What ’ s in a Word ? Refining the Morphotactic Infrastructure in the LinGO Grammar Matrix Customization System

The LinGO Grammar Matrix customization system (Bender et al., 2002, 2010) is a web-based software system for creating implementedHPSG (Pollard and Sag, 1994) grammar fragments on the basis of user input of typological and lexical information. These fragments are compatible with theLKB grammar development environment (Copestake, 2002) and other DELPH-IN software. The system consists of a core grammar (types and constraints hypothesized to be useful across all languages) and a series of “libraries” of analyses of recurring, but nonuniversal, phenomena. Most existing and future Matrix libraries involve morphological expression in at least some languages, so the customization system must provide a means for users to define lexical rules which attach the morphemes expressing various linguistic features.