Morphology Module

Hi,



John suggested I get in contact RE some issues that have come up involving the representation of morphology in lexica for some of the historical languages I work with.



I’ve been out of the loop for a while regarding the morphology module, but I’ve taken a look at the requests on the wiki and, while some requests are similar, I don’t think I’m repeating any current requests.



  1.  Based on my work on the Old Irish glosses over the past year and a half, I would suggest there is a need to allow morphology to break up a stem. I see John  have raised a similar issue in N15, but what I am suggesting is that Old Irish verbs like “do-beir” in prototonic form should not be split, “tabair”, while in deuterotonic form they should “do” + “beir” (with “beir” being a morphological form of the stem “do-beir”). In this case, while the headword, “do-beir” contains “do”, the morphological form does not, and “do” exists as a separate token.
  2.  It seems that the framework is built around having inflected variants of lexical entries (see N6). If I understand the data structure correctly that would imply that there’s a lexical entry as a head, and each variant of that lexical entry is assumed to be an inflected variant, or word form. What if there are two or more tokens which look different, but represent the same word form under the one lexical entry? Is there a way to allow for such variants as Latin, nĕgōtĭum, negōtium, and negotium (all of which may be found in different sources to represent the same word form), to exist as the same word form under a given lexical entry? Or would they be assumed to be different variants, though, they are in fact the same?

I’ll take part in the upcoming telco in case it would be helpful to discuss any of these issues further.

Is mise, le meas,
Adrian Doyle