A procedure for morphological encoding

In many languages a word may be identified, on the syntactic level, by a single vocabulary element or lexeme and a single term from each of a set of closed grammatical categories. For example, the Italian verb form canterá (possible translation: “he will sing”) may be identified, on the one hand, by a vocabulary element which we symbolize in the form CANTARE and, on the other, by the terms “Future” (Fu) and “non-Past” (nonPa) from the categories TENSE and TENSE, the term “Indicative” (Ind) from the category MOOD, and the terms “third Person” (3) and “singular” (sg) from the categories PERSON and NUMBER. (The categories TENSE [Future and non-Future] and TENSE [Past and nonPast] are postulated on morphological grounds: this proposal is tentative but may well have syntactic and semantic justification. The various forms discussed in this paper are customarily displayed in paradigms; for example, see Reynolds [1962] for the paradigms of MANDARE, a verb of the same class as CANTARE, and STARE [see below]. A less “traditional” account of Italian morphology, though inevitably dated, can be found in Hall [1949].) Future, Indicative, etc., are interpreted here as properties (we will call them morphosyntactic properties) of the word concerned. Thus canterá, we will say, is that form of the vocabulary element CANTARE which has all and only the morphosyntactic properties non-Past, Future, Indicative, third Person, and singular. For such a syntactic representation we will employ the notation