Prosodic Inheritance and Morphological Generalisations

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 principles of word composition in terms of immediate dominance (ID) relations, morpho- semantic, interpretation functions from morpho- tactic structures to semantic representations, and morphophonologica/ ( or ' morphograph ic') , interpretation functions from morphotactic structures to surface phonological or ortho- graphic representations. This paper is mainly concerned with modelling morphotactic and morphophonological generalisations. Simple abstract morphotactic combinations (denoted by the operator '*') may be repre- sented as follows: Ger.: [Rad * singular], [Rad * plural] Eng.: [cat * plural], [dog * plural], [horse * plural] Morpheme ID combinations receive a composi- tional morphophonological interpretation based on the forms of the component morphemes and the kind of construction involved. Phonological interpretations are composed primarily by means of concatenation, with phonological feature variation at morpheme boundaries: Get.: Rad-Rades,/ra:t/-/ra:des/ (Voicing specification of stem final C) Eng.: cats-dogs-horses,/keets/-/dogz/-/ho:siz/ (Voicing specification of C and epenthetic V in suffix) Non-concatenative morphophonological composition (which we will here refer to as morphoprosody) deals specifically with temporal feature overlap phenomena such as infixing, vowel gradation, consonant mutation, morpho- logical tone and stress patterning, involving the structural 'association' of temporally coextensive categories such as features and autosegmental tiers: Eng.: telephone, telephony, telephonic (stress, vowel quality) Ger.: Fuchs, F~ichse, fuchsig (Umlaut) Arab.: ktb, kutib, aktabib (intercalation) Kikuyu: hmahmolrorlihra, hmahmoltomhihre (tone) Morphoprosodic operations generally occur in combination with concatenation. Concatenation and association operators ('quasi-linear prece- dence, QLP, operators') are represented here - 131 - by " and ,o, respectively. QLP representations are intermediate specifications of morphotactic detail between abstract ID …

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