The Linguist's Shoebox

In Shoebox, simple morphological parsing consists of breaking words into roots and affixes that correspond to lexeme fields in the lexical database. For most languages, you will need to provide additional parsing information. Instead of using general rules, the Shoebox parser matches specific patterns that correspond to alternate and underlying form fields in the lexical database. It might be helpful to think of the "alternate" form as a surface form. Here are several common lexical and morphological phenomena and examples of the corresponding patterns for parsing:

• irregular forms

  \lx	go
  . \a	went
  . . \u	go -ed

• variant forms

  \lx	phone
  . . \u	telephone

• allomorphs

  \lx	in-
  . \a	il-
  . \a	im-
  . \a	ir-

• morphophonemic alternations

  \lx	in-
  . \a	ill-
  . . \u	in+l
  	etc.

• compound forms

  \lx	have
  . \a	I've
  . . \u	I have

• "conjoined" affixes

  \lx	-ability
  . . \u	-able -ity

For more information: Read Parsing with Shoebox, read pages 174–179 in the Shoebox Tutorial, and in Shoebox Help, search for Parsing, An Overview.