Describing Morphologically-rich Languages using Metagrammars: a Look at Verbs in Ikota

In this paper, we show how the concept of metagrammar originally introduced by Candito (1996) to design large Tree-Adjoining Grammars describing the syntax of French and Italian, can be used to describe the morphology of Ikota, a Bantu language spoken in Gabon. Here, we make use of the expressivity of the XMG (eXtensible MetaGrammar) formalism to describe the morphological variations of verbs in Ikota. This XMG specification captures generalizations over these morphological variations. In order to produce the inflected forms, one can compile the XMG specification, and save the resulting electronic lexicon in an XML file, thus favorising its reuse in dedicated applications.