One-Level Prosodic Morphology

Abstract

Recent developments in theoretical linguistics have lead to a widespread acceptance of constraint-based analyses of prosodic morphology phenomena such as truncation, infixation, floating morphemes and reduplication. Of these, reduplication is particularly challenging for state-of-the-art computational morphology, since it involves copying of some part of a phonological string. In this paper I argue for certain extensions to the one-level model of phonology and morphology (Bird & Ellison 1994) to cover the computational aspects of prosodic morphology using finite-state methods. In a nutshell, enriched lexical representations provide additional automaton arcs to repeat or skip sounds and also to allow insertion of additional material. A kind of resource consciousness is introduced to control this additional freedom, distinguishing between producer and consumer arcs. The non-finite-state copying aspect of reduplication is mapped to automata intersection, itself a non-finite-state operation. Bounded local optimization prunes certain automaton arcs that fail to contribute to linguistic optimisation criteria. The paper then presents implemented case studies of Ulwa construct state infixation, German hypocoristic truncation and Tagalog over-applying reduplication that illustrate the expressive power of this approach, before its merits and limitations are discussed and possible extensions are sketched. I conclude that the one-level approach to prosodic morphology presents an attractive way of extending finite-state techniques to difficult phenomena that hitherto resisted elegant computational analyses.