A Computational Analysis of Navajo Verb Stems

1 Introduction One of the principal goals of linguistics is to find, classify, and describe relationships between words. Many formal mechanisms such as rules and constraints have been devised in order to show systematic relationships. Inflectional paradigms are a crucial component of a linguistic analysis that has applications for pedagogical grammars. For example, over the past 20 years there have been numerous Navajo textbooks produced that are aimed at beginning learners of the language. These include works such as Diné However, there is one important feature of Navajo grammar which none of these works deals with directly, namely the inflection of the verb stem. For instance, Faltz (1998), while providing a remarkably lucid treatment of the verbal prefix systems, has comparatively little to say about patterns of verb stem inflection. This is true also of the two large Young & Morgan dictionaries (1987, 1992) that serve as the primary reference works on Navajo. Verb stem inflectional patterns in Navajo are arguably one of the most intractable problems in modern Athabaskan linguist studies. While all Ath-abaskan languages display complex systems of verb stem inflection (see