A MetaPhoneme inventory.

This paper focuses on the sharing of phonological information in a multilingual inheritancebased lexicon. It explores the possibility of establishing a phoneme inventory for a group of languages in which language-specific phonemes function as "allophones" of newly defined metaphonemes. Danish, Dutch, English, and German were taken as a test bed and their vowel phoneme inventories were studied. The results of the cross-linguistic analysis are presented in this paper. The paper concludes by showing how these metaphonemes can be incorporated in a multilingual inheritance-based lexicon. 1 Introduction The work described here assumes a framework for multilingual inheritance-based lexical representation which allows sharing of information across (related) languages at all levels of linguistic description. Most work on multilingual lexicons up to now has assumed monolingual lexicons linked only at the level of semantics (MUL- TILEX 1993; Copestake et al. 1992). Cahill and Gazdar (1995;1999)...