[developers] processing of lexical rules
Ann Copestake
Ann.Copestake at cl.cam.ac.uk
Tue May 3 14:58:26 CEST 2005
The changes to irregs are actually something that needs a bit of thinking
through because it affects how one thinks of their status formally. We could
view irregular morphology as just a funny form of spelling rule that we keep
in the irregs.tab file for convenience (and possibly we construct this from
the lexical db, but again as a matter of convenience). In this case, we are
assuming that any _string_ with this spelling will have this affixation
effect. Right now, the assumption is that any _stem_ will have that
affixation, which is a bit different (it is sort of intermediate with the
approach above and the view that irregular spellings are part of the lexical
specification for a lexeme).
Assuming that irregularity is associated with all lexemes with a particular
orthography (as opposed to individual lexemes) is roughly right for English
(hang/hanged/hung being an exception) but what about other languages? Do we
need to support a version where it is associated with individual lexemes?
If I change the current code as suggested above, will that cause any immediate
problems? (I can't see anything that will go wrong for the ERG though I think
it won't actually help - e.g., it won't capture `undo'/`undid' if we assume
that the bracketing is ((un do) past).)
Ann
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