Morphology and the Hierarchical Lexicon

Approaches to morphology typically account for regular, completely productive aaxation, while ignoring sub-regular and semi-productive schemata. I present an alternative approach to derivational morphology which relates exceptions and sub-regularities to the productive rules, and also captures some linguistically relevant generalizations that cannot be expressed in other theories. The data comes from large corpora of written German which I examined for-bar adjectives (= English-able, e.g. lesbar-`read-able'). The approach is formalized in terms of schemata structured in a multiple inheritance hierarchy.