Ray Fabri

Models of Inflection

Contents: Roy Fabri, Models of Inflection. - Geert Booij, The demarcation of inflection. - Philippe Segeral/Tobias Scheer, A generalized theory of Ablaut: the case of Modern German Strong Verbs. - Albert Ortmann, The Role of [+/-animate] in Inflection. - Teresa Parodi, Aspects of clitic doubling and clitic clusters in Spanish. - Birgit Gerlach, Mediopassive in Greek and the hierarchy of functional categories. - Ilse Zimmermann, Das dativische pronominale Klitikum in der DP-Struktur des Bulgarischen. - Hilke Elsen, The Acquisition of Past Participles: One or Two Mechanisms? - Katrin Lindner, Overgeneralization revisited: the case of German past participles. - Conxita Lleo, Proto-articles in the acquisition of Spanish: Interface between Phonology and Morphology. - Dunstan Brown, Stem Indexing and Morphonological Selection in the Russian Verb: a Network Morphology Account. - Wolfgang Ullrich Wurzel, Drei Ebenen der Struktur von Flexionsparadigmen. - Martin Neef, The Reduced Syllable Plural in German. - Damaris Nubling, Wann werden die deutschen Prapositionen flektieren? Grammatisierungswege zur Flexion.

Maltilex: a computational lexicon for Maltese

The project described in this paper, which is still in the preliminary phase, concerns the design and implementation of a computational lexicon for Maltese, a language very much in current use but so far lacking most of the infrastructure required for NLP. One of the main characteristics of Maltese, a source of many difficulties, is that it is an amalgam of different language types (chiefly Semitic and Romance), as illustrated in the first part of the paper. The latter part of the paper describes our general approach to the problem of constructing the lexicon.

Linguistic Introduction: The Orthography, Morphology and Syntax of Semitic Languages

We present in this chapter some basic linguistic facts about Semitic languages, covering orthography, morphology, and syntax. We focus on Arabic (both standard and dialectal), Ethiopian languages (specifically, Amharic), Hebrew, Maltese and Syriac. We conclude the chapter with a contrastive analysis of some of these phenomena across the various languages.

The inverse morphology of Plains Cree (Algonquian)

Several languages “sweeping a broad area from northeastern Asia eastward and southward across North America” (Klaiman 1992: 321) have been claimed to display some form of direct/inverse patterning in their morphology, although in many cases the system is not as obvious and transparent as it is in the Algonquian languages. Examples of language families in which inverseness has been claimed to occur are listed under (1), together with the relevant references. Except for Ellis (1971) and Ebert (1990/1991), the list is based on Klaiman (1992: 231).

A computational model of minimalist morphology

In this paper we present a computational model of a theory of inflection called Minimalist Morphology (Wunderlich & Fabri 1994). This theory places special emphasis on the economical feature specification of stems and affixes, which combine in a principle-guided fashion. Recursive paradigms then act to ban illicit, overgenerated candidate word forms. The computational grammar which formalises stems, affixes and morphological combination is realised using the constraint-based linguistic formalism CUF (Dorre & Dorna 1993). Output candidate word forms are further processed by a parametrised paradigm tool, implemented in Prolog, that embodies active candidate ranking principles to select only the well-formed forms. It is shown that Minimalist Morphology can be made explicit enough to provably generate all and only the correct inflected forms of both regular and irregular verbs in Modern High German. This case study then demonstrates the nontrivial potential of computer implementation as an aid in the rigid evaluation of contemporary linguistic theories, whose subtleties often defy a classical pencil-and-paper approach