An Innovative Methodology for Learning Polish Inflection
Marjorie J. McShane
University of Maryland Baltimore County
This book introduces an innovative, practically oriented methodology for describing the inflectional patterns of Polish nouns, adjectives and adverbs. It then employs this methodology for describing the full inventory of inflectional paradigms for the selected parts of speech, and richly supplements each paradigm with illustrative examples. This book takes up where typical descriptive grammars leave off, supplementing their valid but often difficult to apply rules with a more direct, less abstract presentation of the material. Formally, the book is divided into two parts. Part I provides background about the morphology of Polish, as well as introducing and motivating the methodology of description. Part II instantiates that methodology, presenting the inflectional paradigms and lists of sample members in the general style of a reference manual. One aim of the work is to demystify the difficult, often idiosyncratic aspects of Polish inflection by stating plainly what factors affect the choice of inflectional endings for every class of word. Another aim is to provide students and teachers with sufficient practice material to drill each pattern to the point where producing correct word forms becomes automatic.
The author, Marjorie McShane, received her Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University and currently works as a computational linguist at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. This book developed from work on a natural language processing project carried out between 1998 and 2001 at the Computing Research Laboratory of New Mexico State University. Apart from computational and practical morphology, Dr. McShane’s research interests include ellipsis and reference (theoretically, descriptively and computationally), machine translation, knowledge elicitation, ontological semantic text processing, and Slavic morphosyntax.
ISBN 9783895864483. LINCOM Language Coursebooks 11. 130pp. 2003.