Morphotactics as Tier-Based Strictly Local Dependencies

Aksënova, Alëna, Thomas Graf, and Sedigheh Moradi

Abstract It is commonly accepted that morphological dependencies are finite-state in nature. We argue that the upper bound on morphological expressivity is much lower. Drawing on technical results from computational phonology, we show that a variety of morphotactic phenomena are tier-based strictly local and do not fall into weaker subclasses such as the strictly local or strictly piecewise languages. Since the tier-based strictly local languages are learnable in the limit from positive texts, this marks a first important steps towards general machine learning algorithms for morphology. Furthermore, the limitation to tier-based strictly local languages explains typological gaps that are puzzling from a purely linguistic perspective.

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@misc{AksenovaEtAl16Sigmorphontalk,
  author = {Aks\"{e}nova, Al\"{e}na and Graf, Thomas and Moradi, Sedigheh},
  title = {Morphotactics as Tier-Based Strictly Local Dependencies},
  year = {2016},
  note = {Slides of a talk given at the 14th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, August 11, Berlin, Germany}
}

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Wed 27 July 2016 | in Papers |
| morphology | subregular hierarchy | formal language theory | tiers | locality | typology | English | German | Russian | Swahili | Ilocano |

Aksënova, Alëna, Thomas Graf, and Sedigheh Moradi

Abstract It is commonly accepted that morphological dependencies are finite-state in nature. We argue that the upper bound on morphological expressivity is much lower. Drawing on technical results from computational phonology, we show that a variety of morphotactic …
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Wed 26 September 2012 | in Presentations |
| binding | Principle B | finite-state | typology | sign language | English | German |

Graf, Thomas, and Natasha Abner

Abstract Recent results show that both TAG and Minimalist grammars can be enriched with rational constraints without increasing their strong generative capacity, where a constraint is rational iff it can be computed by a bottom-up tree automaton. This raises the …
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