As long as we restrict ourselves to matters of inflection, defining the morphotactics of German is about as simple as it could be. By default, words consist of a root and a suffix and, by default, the root is a monosyllable.
Given our definition of Syllable above, this statement of German word structure can be directly encoded in DATR as follows:
Word:
<> == Syllable
<mor word> == "<phn root>" "<mor suffix>".
Notice that the <mor suffix> path will default to the null sequence
via the link to Syllable and thence to Null unless it gets
defined at a point lower in the hierarchy. This very general default
does useful work throughout our account of German inflection but is
specifically relevant in our treatment of indeclinable adjectives
(Adj_0) and determiners (Det_0) in Sections
6 and 7, below.
