Recursion Problems in Concatenation : A Case of Korean Morphology

Without properly constraining recursions in generation, no language system can effectively operate. This is especially so with morphological generation, for each well-formed word must be finite in length and is accepted as such only when it actually occurs in text or ordinary usage. This difficulty is compounded when a language system tries to maintain a single rule of concatenation and apply it repeatedly in order to combine a nominal or verbal stem with a sequence of suffixes in a time-linear manner. In an agglutinative language like Korean, however, it can easily be demonstrated how a language system like Malaga, based on time-linear grammars like Hausser's [1] Left-Associative Grammar, can properly be implemented to constrain undesirable recursive loops in generation. Both nominal and verbal concatenations in Korean are treated in this paper to show how infinite loops can be blocked by imposing appropriate matching conditions on two adjacent input strings to concatenation.