Modeling and implementing non canonical morphological phenomena

Non-canonical inflection (deponency, heteroclisis. . . ) is extensively studied in theoretical morphology. However, these studies often lack practical implementations associated with large-scale lexica. Yet these are precisely the requirements for objective comparative studies on the complexity of morphological descriptions. We show how parsli, our model of inflectional morphology, manages to represent many non-canonical phenomena and to formalise them in way allowing for their subsequent implementation. We illustrate it with data about a variety of languages. We expose experiments conducted on the complexity of four competing descriptions of French verbal inflection, which is evaluated using the information-theoretic concept of description length. We show that the new concepts introduced in parsli reduce the complexity of morphological descriptions w.r.t. both traditional or more recent models. MOTS-CLÉS : parsli, flexion, structure de paradigme, canonicité, zone flexionnelle, schème flexionnel, schème de radicaux, complexité de description, MDL.