Explorations on Positionwise Flag Diacritics in Finite-State Morphology

A novel technique of adding positionwise flags to one-level finite state lexicons is presented. The proposed flags are kinds of morphophonemic markers and they constitute a flexible method for describing morphophonological processes with a formalism that is tightly coupled with lexical entries and rule-like regular expressions. The formalism is inspired by the techniques used in two-level rule compilation and it practically compiles all the rules in parallel, but in an efficient way. The technique handles morphophonological processes without a separate morphophonemic representation. The occurrences of the allomorphophonemes in latent phonological strings are tracked through a dynamic data structure into which the most prominent (i.e. the best ranked) flags are collected. The application of the technique is suspected to give advantages when describing the morphology of Bantu languages and dialects.