Syntagmatic and paradigmatic issues in computational morphology

Abstract - In this paper some germane theoretical issues in inflectional morphology will be addressed from a computational point of view. In particular we shall focus on the proper treatment of verb stem allomorphy in Italian conjugation and discuss several different formal solutions in some detail. To put our discussion on a more computational footing, all our examples are illustrated by using the DATR formalism as our metalanguage. This allows us to combine the advantages of the advanced expressive power and flexibility of DATR with the further bonus of offering a running piece of program code that actually works on the discussed examples. The upshot of the paper is that a computational treatment of Italian conjugation can considerably benefit from recent theoretical advances in word and paradigm morphology, as this level of description allows the rule writer to capture generalizations which would otherwise completely elude a purely syntagmatic approach to allomorphy.