The use of formal language models in the typology of the morphology of Amerindian languages

PORTA, ANDRÉS

Proceedings of the ACL 2010 Student Research Workshop

ACL

Año: 2010

The aim of this work is to present some preliminary results of an investigation in course on the typology of the morphology of the native South American languages from the point of view of the formal language theory. With this object, we give two contrasting examples of descriptions of two Aboriginal languages finite verb forms morphology: Argentinean Quechua (quichua santiagueño) and Toba. The description of the morphology of the finite verb forms of Argentinean quechua, uses finite automata and finite transducers. In this case the construction is straight forward using two level morphology and then, describes in a very natural way the Argentinean Quechua morphology using a regular language. On the contrary, the Toba verbs morphology, with a system that simultaneously uses prefixes and suffixes, has not a natural description as regular language. Toba has a complex system of causative suffixes, whose successive applications determinate the use of prefixes belonging different person marking prefix sets. We adopt the solution of Creider et al. (1995) to naturally deal with this and other similar morphological processes which involve interactions between prefixes and suffixes and then we describe the toba morphology using linear context-free languages.