Inflectional Networks: Graph-theoretic Tools for Inflectional Typology

The interpredictability of the inflected forms of lexemes is increasingly important to questions of morphological complexity and typology, but tools to quantify and visualize this aspect of inflectional organization are lacking, inhibiting effective cross-linguistic comparison. In this paper I use metrics from graph theory to describe and compare the organizational structure of inflectional systems. Graph theory offers a well-established toolbox for describing the properties of networks, making it ideal for this purpose. Comparison of nine languages reveals previously unobserved generalizations about the typological space of morphological systems. This is the first paper to apply graph-theoretic tools to the goal of inflectional typology.