A Deterministic Finite State Automaton for the Oriya Negative Verbal Forms

This paper discusses the processing of negative verbal forms in Oriya in a deterministic Finite State Automaton. A morphologically agglutinative language like Oriya has ‘phrasal’ or ‘constituent’ negation, where tense, aspect etc. impose restrictions on NEG marking. Negation can be marked by various NEG morphemes in various positions of the verbal form, but is marked only once. That is, the occurrence of a NEG morpheme restricts the occurrence of any other NEG marker in the verbal form. Such multiple positional slots for the NEG morpheme with respect to tense, aspect poses constraint for the processing of the string by FSA. The FSA being a unidirectional machine, cannot backtrack, and thus, cannot account for such mutual exclusiveness of the items if all the three NEG items are available in a single chart. So, to account for this problem, we propose different types of processing for the different positional slots of NEG morphemes.