Two-level description of Turkish morphology

Abstract

This paper describes a full two-level morphological description of Turkish word structures. The description has been implemented using the PC-KIMMO environment and is based on a root word lexicon of about 23,000 root words. The phonetic rules of contemporary Turkish (spoken in Turkey) have been encoded using 22 two-level rules while the morphotactics of the agglutinative word structures have been encoded as finite-state machines for verbal, nominal paradigms and other categories. Almost all the special cases of, and exceptions to phonological and morphological rules have been taken into account. In this paper, we describe the rules and the finite state machines along with examples and a discussion of how various special cases were handled. We also describe some known limitations and problems with this description.