A Finite State Approach to Abkhaz Morphology and Stress

The West Caucasian language Abkhaz is characterized by a rich but rather regular agglutinative morphology. Word stress, however, is free and dynamic and difficult to predict. A theory of stress in Abkhaz has been developed by V. Dybo, A. Spruit and L. Trigo which predicts word stress correctly in the majority of cases. Although stress is not orthographically marked, its position determines the surface representation of Schwa. Thus, in a morphological analyser for the language, stress rules have to be incorporated in order to be able to properly parse and generate orthographic forms. I show how a finite state morphological analyser for Abkhaz can be built that uses the rules developed by Trigo et al.