An Inheritance-Based Description of Bulgarian Noun Inflection

This paper discusses an analysis of Bulgarian noun inflection that uses non-monotonic inheritance and abstract morphophonemic representation. The analysis is encoded in the lexical knowledge representation language DATR. In this discussion, we approach Bulgarian noun inflection in terms close to those of Network Morphology (cf. Corbett & Fraser (1993)) and related theories of inflection. Thus, an essential feature of the analysis is that inflectional types are represented as objects within a nonmonotonic inheritance hierarchy that gives an explicit account of regularities, subregularities and exceptions through highly constrained lexical entries, default inflectional class(es) and non-productive class(es). Our goal has been to make a precise and explicit description allowing economical lexical entries. We decided to use abstract morphophonemic representations to simplify the description of alternations and the morphotactics. For example, the phoneme i has at least three sources: i1, i2 and ы. The i that is not involved in morphophonemic alternations is transliterated as i, while the i that triggers 2 palatalization is marked in the lexicon as 2 but surfaces as i in the generated forms. This may look like diachronic description but is not; rather our description is synchronic and applicationoriented since the use of deep morphophonemic representations is 1 For details on the transcription cf. the table in Appendix 1. always motivated by synchronic alternations. Nouns in Bulgarian have two inflectional categories – number and definiteness, and one structural category – gender. The most important elements through which the paradigmatic oppositions are described are the base, sg stem suffixes (suff sg), plural stem suffixes (suff pl), inflections (flex pl) and articles. The base of a noun is the part that is left after the inflectional elements such as singular and plural stem suffixes, endings and articles have been removed. Thus, the base in Bulgarian consists of optional prefixes, root(s), and optional suffixes. For example, the word uchilishte ‘school’ splits into the base uchilisht and the sg stem suffix e. The suffix isht belongs to the base as it appears in all forms of the lexeme. The same suffix however, may appear as an inflectional element, e.g. a plural stem suffix, cf. kup ‘heap’ – kupisht-a ‘heaps’ where a is the plural ending and isht is a plural stem suffix. The sg stem suffixes define the gender of the noun. Every noun in Bulgarian belongs to one of the three genders masculine 2 For a detailed description of nominal number systems cf. Corbett (2000).