[Lexicog] Re: Citation forms in Prefixing Languages

[Mike Maxwell]

canfield66 wrote:
> I have been thinking about athabaskan (specifically navajo)
> dictionaries for awhile and had the following thoughts:
<snip>
> 1. The user still has to find and highlight the stem. Poser has
> suggested that a
> morphological anlyser is needed and this would be good but would
> probably be brittle (at
> least if I made one!). Can users find the stem easily?

Stems in Athabaskan languages in general (and in Navajo in particular) are
not necessarily contiguous, are they?  That is, something that you would
want to list in the lexicon as a stem (e.g. on the grounds that the meaning
of the whole is not transparently related to the meaning of its parts) can,
in a surface form, contain inflectional affixes in between parts of the
stem.  This is not due to infixation, but rather to the fact that it not the
case in Athabaskan that inflectional morphemes are always outside of
derivational morphemes.

This is reminiscent of the fact that in English, inflection appears between
the verb stem and the particle in particle verbs (e.g. "John was running up
a bill").  Except that in English, the particle is written separate from the
verb, whereas in Athabaskan the outer derivational morphemes are written
solid with the verb root and its inflection.  (The Athabaskan systems is of
course much more complex than English!)

So even if the users did know enough morphology to know which parts of a
given verb form were inflectional and which parts were the stem, they might
have to highlight multiple parts of a single stem (at least in certain forms
of the paradigm).

FWIW, I have heard that the average user has a great deal of difficulty in
manually parsing Athabaskan verb forms into their components.  It is perhaps
like the Arabic case, only more so.

> 3. There are still a bunch of nagging little surface form problems
> that would have to be
> dealt with even with this manual 'user selection of the stem' routine
> (both stem initial and final). For example, (using the TNR Navajo
> font number scheme) the word da'iid33' gets a falling tone when
> affixed as in da'iid32'go (where 3 is hightone/nasal 'a' and 2 is
> nasal 'a')- this means that the user would be highlighting d32' when
> the dictionary form of the stem
> is d33'. My impression is that there are not too many of these and it
> is practical to put
> them into the lexicon documents, but I may be wrong on this.

There's lots of other allomorphy, isn't there?  To the extent that some
morphemes (I can't recall whether they are derivational or inflectional) are
virtually invisible in certain forms (or at least reduced to a single
phonological feature).

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



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