[developers] Reduplication in morpholgy

[Berthold Crysmann]

Hi Francis,

I guess you only worry about total reduplication. While in principle in 
Chinese you could get away with using string unification (thanks to the 
script, word length is limited), but specifying the letter set will not 
be much for for either humans or machines....

I am currently working on total reduplication in my Hausa grammar. I had 
a first solution that is non-compositional in the semantics. I.e. I just 
use a binary rule that glues the stuff together, conditioned on identity 
of predicates, but throws away the semantic contribution in the 
reduplicant. Works in parsing, but needs *item-specific* trigger rules 
in generation.

Right now, I am exploring with ersatzing. Things should work well as 
long as only one of the reduplicants undergoes additional morphology. 
Otherwise, you'll have to memoise parts of the original string, so you 
can apply regular morphophonological changes to the reduplicant. Seems 
to work in the LKB.

I shall commit that new analysis very soon. I shall also send you a 
detailed description.

Cheers,

Berthold

On 08/09/15 15:28, Francis Bond wrote:
> G'day,
>
> we are working with a couple of languages where we would like to be
> able to write lexical rules that do things like:
>
> Take a two character word in Chinese (AB)
> AB -> ABAB
> AB -> AABB
> AB -> AAB
> AB -> ABXAB (where X is fixed by the rule)
> AB -> AXAB
> AB -> AXB
>
> Take a one character word (A):
> A -> AA
> A -> AXA
> A -> AAX
>
> In Indonesian we want to take an arbitrary word and produce a duplicate
> w -> w-w   (kasus -> kasus-kasus)
>
> More examples here:
> http://moin.delph-in.net/LADChineseReduplication
> and
> http://moin.delph-in.net/LADChineseAnotA
>
> Is this (or some of this) possible with the DELPH-IN tools?  If so,
> can someone explain how to do it (or point to a paper or website that
> tells us how to do it)?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
>


-- 
Berthold Crysmann <crysmann at linguist.jussieu.fr>
CNRS, Laboratoire de linguistique formelle (UMR 7110), U Paris Diderot
Case 7031, 5 rue Thomas Mann, 75205 Paris cedex 13
Bureau 545, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, rue Albert Einstein, 75013 Paris