A finite-state morphological analysis of Tswana nouns
Rigardt Pretorius, Biffie Viljoen, Laurette Pretorius · South African Journal of African Languages · 2005
This article describes the progress made in developing a broad-coverage computational morphological analyser for Tswana, an agglutinative disjunctively written indigenous South African language. Two central questions are addressed, viz. what is essential in order to build a broad-coverage computational morphological analyser/generator and how do we go about building this software application? In answer to the first question, a precise linguistic description is required of the linguistic phenomena mechanisms governing the morphology of the relevant natural language, in this case Tswana, the accurate modelling and implementation of these morphological phenomena and, ideally speaking, a complete list of all and only the valid roots and stems in Tswana. The answer to the second question lies within the realm of the discipline of software engineering and its methodologies. The article discusses the development of a morphological analyser with respect to the appropriate life cycle model, tools and testing procedures; Tswana noun morphology, in particular, the relevant morphotactics and morphophonological alternation rules; their modelling and implementation: preliminary results; testing procedures and future work.