Incorporating metaphonemes in a multilingual lexicon
Carole Tiberius, Lynne J. Cahill · 2000
This paper describes a framework for multilingual inheritance-based lexical representation which allows sharing of information across languages at all levels of linguistic description. The paper focuses on phonology. It explores the possibility of establishing a phoneme inventory for a group of languages in which language-specific phonemes function as "allophones" of newly defined metaphonemes. Dutch, English, and German were taken as a test bed and their vowel phoneme inventories were studied. The results of the cross-linguistic analysis are presented in this paper. The paper concludes by showing how these metaphonemes can be incorporated in a multilingual lexicon.