An informal discovery procedure for two-level rules

Abstract

The paper shows how a certain kind of underlying representations (or deep forms) of words can be constructed in a straightforward manner through aligning the surface forms of the morphs of the word forms. The inventory of morphophonemes follows directly from this alignment. Furthermore, the two-level rules which govern the different realisations of such morphophonemes follow fairly directly from the previous steps. The alignment and rules are based upon an approximate general metric among phonemes, e.g., articulatory features, that determines which alternations are likely or possible. This enables us to summarise contexts for the different realisations.