Paradigmatic Treatment of Arabic Morphology

What it is about

The paper proposes a declarative language for morphology, built on feature unification, in which a morphological process is a paradigm instead of a set of rewrite rules. Helping paradigms give partial pieces of a word: a vowel melody tied to an aspect and voice, or a consonant template such as the prefix and doubling of Form V. Main paradigms combine helping paradigms by unifying their strings and features, so that a root receives a fully specified form. Feature classes sit in an inheritance hierarchy, so a regular class is written once and irregular entries override only what differs. The author argues that this covers non-concatenative Arabic morphology and fits HPSG-style parsing. It is a design paper: the language is stated as not yet implemented, and no measurements are given.

Ideas

• I1. Split each Hebrew verb into two tables: a binyan template (the prefix and infix pattern of nif'al, hif'il, hitpa'el and the rest) and a vowel melody per aspect and voice (qal perfect, qal imperfect, the passive melodies). Combine them as a main paradigm does, so that entries need only the template and the melody, not the full form. Count the entries saved on one verb class before deciding.
• I2. Monotonic inheritance for weak verbs: write the regular paradigm once and let the classes pe-nun, ayin-waw, lamed-he and pe-guttural override only the slots that change.
• I3. Keep lexical entries as consonant roots only, and let the forms be derived from paradigms. Where a helping paradigm carries a feature label, the Rust side can use an enum for that label, not a string.

For Mova

I1 goes into The verb (binyanim and melodies) and into the lexicon design of tools/hbo; the same split applies to The verb in Biblical Aramaic. I2 goes into The weak verbs. I3 is a design note for the verb module, not a measured gain.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/1621753.1621764

@inproceedings{smets1998paradigmatic,
  title = {{Paradigmatic Treatment of Arabic Morphology}},
  author = {Smets, Martine},
  booktitle = {Computational Approaches to Semitic Languages},
  year = {1998},
  doi = {10.3115/1621753.1621764},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1621753.1621764}
}

References

20 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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