Using a morphological analyzer to teach theoretical morphology

Abstract

This paper presents the results of our experience in using an instructional morphological parser (IMP) as a teaching tool in two graduate level courses, one in theoretical morphology and the other in computational morphology. IMP was written in Waterloo PROLOG by the second author and is based on the UDICT morphology system (Byrd 1983). The courses were taught by the first author at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. We present a brief overview of computational morphology and discuss in detail the implementation we used for IMP. We then give an outline of the two courses with some speculation on the computational and linguistic concepts that our students learned. In particular, we discuss the problems we encountered in teaching the notion of recursion. © 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers.