Morphotactics

 

As long as we restrict ourselves to matters of inflection, defining the morphotactics of English and German words is about as simple as it could be. By default, they consist of a stem and a suffix and, by default, the stem is a monosyllable, as illustrated in this figure.

  

Figure 4: Default word structure for English and German

As with syllable structure, simple context-free phrase structure rules apply:

stem $\rightarrow$ syllable
word $\rightarrow$ stem suffix

Given our definition of Syllable, this statement of basic English and German word structure can be readily encoded in DATR as follows:

Word:
    <> == Syllable
    <mor word> == "<phn root form>" "<mor suffix>".

Notice that the <mor suffix> path will default to the null sequence via the link to Syllable and thence to Null unless it gets defined at a point lower in the hierarchy. This very general default does useful work throughout an account of inflection.

Exercise 6024

Define a plausible basic morphotactics for Vietnamese.

Exercise 6025

Define a basic morphotactics for a language in which inflection is standardly marked by a prefix and in which word stems are mostly disyllabic.