A Two-level Morphology of Malagasy

We present a two-level model of Malagasy nominal and verbal morphology (Beesley and Karttunen, 2003), based primarily on the discussion of Malagasy morphology in Keenan and Polinsky (1998) and Randriamasimanana (1986). Words in Malagasy are built from roots by means of a variety of morphological operations such as affixation and reduplication. The present paper analyzes productive patterns of nominal and verbal morphology, describing genitive compounding and suffixation for nouns, and various derivational processes involving compounding and affixation for verbs. 1 Overview of Malagasy Morphology Malagasy is an Austronesian language spoken by about six million people on the island of Madagascar. With Welsh, it is a focus of the Verb-Initial Grammars subproject (users.ox.ac.uk/ ̃cpgl0015/pargram/) within the PARGRAM initiative, a collaborative project to develop computational lexicons and grammars within the shared linguistic framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (Butt et al., 2002). Because of the complicated and productive patterns of Malagasy verbal and nominal morphology, the development of such a grammar relies heavily on a computational component for morphological analysis. As with any finite-state morphological transducer, our Malagasy morphological analyzer is bidirectional: it can be used in grammatical analysis to produce morphologically analyzed input to a parser, or in generation to produce a surface form from a specification of lexical properties (Beesley and Karttunen, 2003). The research reported here is supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council, UK (Project RES-000-23-0505). Proceedings of PACLIC 19, the 19th Asia-Pacific Conference on Language, Information and Computation.