Disjunctive rule ordering in finite state morphology”. Paper presented at the 41st Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society

Paradigm Function Morphology (PFM; Stump, 2001) is an elaborated realization-based theory of inflectional morphology which is notable for its empirical scope and formal precision. As Karttunen (2003) shows, most of the apparatus of PFM can be straightforwardly mapped onto regular expressions or finite state machines (FSMs). However, Karttunen’s implementation sim-plifies Stump’s theory slightly by assuming that at most one rule per block may be compatible with any given form. This allows rule blocks to be compiled into FSMs simply by composing the FSMs which implement the individual realization rules. However, this precludes the case where more than one potentially applicable rules competes to apply to a particular form. In what Stump argues is a crucial feature of PFM, such rule competition should be resolved ac-cording to Pān. ini’s principle: within each rule block, only the applicable rule with the narrowest domain is applied. In this talk, we will describe an alternative implementation of PFM as FSMs using van Noord and Gerdemann’s (2001) FSA Utilities. This implementation, while otherwise similar in many respects to Karttunen’s, uses Pān. ini’s principle to resolve rule competition and so is more faithful to Stump’s version of PFM