initial consonant alternation
Catherine Crawford
interest.
I am working periodically on a Fulfulde dictionary that already has many
lexical entries, and in particular on inserting morphology as it occurs
in my texts. I'm not sure how to tackle initial consonant alternation,
which occurs on nouns and verbs and mostly marks singular and plural
(except where it is on subject-verb inversions). Does anyone have
experience of this or ideas for how to show it?
Thanks,
Catherine Crawford
Jeff and Peg Shrum
I am working periodically on a Fulfulde dictionary that already has many
lexical entries, and in particular on inserting morphology as it occurs
in my texts. I'm not sure how to tackle initial consonant alternation,
which occurs on nouns and verbs and mostly marks singular and plural
(except where it is on subject-verb inversions). Does anyone have
experience of this or ideas for how to show it?
-------------------------------------------------------
The key is using the Lexeme and citation fields. The lexeme field should
have the root/stem minus the prefix/consonant indicating plural or singular.
The prefix/consonants would appear as separate morphemes in the lexicon.
In this way you can manually parse the words and teach the parser how to
divide the word into morphemes. I do not know what is standard practice in
West Africa, but on this side, the singular form of nouns is used for the
citation form of the entry. A custom field can then be created for plurals.
If plurals can be generated by predictable rule from the singular form, then
a field for the plural is probably not necessary.
I would use a similar approach for verbs, but they are probably much more
complex than nouns. Still entering the root or stem minus as many affixes
as possible would be my suggestion.
Jeff S.
Milange, Mozambique
Andreas Joswig
alternating on all morphemes, so that you can treat it as a prefix. If the
consonants are different for each morpheme, however, then it would be better
using different stems - the singular stem would be the default one, shown on
the entry level, and the plural stem would be an alternate form (you enter
these below the sense section of an entry). In the grammar tab of FLEx you
can then give stem names (like singular and plural) and even inflection
features which go with each stem. That's the way I do it in such a
situation.
Andreas
Catherine Crawford wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
Jeff S.
Milange, Mozambique
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Richard Gravina
stems as alternate forms, as Andreas has described. However, some of the
plurals, whilst 'predictable' can be almost unrecognizable to non-native
speakers after the initial consonant and suffix have changed. If your target
audience is non-native speakers, you may wish to have the plurals in the
dictionary as minor entries, in which case it would be better to enter them
as inflectional variants.
These aren't really prefix consonants, but certain articulatory features get
added or removed, so it wouldn't be good to separate them in this particular
language.
Richard Gravina
Catherine Crawford
feature. I shall explore them all and do some experimenting. I agree
with Richard, however, that it is not appropriate to treat the
alternating consonants as prefixes because they are integral with the
stem: if they were absent, stems would not be recognisable.
Catherine Crawford