Indexed stems and Russian word formation: a network-morphology account of Russian personal nouns

Recent lexeme-based models have proposed that a lexeme carries an inventory of stems on which morphological rules operate. The various stems in the inventory are associated with different morphological rules, of both inflection and derivation. Furthermore, one stem may be selected by more than one rule. For this reason stems in the inventory are labeled with indexes, rather than being directly associated with a particular morphological function. It is claimed that and indexed-stem approach captures generalizations in the morphological system that would otherwise be missed. We argue that such an approach provides for greater generalization in the Russian morphological system. One area of Russian derivation that particularly lends itself to an indexed-stem approach is the highly productive system of personal-noun formation. We present a declarative account of Russian personal nouns that assumes indexed stems and show how such an account on the one hand obviates the need to posit either compound suffixes or "concatenators" and on the other dispenses with truncating/deleting rules. The account is couched within network morphology, a declarative lexeme-based framework that rests on the concept of default inheritance and is expressed in the computable lexical knowledge representation language DATR.