Recognizing Reduplicated Forms: Finite-State Buffered Machines

Yang Wang


Abstract
Total reduplication is common in natural language phonology and morphology. However, formally as copying on reduplicants of unbounded size, unrestricted total reduplication requires computational power beyond context-free, while other phonological and morphological patterns are regular, or even sub-regular. Thus, existing language classes characterizing reduplicated strings inevitably include typologically unattested context-free patterns, such as reversals. This paper extends regular languages to incorporate reduplication by introducing a new computational device: finite state buffered machine (FSBMs). We give its mathematical definitions and discuss some closure properties of the corresponding set of languages. As a result, the class of regular languages and languages derived from them through a copying mechanism is characterized. Suggested by previous literature, this class of languages should approach the characterization of natural language word sets.
Anthology ID:
2021.sigmorphon-1.20
Volume:
Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Garrett Nicolai, Kyle Gorman, Ryan Cotterell
Venue:
SIGMORPHON
SIG:
SIGMORPHON
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
177–187
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigmorphon-1.20
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.sigmorphon-1.20
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Wang. 2021. Recognizing Reduplicated Forms: Finite-State Buffered Machines. In Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 177–187, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Recognizing Reduplicated Forms: Finite-State Buffered Machines (Wang, SIGMORPHON 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigmorphon-1.20.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigmorphon-1.20.mp4