An interpretation of paradigmatic morphology

• Main Author: Calder, Jonathan H. R.
• Published: University of Edinburgh 1991
• Subjects: 006.3
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.642315

The thesis has as its goal the extension of current approaches in the description of natural languages, based on logics of partial information, to the area of morphology. I review work in a number of areas which may inform the study of morphology. I define a system for the representation of lexical and morphological information similar in descriptive aims to the system of <i>Word and Paradigm</i> (WP) morphology developed by Matthews, although somewhat different in technical details. I show that this system has a simple mathematical structure and indicate how it is related to current proposals in the field of feature value logics for linguistic description. The descriptive use of the system is demonstrated by an analysis of verbal paradigms from Latin. The attested shortcomings of WP are reanalysed in the light of the formalization developed above, and I show that, contrary to previous claims, the structures developed for the formalization of WP may be both adequate for describing the morphology of non-inflecting languages and concise in so doing. These assertions are supported by sample analyses of the morphology of Turkish, taken as an exemplary agglutinating language, and of Semitic.