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The inflected forms are represented as two-level finite-state arcs, with the verb
stem and morphosyntactic properties on the upper side, and the inflected word on the
lower side, as in Figure 1. The purpose of the stem is to uniquely identify each verb.
Verb roots in Georgian are often very short and ambiguous; therefore a combination
of the verb root plus thematic suffix was used. In some cases, even this combination
is be insufficient to identify the verb uniquely; in such cases, the preverb may be
necessary as well. It is only important that the verb stem can be uniquely matched in
the network containing glosses; thus, the stem has no theoretical significance in this
model.
Another challenge is posed by the non-concatenative nature of verb agreement.
Recall from section 2 that verb agreement is realised by a pre-stem affix and a final
suffix. Since many of the word forms in Level 1 contain preverbs, the agreement affix
would need to be infixed into the verb form at a later level. Beesley & Karttunen
provide some fairly complex mechanisms for doing infixation in FST; however, the
fixed position of the agreement affixes in the Georgian verb template allows for a
much simpler solution. The forms on Level 1 contain a place holder “+Agr1” for the
prefixal agreement marker (Figure 1), which is replaced by the appropriate marker in
the later levels.
The Level 1 network is produced via scripts from a table of verb forms containing only
the necessary lexical information. Redundancy in human input is thus minimised.
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