The semantics of MOLUSC
Lynne J. Cahill, Gerald J. M. Gazdar · 1990
Much recent work in computational morphology has presupposed that morphological operations are definable on strings of phonological or graphemic objects. By contrast, theoretical linguistic work has moved from a string-based view to one in which the relevant operations are defined on syllable sequences, where syllables are small shallow trees whose terminal symbols are phonological objects. We exhibit the syntax and semantics of a formal language, MOLUSC, whose only purpose is to permit the definition of functions which map syllable sequences to syllable sequences. Our working assumption is that such a language, combined with an inheritancebased lexical representation language, provides the basis for a morphological framework which is both computationally tractable and linguistically well-founded. In the version of MOLUSC presented here, we omit some aspects of the full language and simplify others. Our semantics makes crucial and pervasive use of Gorn tree domains. Extensions to the s...