A Two-Level Computer Formalism for the Analysis of Bantu Morphology An Application to Swahili

SWATWOL is a computer program which has been designed to analyze morphologically Standard Swahili texts. It is based on Koskenniemi's (1983) already well-known two-level model. A number of applications of this model on various languages exist already. Some of those are very ambitious and almost complete (Koskenniemi 1983; Karlsson 1992), others being still in various stages of development. The implementations have concerned so far such languages, where inflection and derivation is taken care of primarily by means of suffixation. This is the first effort to apply the two-level model to a primarily prefixing language. SWATWOL includes a full description of Swahili inflectional morphology and morphophonology and contains a lexicon system with more than 25 000 lexical entries. The program identifies and analyzes all correct word-forms as far as the lexical items are listed in the lexicon. The extensive tests on various types of Swahili texts described below indicate that the coverage and precision of the program are close to perfection.