MORTABLE – Morphological Category Cross-Tabulation

Status: Current Last updated: 2026-05-12 11:09 EDT

Purpose

Produces a per-speaker frequency table of morphosyntactic categories by matching POS tags from the %mor tier against patterns defined in a language-specific script file.

Requires a language script file (e.g., eng.cut) that defines patterns and their labels for categorizing morphemes from the %mor tier. Each rule line contains a quoted label and +/- prefixed POS patterns. Rules can be grouped as OR (first match wins) or AND (all must match).

See the CLAN manual for the original MORTABLE command specification.

Note on -f short flag. Both --script and --format declare -f as their short flag in crates/chatter/chatter-cli/src/cli/args/clan_commands.rs:260 and :345. clap currently accepts this — chatter clan mortable --help runs successfully and -f test.cut resolves to --script — so the previous warning that the command was “unusable” no longer applies. Verified 2026-05-12 by invoking chatter clan mortable --help and chatter clan mortable -f test.cut file.cha. Prefer the long form --script / --format in scripts to avoid ambiguity in future clap upgrades.

Usage

chatter clan mortable --script eng.cut file.cha
chatter clan mortable --script eng.cut --speaker CHI file.cha

Options

Differences from CLAN

• POS matching: Operates on parsed %mor tier data rather than raw text line scanning.
• POS matching detail: POS tags are read directly from typed %mor items instead of reparsing serialized %mor content.
• Script file format: Compatible with CLAN’s .cut files.
• Output formats: Supports text, JSON, and CSV formats.
• Deterministic ordering: BTreeMap ordering ensures deterministic output across runs.
• Golden test parity: Verified against CLAN C binary output.