Abstract
In this article, I shall discuss the treatment of reduplication, and most notably total reduplication in an implemented grammar of Hausa. I shall compare several patterns observed in the language and conclude, on the basis of segmental and suprasegmental properties alike, that partial and total reduplication operate on entirely different structures: phonological representations of limited size (max: CVC) in the case of partial reduplication, and morphological representations, such as stems in the case of total reduplication. Finally, I shall show that partial reduplication can readily be captured by the morphophonological means offered by the underlying formalism, yet argue that total reduplication is best modelled on the basis of a binary morphological construction. I shall propose a formalisation that keeps all of the linguistic generalisations within the grammar proper, yet ensures compositionality and reversibility.
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04 October 2017
Erratum to: Morphology DOI 10.1007/s11525-017-9306-y
Notes
In Hausa both tone and vowel length are distinctive: I mark long vowels with a macron, short vowels being left unmarked. For tone, I follow the Hausaist tradition of marking low with a grave accent, and falling tone with a circumflex. Vowels unmarked for tone are high.
Compared to finite state technology, owing to the fact that character classes are partial descriptions of variables, reduplication itself is surprisingly easy. Factoring of phonological alternations, however, falls short of what is offered by FSTs, a direct consequence of the fact that the DELPH-IN implementation of string unification does not provide pattern unification.
The discussion in this section is mainly concerned with implications in the MRS universe. As pointed out by one of the reviewers, alternative semantic formalisms for HPSG that permit overlap, like Lexical Resource Semantics (Richter and Sailer 2003) may not suffer from the problems outlined here. LRS is currently not supported by DELPH-IN processors, such as LKB, Pet, or Ace. Furthermore, development of the LRS constraint language CLLRS in Trale (Penn 2004) was entirely focused on parsing at the time (Frank Richter, p.c.). Finally, according to Gerald Penn (p.c.), it remains an open research question how the semantic head-driven generation algorithm currently used in Trale can be made to work with underspecified semantics, such as LRS. Thus, comparison must wait until a reversible implementation of LRS becomes available.
Independently of this, both MRS and LRS recognise semantically empty lexical items, e.g. markers, so the approach presented in the next section bears the further advantage to be compatible with both semantic representation languages.
Chart dependencies are declaratively defined as pairs of feature paths where values unidirectionally or bidirectionally depend on each other. Checking is applied at the latest after lexical processing, yet definitely before syntactic parsing.
One reviewer was wondering about the possibility of doing an identity check even earlier on, maybe even before populating the chart with reduplicant hypotheses. However, owing to the fact that other morphological rules, or tone assignment may affect base and reduplicant in different ways, the identity check must be delayed until lexical processing is complete. If chart dependencies were checked before lexical processing, one would end up having to anticipate morphological analysis in the chart mapping component, which constitutes an unwieldy and unnecessary duplication of morphology outside the grammar proper.
All information not pertaining to reduplication has been suppressed for clarity.
Again, post-generation chart mapping was introduced into the Ace generator for reasons independent of reduplication, including conversion of autosegmental phonological structures into diacritically marked surface strings.
This choice is motivated essentially on linguistic grounds, given the parallelism with derived adjectives of sensory quality which display divergent reduplicative patterns in the singular and the plural. In particular, there is no computational obstacle motivating the choice, given that partial reduplicated bases can be simplified to canonical ones straightforwardly, using string unification. Linguistically, such rules are hardly attractive, since the de-palatalisation d needed to derive the surface forms cannot be motivated on the basis of Hausa phonotactics.
Furthermore, this choice is also in line with the standard LFG projection architecture, which maintains that different sub-modules of grammar can be modelled using different formal devices (e.g. finite state transducers for morphology, CFGs for constituent structure, and feature structure unification for functional structure).
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This article has been corrected. During article processing errors were made in the data of Fig. 7. Figure 7 has been updated in the article itself and the current version should be regarded as the final version by the reader.
The ideas proposed in this article have been presented at the workshop on Computational Methods for Descriptive and Theoretical Morphology at the International Morphology Meeting, February 2016 in Vienna, as well as at the DELPH-IN summit, June 2016, at Stanford. I would like to thank the respective audiences for their helpful comments, in particular Mark Aronoff, Francis Bond, Luis Morgado Costa, Dan Flickinger, David Ingman, Rob Malouf, David Moeljadi, Stephan Oepen, and Woodley Packard. Furthermore, I have benefited from discussing several aspects of this work with Gerald Penn, Frank Richter, and Manfred Sailer. Finally, I am also indebted to the anonymous reviewers of Morphology for their helpful remarks and criticism. This work was partially supported by a public grant overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR) as part of the “Investissements d’Avenir” program (reference: ANR-10-LABX-0083).
An erratum to this article is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-017-9308-9.
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Crysmann, B. Reduplication in a computational HPSG of Hausa. Morphology 27, 527–561 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-017-9306-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11525-017-9306-y