Towards a computational morphological analysis of Setswana compounds

The development of a computational morphological analyser for Setswana necessitates the accurate modelling and implementation of, among others, compounding as a word formation process. Compounding is known to be an area of Setswana morphology that has sadly been neglected and still requires much investigation and research. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the formation of noun + noun compounds by computational morphological means in order to understand how this process should be formalised, modelled and subsequently implemented. In particular, an empirical study based on a collection of Setswana noun + noun compounds is reported on. The computational morphological analysis of these compounds revealed linguistic deviations from the standard morphological rules governing the formation of nouns and deverbatives. Examples, computational results and a discussion of the main findings are included.