Re: Arabic and BACK TO Self-segregating morphology

On 12/19/05, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> wrote:
>
>
>
> If compounds of two or more words are allowed,
> and your derivational patterns include both prefixes
> and suffixes, it seems that a word of seven syllables
> might be ambiguous, e.g.:
>
> (prefix + word1) + word2
> or
> (word1 + suffix) + word2
> or
> word1 + (prefix + word2)
> or
> word1 + (word2 + suffix)
>
> This might also be an ambiguity re:
> the word boundary in a two-word phrase.
>
>
Well, if we're requiring that it not just have self-segmenting morphemes,
but also be structurally unambiguous, we've got some serious work cut out.
Gotta disambiguate these, too:

prefix + (word1 + word2)
(word1 + word2) + suffix

And once you get more than three... well, it would be a nightmare to work
out completely unless serious restrictions were put on word-formation.

Hmm, that's an engineering problem to give one pause.  Not just word
segmentation or morpheme segmentation or both of these at once, but both of
these *plus* unambiguous morphological structure.

Any takers?

-- Pat

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