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<Paper uid="W02-0502">
  <Title>Generating Hebrew verb morphology by default inheritance hierarchies</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Recent research into the nature of morphology suggests that the best definitions of a natural language's inflectional system are inferential and realizational (Stump, 2001). A definition is inferential if it represents inflectional exponents as markings associated with the application of rules by which complex word forms are deduced from simpler roots and stems; an inferential definition of this sort contrasts with a lexical definition, according to which an inflectional exponent's association with a particular set of morphosyntactic properties is simply stated in the lexicon, in exactly the way that the association between a lexeme's formal and contentive properties is stipulated. In addition, a definition of a language's inflectional system is realizational if it deduces a word's inflectional exponents from its grammatical properties; a realizational definition contrasts with an incremental definition, according to which words acquire morphosyntactic properties only by acquiring the morphology which expresses those properties.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The conclusion that inflectional systems should be defined realizationally rather than incrementally is favored by a range of evidence, such as the widespread incidence of extended exponence in inflectional morphology and the fact that a word's inflectional exponents often under-determine its morphosyntactic content (Stump, 2001). Moreover, inferential-realizational definitions can avoid certain theoretically unmotivated distinctions upon which lexical or incremental definitions often depend. For instance, inferential-realizational definitions do not entail that concatenative and nonconcatenative morphology are fundamentally different in their grammatical status; they do not necessitate the postulation of any relation between inflectional markings and morphosyntactic properties other than the relation of simple exponence; and they are compatible with the assumption that a word form's morphological representation is not distinct from its phonological representation.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Various means of defining a language's inflectional morphology in inferential-realizational terms are imaginable. In an important series of articles (Corbett and Fraser, 1993; Fraser and Corbett, 1995; Fraser and Corbett, 1997), Greville Corbett and Norman Fraser proposed Network Morphology, an inferential-realizational morphological framework that makes extensive use of nonmonotonic inheritance hierarchies to represent the information constituting a language's inflectional system. Analyses in Network Morphology are implemented in DATR, a formal language for representing lexical knowledge designed and implemented by Roger Evans and Gerald Gazdar (Evans and Gazdar, 1989).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> In recent work, we have extended DATR, creating KATR, which is both a formal language and a computer program that generates desired forms by interpreting that language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In this paper, we show how KATR can be used to provide an inferential-realizational definition of Hebrew verb morphology. Our objectives are twofold.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> First, we propose some general strategies for exploiting the capabilities of nonmonotonic inheritance hierarchies in accounting for the properties of &amp;quot;root-and-pattern&amp;quot; verb inflection in Hebrew; second, we discuss some specific capabilities that distinguish KATR from DATR and show why these added capabilities are helpful to account for the Hebrew facts.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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