>ČASOPIS PRO MODERNÍ FILOLOGII 2026 (108) 1
A Comparison of the Morphological Structure of Words Based on Data from Language Corpora: A Pilot Study of Six European Languages
ABSTRACT (en)
Although comparing the internal structure of words across languages has long been a subject of interest in contrastive linguistics and linguistic typology, most of this research focuses on qualita tive aspects, and when data is adduced, its scope is usually limited. This paper presents a pilot study of word-internal structure based on parallel data extracted from the Europarl corpus for six Euro pean languages. For the purposes of this study, the data were lemmatized, annotated with part-of speech tags, and segmented into morphs, which were classified according to their boundedness and lexicality. The annotated corpus was used in three case studies. Firstly, we examined the behaviour of morphemes with respect to Zipf’s law. Secondly, we investigated the relationship between mor phological structure of words and Zipf’s abbreviation law, providing evidence that the morphe matic structure of words influences their frequency over and above their length. Thirdly, we have described possible cases of concurrence among morpheme types and offered rudimentary explana tory hypotheses for them.
KEYWORDS (en)
word-internal structure, morphological segmentation, Zipf’s laws, language typology, parallel corpora
KLÍČOVÁ SLOVA (cz)
vnitřní struktura slov, morfologická segmentace, Zipfovy zákony, jazyková typologie, paralelní korpusy
DOI
https://doi.org/10.14712/23366591.2026.1.1
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