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German noun inflection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 1999

LYNNE CAHILL  and
GERALD GAZDAR
LYNNE CAHILL
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
GERALD GAZDAR
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Abstract

This is the second of a series of three papers that, taken together, will give an essentially complete account of inflection in standard German. In this paper we present that part of the account that covers nouns, one that captures all the regularities, subregularities and irregularities that are involved, but with a focus on the subregularities. Inflected forms are defined in terms of their syllable structure, as proposed in Cahill (1990a, b, 1993). The analysis is formulated as a DATR theory – a set of lexical axioms – from which all the relevant facts follow as theorems. DATR is a widely used formal lexical knowledge representation language developed for use in computational linguistics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 1 - 42
Copyright
1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The present paper is a direct descendant of a talk (‘The lexical representation of German morphology’) given at the Autumn Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain at UMIST in Manchester on 22nd September 1989 (the fragment as presented there is included in Roger Evans & Gerald Gazdar (eds.) (1990). TheDATRpapers. University of Sussex: Cognitive Science Research Paper CSRP 139. 85–93.). We thank members of the audience for their comments on that occasion. And we thank those attending the June 1996 ESRC Frontiers of Research in Morphology Seminar at Surrey, especially Grev Corbett and Andy Spencer, for their comments on an oral presentation of a much more recent version of the analysis. We are grateful to Jim Kilbury for his detailed comments on the May 1995 edition of the DATR fragment. And we are grateful to our two JL referees, to Jim Kilbury and to Dieter Wunderlich for their comments on the original manuscript of this paper. This research is supported by a grant Multilingual lexical knowledge representation, (R000235724) to the authors from the ESRC (UK).