Position-class templates

In templatic morphology the formatives of a word fill a flat string of positions. A formative's position can be determined by its formal category rather than by its function, and fillers of the same position cannot co-occur. These properties tend to hold of individual formatives rather than of the whole string, so a template may contain a position whose fillers stack, as the voice suffixes of the Turkish verb do.

An AffixTemplate lists the positions of a word's prefixes and of its suffixes and marks those that stack. It admits the strings over its positions, in their order, in which only stacking positions repeat. Each position may be skipped, so these strings are closed under dropping a filler and regular. Order and repetition are conditions on pairs, so they are also strictly 2-piecewise. A string of exponents, each tagged with its position, is licensed when its positions are admitted.

Implementation notes

A template can forbid a filler but not require one, the limit of strictly piecewise grammars, so a dependency between fillers is a further condition in the citing grammar. The template of prosodic morphology, a CV skeleton, is Autosegmental.Skeleton, matched in Morphology/Morphotactics/TemplateMatch.lean.

References

• Bickel & Nichols 2007, Inflectional Morphology
• Aksënova et al. 2016, Morphotactics as Tier-Based Strictly Local Dependencies