Dami{\'a}n  and
      Paperno, Denis",
    editor = {Nicolai, Garrett  and
      Chodroff, Eleanor  and
      Mailhot, Frederic  and
      {\c{C}}{\"o}ltekin, {\c{C}}a{\u{g}}r{\i}},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the The 22nd SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Morphology, Phonology, and Phonetics",
    month = may,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.sigmorphon-main.2/",
    pages = "15--22",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-231-2",
    abstract = "This paper examines the linguistic distinction between syntax and morphology, focusing on noun-noun compounds in three West Germanic languages (English, Dutch, and German). Previous studies using the Parallel Bible Corpus have found a trade-off between word order (syntax) and word structure (morphology), with languages optimizing information conveyance through these systems. Our research question is whether manipulating English noun-noun compounds to resemble Dutch and German constructions can reproduce the observed distance between these languages in the order-structure plane. We extend a word-pasting procedure to merge increasingly common noun-noun pairs in English Bible translations. After each merge, we estimate the information contained in word order and word structure using entropy calculations. Our results show that pasting noun-noun pairs reduces the difference between English and the other languages, suggesting that orthographic conventions defining word boundaries play a role in this distinction. However, the effect is not pronounced, and results are statistically inconclusive."
}