Parallel Forms in Estonian Finite State Morphology
Heiki-Jaan Kaalep · 2018
Parallel forms are two or more synonymous forms that convey an identical set of morpho-syntactic categories in a paradigm cell of a word.They deserve attention from a theoretical linguistic, as well as from a computational point of view.How do humans know which form to choose, and how should this preference be modelled computationally?The paper gives an overview of parallel forms in Estonian and discusses reasons for surface form variation.A considerable part of the article is dedicated to a simplified, but still technically detailed example of handling parallel plural partitive forms, one of which is more common, and the other a rarer form.An example is used to explicate the proposed method of handling parallel forms in finite state morphology, coupled with considerations of their preferencial choice.The method involves using a combination of two-level rules as a way of controlling the combinatorial explosion of continuation lexicons.The design has been implemented to fully cover the inflectional morphology of Estonian.