A two-level description of written French

In his thesis, K. Koskenniemi presents a new model for morpholo­ gical description, two-level morphology (l). The model has two components: 1) a lexicon component 2) a rule component The lexicon component consists of lexicons for different mor­ phological elemehts, such as stems and endings. Continuation classes constitute the links between the lexicons. The rules specify equivalences between pairs of signs on two levels, a lexical level and a surface level. lexical level surface level n e z + s n e z C C The two-level model nas already been applied to a number of are some examples. My contribution is a description of the inflectional morphology of written French. A very important matter to decide upon when setting up a two-level description is the following: which inflectional phenomena are to be treated in the lexicon system. anp which ones arc-best described by rules? In order to get a survey of the different types of inflection­ al phenomena that occur In French, the following classification Is of help: