[Lexicog] In Shoebox / Toolbox, how does one deal with zero allomorphs?

[Mike Maxwell]

Susan Gehr wrote:
> In Shoebox / Toolbox, how does one deal with zero allomorphs?
>
> Specifically, how should I represent them in the dictionary database? What
> about interlinearization?

There are, as you say, two problems here: the dictionary representation,
and interlinearization.  As for the latter, I have no idea how the
Shoebox parser handles zero (allo)morphs, so I'll leave that to someone
else (and I notice that Steve White has just responded on this point).

As to the dictionary representation--let me expand your question to talk
both about zero _morphemes_ and zero _allomorphs_.  And I'll assume that
we're talking about zero affixes in both cases (zero roots are, I
suppose, possible, depending on your theory, but I'm not going to talk
about that).

For zero morphemes, I can't imagine anyone trying to look them up.  You
have to already know the morphology of the language pretty well to even
try to look up a zero morpheme, and if you know it that well, you
probably don't need to look it up.  Nor is it clear how you would
represent such a thing--the digit zero, maybe.  At any rate, I would
expect zero morphemes to be discussed in the grammar.  (Of course,
depending on your theory, you may not believe in zero morphemes, or in
flying saucers.  But that's a different question...)

As for zero affixal allomorphs--your question--I guess the answer would
depend in part on how you treat other (non-zero) allomorphs.  Let's
suppose for the sake of illustration that your printed dictionary
includes them in the same lex entry as the "main" allomorph, maybe like
this:

	-s (-es after 's', 'sh', or 'ch'): 1. plural suffix
		on nouns.  2....

Then for a zero affix, you might do s.t. like this:

	-i (omitted after vowel-final words): imperative

If OTOH you alphabetize allomrphs separately (particularly if they would
fall a long ways from the "major" allomorph in alphabetic order), I
guess it would be a more difficult call.  But given the obvious
difficulty in alphabetizing nothing, you might still elect to treat them
the way I have indicated above.

Your original question was on how to treat them in Shoebox, and what
I've talked about is how to present them (what we called a "view" in
LinguaLinks), in part because this distinction is not not real strong in
Shoebox.  But you could get the effect I discuss above by having an
allomorph field, which I assume is what your \a field is, then doing
some post-processing to create your publication view.  The \a field is
basically the solution used in the AMPLE parser (for which see the AMPLE
book by Weber, Black and McConnel), which (in its original incarnation)
used an SFM-based lexicon.  AMPLE is still the morphological parser of
choice in languages for which the Shoebox parser makes the wrong
assumptions.

--
	Mike Maxwell
	Linguistic Data Consortium
	maxwell at ldc.upenn.edu


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