Prosodic Inheritance (PI) morphology pro-.pdf

PROSODIC INHERITANCE AND MORPHOLOGICAL GENERALISATIONS Sabine Reinhard Dafydd Gibbon UniversitSt Bielefeld FakultSt fflr Linguistik und Literaturwissensohaft P8640 D J,800 Bielefeld 1 email: reinhard@lilil 1 .uni-bielefeld.de gibbon@lilil 1 .uni-bielefeld.de ABSTRACT Prosodic Inheritance (PI) morphology pro- vides uniform treatment of both concatenative and non-concatenative morphological and phonological generalisations using default inheri- tance. Models of an extensive range of German Umlaut and Arabic intercalation facts, imple- mented in DATR, show that the PI approach also covers hard cases more homogeneously and more extensively than previous computational treatments. 1, INTRODUCTION Computational models of sentence syntax are increasingly based on well-defined linguistic theories and implemented using general formal- isms; by contrast, morphology and phonology in the lexicon tend to be handled with tailor-made hybrid formalisms selected for properties such as finite state compilability, object orientation, default inheritance, or procedural efficiency. The linguistically motivated Prosodic Inheritance (PI) model with defaults captures morphotactic and morphophonological generalisations in a unified declarative formalism, and has broad linguistic coverage of both concatenative morphology and the notorious hard cases of non-concatenative morphology. This paper integrates the PI con- cepts underlying previous descriptions of Ger- man Umlaut (Reinhard 1990a, 1990b), Bantu tone morphology and Arabic C-V intercalation (Gibbon 1990); Umlaut and intercalation are treated here. PI descriptions are currently Imple- mented in a DATR dialect (Gibbon 1989; for DATR cf. Evans Gazdar 1989, 1990, 1989a, 1989b); DATR was chosen for its syntactic simplicity and its explicit formal semantics. 2. INHERITANCE AND NON-CONCATENATIVE MORPHOLOGY Morphological generalisations are of three basic kinds: morphotactic, the combinatorial p