Morphological Parser Workshop

The following workshop is designed to show how FLEx can be used to parse words into morphemes. The early material is using Sena (Bantu) and English data, while the majority of the material uses Nyangatom (Nilo-Saharan). The “Stem-Names” module uses Portuguese data.

The workshop covers entering morphemes and their allomorphs and variants because doing this correctly is important to making the morphological parser work. The same is true for the entering of complex forms into the FLEx database.

When attempting to use the parser there are some linguistic distinctions that are important to understand. One is the difference between inflectional verse derivational affixes. Another is the difference between inflectional features and inflectional classes. The following modules assume an understanding of these important distinctions. For more information on these distinctions see the Introduction to Parsing document that can be found under the Help menu in Fieldworks.

It is possible to parse words at least three ways in FLEx and this can cause some confusion. The ultimate goal of this workshop is to teach participants how to configure FLEx so that the morphological parser can automatically parse texts that it has never seen before, but there are two other means of parsing words that are covered in this workshop. The first is what is sometimes called manual parsing where the user manually breaks the words into morphemes and then marks the parse as approved (Called “approved word analysis” in FLEx). The user can do this either in the Interlinear Texts area or the Word Analyses area. The last kind of parsing is where FLEx applies these approved word analyses to words that it finds in new texts that have been imported into the Interlinear Texts area.

This course will use FLEx’s Inflectional Affix Gloss Builder (IAGB) for generating glosses for morphemes. Using the Inflectional Affix Gloss Builder will produce consistent glosses that conform to the Leipzig guidelines for glossing morphemes. https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/pdf/Glossing-Rules.pdf