Tag: mutually exclusive morphemes - adamb924/mortal-engine GitHub Wiki

The <mutually-exclusive-morphemes> tag is used when the language offers a choice of one of a set of morphemes. For instance, you generally just get one possessive morpheme. So a <mutually-exclusive-morphemes> would have each possessive morpheme: first singular, first plural, second singular, etc.

Here is an example of the node (from examples/05-Mutually-Exclusive.xml).

<mutually-exclusive-morphemes label="Possessive Suffixes">
    <optional/>
    <morpheme label="1s-Possessive">
        <allomorph>
            <form lang="wk-AR">ېم</form>
            <form lang="wk-LA">ym</form>
        </allomorph>
    </morpheme>
    <morpheme label="3s-Possessive">
        <allomorph>
            <form lang="wk-AR">ې</form>
            <form lang="wk-LA">y</form>
        </allomorph>
    </morpheme>    
</mutually-exclusive-morphemes>

In this example the <mutually-exclusive-morphemes> has the <optional/> marker, so a word doesn't have to have one of the morphemes. If it were not optional, then the word would have to have exactly one of the morphemes.

None of the <morpheme> tags within <mutually-exclusive-morphemes> can have the <optional/> tag—that would defeat the purpose.

The label attribute will never show up in parsings, it's just there as a reminder for what the set of morphemes is.

The <mutually-exclusive-morphemes> is essentially a simplified <fork>.