Measuring Derivational Morphosemantic Distance Between Russian and Serbian

Recent research in the field of computerized measuring of linguistic distance has offered an abundance of methods for estimating similarity between languages. However, these methods are usually applied to large linguistic datasets containing information about a large number of languages and are not used to compare certain grammatical and/or lexical features in pairs of languages. They also tend to ignore complex language units giving preference to simple coarse input data. The current study tests a new linguistic distance measure that considers verbal prefixation patterns. It employs several methods of measuring morphosemantic distance to estimate similarities between Serbian and Russian in terms of prefixal derivation of verbs and compares the results yielded by those methods. Different types of meaning and functions of the prefixes are taken into consideration when applying these methods. The study supports our initial claim about the efficiency of the proposed distance measure. It also demonstrates the differences in verb prefixation patterns between Serbian and Russian as well as discrepancies in meaning and function of genealogically related prefixes. The results also indicate whether/how much estimation of morphosemantic distance between two genetically close languages depends on input data, specifically in case of morphologically complex language units. The outcomes of this research complement our knowledge of verb prefixation patterns in Russian and Serbian and are hopefully helpful for further improvement of morphosemantic derivational measures.