[Intro to NLP, CMPSCI 585, Fall 2014]


Please submit electronically before lecture on Thursday 10/2, and bring a copy to class for discussion.


Inflectional morphology

Do the Swahili part of these exercises. If you don’t know what a grammatical term means, just search for it; there are many language learning websites describing present progressive, present perfect, etc.

Derivational morphology

Select a news article in English (or another language you read and can explain), and identify any words that have three or more morphemes. If there are no such words, find another news article!

Show how each word breaks down into morphemes, and indicate which is the stem and which are affixes. Indicate whether the affixes cause a part-of-speech change.

For example, “derivational” breaks down as “derive”+”ation”+”al”, where “derive” is the stem (and a verb), “-ation” nominalizes it, and then “-al” makes it into an adjective.


(Exercise borrowed from Jacob Eisenstein.)