May 9, 2007 continued with two questions
1. Question: There are several cases of two or more different affixes having almost identical meanings. This means that they have identical feature structures. Is this going to be a problem? For example, xix and xax are both baseType, suffix, morphoSyntactic, indefinite-object.
2. Question about prons and hyphs of reduplicative morphemes: How should prons and hyphs of reduplications be represented?
Reduplicative morphemes have changeable form, depending on what the shape of the base of the reduplication is. For example, if the root is of the shape xit, the reduplicative suffix “characteristic” will be xit (xit-xit), but if the root is of the shape quc, the reduplicative suffix “characteristic” will be quc (quc-quc). The basic shape of the reduplication is thus CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant), but what the exact segmental content of the suffix is depends on the segments found in the root. The simplest thing for a pron would be to specify the CV-shape of each reduplication. For example, the pron for the reduplicative suffix whose meaning is“characteristic” would be CVC, for the distributive it would be CEC (where E=schwa), for repetitive it would be Ca, and for out of control it would be VC, and for diminutive it would be C-.
For the hyph forms, it would be the same type of thing. For example, for characteristic the hyph would thus include
sameAs=”CHAR”>CVC
Is it possible/desirable to do this in an xml markup?
3. I have completed to the end of hard copy affix10 of the affix files, except for fixing cross-references in the last entry, which is the DIM form. There is one more of these files left in the affix set.