Derivational morphology in inheritance-based lexica: Insights from Pāṇini

This paper demonstrates that the treatment of nominal derivational morphology in Pāṇini’s grammar of the Sanskrit language (ca. 500 b.c.) is based on an architecture strikingly similar to that of modern inheritance-based lexica. Specifically, Pāṇini adopts a single inheritance network with defaults to account concisely for intricate cases of affix homonymy and affix synonymy with minimal redundancy. The result is a hierarchy with an interleaving of formal and semantic word formation rules at multiple levels. Affix homonymy is treated by subsumption of semantic rules under formal rules, while affix synonymy is handled in terms of morphological blocking. Formally, this architecture yields an elegant representation of the complex derivational facts of Sanskrit. Moreover, the interleaving of formal and semantic rules along a single inheritance path presents a novel way to model derivational relations in a constrained manner.