Hindi noun inflection and distributed morphology

This paper primarily presents an analysis of nominal inflection in Hindi within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993 1994, Harley and Noyer 1999). Muller (2002, 2003, 2004) for German, Icelandic and Russian nouns respectively and Weisser (2006) for Croatian nouns have also used Distributed Morphology (henceforth DM) to analyze nominal inflectional morphology. This paper will discuss in detail the inflectional categories, inflectional classes, morphological processes operating at syntax, the distribution of vocabulary items and readjustment rules for Hindi nouns. Most of the earlier studies on Hindi inflectional morphology (such as Guru 1920, Vajpeyi 1958, Upreti 1964, etc.) were greatly influenced by the Paninian tradition (classical Sanskrit model) and work with Paninian constructs such as root and stem. They only provide descriptive studies of nominal and verbal categories and their inflections without discussing the role or status of affixes that take part in inflection. The discussion on the mechanisms (morphological operations and rules) used to analyze or generate word forms are missing in these studies. In addition, these studies do not account for syntax-morphology or morphology-phonology mismatch during the course of word formation. Another aim of this paper is to present an economical way of forming noun classes in Hindi as compared to other traditional methods, especially gender and stem ending based or paradigm based methods that give rise to a large number of inflectional paradigms. Using inflectional class information to explain various forms of Hindi nouns, we can reduce the number of affixes, wordgeneration rules and readjustment rules that are required to describe nominal inflection. The analysis also helped us in developing a morphological analyzer for Hindi. The small set of rules and fewer inflectional classes are of great help to lexicographers and system developers. To the best of our knowledge, the analysis of Hindi inflectional morphology based on DM and the implementation of Hindi morphological analyzer using the same has never been tried before. The methodology can be applied to other Indian languages for analysis as well as word generation.