PMKNS for PIE: Parsed Morphological KATR Networks of Sanskrit for Proto-Indo-European

In this thesis, I construct two computational networks for Sanskrit to test theories of nominal accentuation as a way of examining the simplicity of each theory. I will be examining the Paradigmatic Approach and the Compositional Approach to nominal accentuation. For the Paradigmatic Approach, nominals are categorized into mobile and static categories based on how the accent appears in the paradigm (Fortson 2010). For the Compositional Approach, accent mobility is a result of the combination of morphemes and their inherent accent states (Kirparsky 2010). To construct these networks, I use the KATR extension to the DATR language for lexical knowledge representation (Finkel et al. 2002). In Chapter 1, I give an overview of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) accentuation and KATR. Chapter 2 presents my methods and connects the hypothetical nature of PIE to the well-documented Indo-European (IE) language Sanskrit. In Chapters 3 and 4, I use a guided derivation of a Sanskrit r-stem nominal pitr̥- and a Sanskrit a-stem nominal sukha- to walk us through each step. Chapter 5 is an analysis of my results for the two networks from chapters 3 and 4 and then the overall conclusions I have drawn from the project and suggests further areas of expansion