German noun inflection

Abstract

This is the second of a series of three papers that, taken together, will give an essentially complete account of inflection in standard German. In this paper we present that part of the account that covers nouns, one that captures all the regularities, subregularities and irregularities that are involved, but with a focus on the subregularities. Inflected forms are defined in terms of their syllable structure, as proposed in Cahill (1990a, b, 1993). The analysis is formulated as a DATR theory – a set of lexical axioms – from which all the relevant facts follow as theorems. DATR is a widely used formal lexical knowledge representation language developed for use in computational linguistics.