Morphological Description Of Nouns In Shahmukhi Punjabi; A Corpus Based Study

Abstract

Morphology plays a central role in language studies. It provides a foundation for the exploration of linguistics on advance levels such as syntax and semantics. This study is concerned with the comprehensive morphological analysis of Shahmukhi Punjabi Nouns. For conducting the analysis, a corpus of Nine (9) million words of Shahmukhi Punjabi was compiled and lists of grammatical categories were extracted from it. Vocabulary items were evaluated to discover the inflectional and derivational patterns in the corpus. Theoretical framework of distributed morphology was adopted for the morphological analysis. The analysis revealed that nouns inflect for number and gender and showed same pattern of complementation among adjectives and nouns. The results revealed various patterns for forming plural nouns in both of the genders, and also for deriving nouns from the adjectives and vice versa. Additionally, the study also discovered the patterns of noun derivation from the adverbs. This research contributes to the understanding of Shahmukhi Punjabi morphology by shedding light on the inflectional and derivational processes involved in noun formation. Future studies can be conducted on the basis of the findings to explore the other aspects of Shahmukhi Punjabi morphology.