The exported routines

These are defined in MORPHGEN.LSP:

• EA-CatAndSkeletonToWords (cat skeleton): This is the main routine. It returns a list of words, each element corresponding to one of the possible inflectional forms for the feature-set cat. skeleton is a list of strings giving the root morphemes. In general, you will not construct a skeleton yourself, but will get it by calling EA-ParseTreeToSkeleton or EA-LexicalEntryToSkeleton.

  Most calls of this routine will only return a one-element list. However, in a few cases there will be several alternative forms. At present, these are (as far as I know) only hyphenation variants: see section 3.4.

• EA-ParseTreeToSkeleton (tree): tree must be a word-structure parse-tree, as returned by D-LookUp in 'D-WORDSTRUCTURE format. This function returns the corresponding word skeleton.

• EA-LexicalEntryToSkeleton (entry): Returns a skeleton, given a lexical entry. This is so that if a function wants to look up a lexical entry directly, it doesn't have to know how to convert the entry into a skeleton.

• EA-ParseTreeToCat (tree): Returns the top-level feature-set from tree. This is just a utility so that if a function which needs the skeleton also needs the feature-set, it doesn't have to know the format of the parse tree.

• EA-LoadIFI (filename): The IFI is a special index which is used to locate irregular forms such as the past tense of strong verbs. This function reads and returns the IFI stored in the file named <filename>-ifi.ma.

These functions may be changed in future versions. The comments at the head of MORPHGEN.LSP will always give an up-to-date specification. To use the functions, you need various other things:

• Generational rules in your word-grammar file.

• A GENINFL + feature added to inflectional suffixes in the lexicon, and a GENINFL - feature for derivational suffixes. You also need a feature declaration for GENINFL.

• A root form in the semantic field of each lexical entry.

• The IFI to have been created by a call to D-MakeLexicon.

The comments heading MORPHGEN.LSP describe how to do all this, and are where you should look if you are going to use the functions. I also describe how to do these things below, but since this report is a more general account of the problems encountered and solutions chosen, it is less suitable as a programmer's reference.