Morphological Productivity in the Lexicon

In this paper we outline a lexical organization for Turkish that makes use of lexical rules for inflections, derivations, and lexical category changes to control the proliferation of lexical entries. Lexical rules handle changes in grammatical roles, enforce type constraints, and control the mapping of subcategorization frames in valency-changing operations. A lexical inheritance hierarchy facilitates the enforcement of type constraints. Semantic compositions in inflections and derivations are constrained by the properties of the terms and predicates. The design has been tested as part of a HPSG grammar for Turkish. In terms of performance, run-time execution of the rules seems to be a far better alternative than pre-compilation. The latter causes exponential growth in the lexicon due to intensive use of inflections and derivations in Turkish.Comment: 10 pages LaTeX, {lingmacros,avm,psfig}.sty, 1 figure, 1 bibtex fil

Design and implementation of a spelling checker for Turkish

This paper presents the design and implementation of a spelling checker for Turkish. Turkish is an agglutinative language in which words are formed by affixing a sequence of morphemes to a root word. Parsing agglutinative word structures has attracted relatively little attention except for application areas for general purpose morphological processors. Parsing words in such languages even for spelling checking purposes requires substantial morphological and morphophonemic analysis techniques, and spelling correction (not addressed in this paper) is significantly more complicated. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a morphological root-driven parser for Turkish word structures which has been incorporated into a spelling checking kernel for on-line Turkish text. The agglutinative nature of the language complex word formations, various phonetic harmony rules, and subtle exceptions present certain difficulties not usually encountered in the spelling checking of languages like English and make this a very challenging problem. © 1993 Oxford University Press

Aspirated and Unaspirated Voiceless Consonants in Old Tibetan

Although Tibetan orthography distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated voiceless consonants, various authors have viewed this distinction as not phonemic. An examination of the unaspirated voiceless initials in the Old Tibetan Inscriptions, together with unaspirated voiceless consonants in several Tibetan dialects confirms that aspiration was either not phonemic in Old Tibetan, or only just emerging as a distinction due to loan words. The data examined also affords evidence for the nature of the phonetic word in Old Tibetan

Design and implementation of a spelling checker for Turkish

Ankara : Department of Computer Engineering and Information Sciences and Institute of Engineering and Sciences, Bilkent Univ., 1991.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 1991.Includes bibliographical references leaves 108-111Solak, AyşınM.S

Strategies for Representing Tone in African Writing Systems

Tone languages provide some interesting challenges for the designers of new orthographies. One approach is to omit tone marks, just as stress is not marked in English (zero marking). Another approach is to do phonemic tone analysis and then make heavy use of diacritic symbols to distinguish the `tonemes' (exhaustive marking). While orthographies based on either system have been successful, this may be thanks to our ability to manage inadequate orthographies rather than to any intrinsic advantage which is afforded by one or the other approach. In many cases, practical experience with both kinds of orthography in sub-Saharan Africa has shown that people have not been able to attain the level of reading and writing fluency that we know to be possible for the orthographies of non-tonal languages. In some cases this can be attributed to a sociolinguistic setting which does not favour vernacular literacy. In other cases, the orthography itself might be to blame. If the orthography of a tone language is difficult to user or to learn, then a good part of the reason, I believe, is that the designer either has not paid enough attention to the function of tone in the language, or has not ensured that the information encoded in the orthography is accessible to the ordinary (non-linguist) user of the language. If the writing of tone is not going to continue to be a stumbling block to literacy efforts, then a fresh approach to tone orthography is required, one which assigns high priority to these two factors. This article describes the problems with orthographies that use too few or too many tone marks, and critically evaluates a wide range of creative intermediate solutions. I review the contributions made by phonology and reading theory, and provide some broad methodological principles to guide someone who is seeking to represent tone in a writing system. The tone orthographies of several languages from sub-Saharan Africa are presented throughout the article, with particular emphasis on some tone languages of Cameroon