Resolving Inflectional Ambiguity of Macedonian Adjectives

Abstract

Macedonian adjectives are inflected for gender, number, definiteness and degree, with in average 47.98 inflections per headword. The inflection paradigm of qualificative adjectives is even richer, embracing 56.27 morphophonemic alterations. Depending on the word they were derived from, more than 600 Macedonian adjectives have an identical headword and two different word forms for each grammatical category. While non-verbal adjectives alter the root before adding the inflectional suffixes, suffixes of verbal adjectives are added directly to the root. In parallel with the morphological differences, both types of adjectives have a different translation, depending on the category of the words they have been derived from. Nouns that collocate with these adjectives are mutually disjunctive, enabling the resolution of inflectional ambiguity. They are organised as a lexical taxonomy, created using hierarchical divisive clustering. If embedded in the future spell-checking applications, this taxonomy will significantly reduce the risk of forming incorrect inflections, which frequently occur in the daily news and more often in the advertisements and social media.