Computing with Realizational Morphology

The theory of realizational morphology presented by Stump in his influential book Inflectional Morphology (2001) describes the derivation of inflected surface forms from underlying lexical forms by means of ordered blocks of realization rules. The theory presents a rich formalism for expressing generalizations about phenomena commonly found in the morphological systems of natural languages. This paper demonstrates that, in spite of the apparent complexity of Stump’s formalism, the system as a whole is no more powerful than a collection of regular relations. Consequently, a Stump-style description of the morphology of a particular language such as Lingala or Bulgarian can be compiled into a finite-state transducer that maps the underlying lexical representations directly into the corresponding surface forms or forms, and vice versa, yielding a single lexical transducer. For illustration we will present an explicit finite-state implementation of an analysis of Lingala based on Stump’s description and other sources.