What about Realizational Morphology?
Q: I am under the impression that your book is
committed to the
existence of morphemes, minimal combinations of meaning and form. That
is a very old-fashioned view. Modern theories of morphology such as Realizational Morphology are not
based on that flawed assumption. For example, see Gregory Stump's book Inflectional Morphology. Cambridge
University Press. Cambridge 2001. It argues against
morpheme-based approaches and presents a feature-based theory of
lexical forms and a set of rules of exponence and referral for
projecting combination of features onto surface forms. Am I right in thinking that your approach
is totally incompatible with modern, feature-based, realizational
theories such as Stump's.
A: Funny that you should ask that question.
Karttunen published a paper
in 2003, Computing
with Realizational Morphology, on that very topic. He shows that,
although different in appearance, Stump's system is yet another variant
of finite-state morphology. Using Stump's description of Lingala as the
example, Karttunen shows how it can be inplemented using replace rules,
composition, and substitution. See the code example Realizational Morphology.