The Inflectional Phonology of German Adjectives, Determiners and Pronouns

This is the first of a series of papers that, taken together, will give an essentially complete account of inflection in standard German. In this paper we present that part of the account that covers adjectives, determiners and third person pronouns, one that captures all the regularities, subregularities and irregularities that are involved. The forms are defined in terms of their syllable structure, as proposed in Cahill (1990a, 1990b, 1993). The morphological treatment is based on ideas originally set out by Zwicky (1985). The analysis is formulated as a DATR theory -- a set of lexical axioms -- from which all the relevant facts follow as theorems. DATR is a widely used formal lexical knowledge representation language developed for use in computational linguistics. 1 Introduction Inflectional paradigms in a given language typically resemble each other in all but a few characteristics. What is needed is a natural way of saying "this paradigm is just like this paradigm except for thi..