Of nodes and cells. Two perspectives on (and from) Word Formation Latin

Abstract

Word Formation Latin (WFL; Litta et alii, 2016) is a linguistic resource providing explicitly recorded word formation relations between items in the Latin lexicon. The lexical basis of WFL comprises around 43,000 lemmas resulting from the collation of three Latin dictionaries, namely the Oxford Latin Dictionary (Glare, 1984), Georges & Georges (1913-1918) and Gradenwitz (1904). The WFL data are stored in a MySQL database, where input and output lexical items are connected via Word Formation Rules (WFRs). Each WFR provides information about (a) its input and output items, (b) their Part of Speech, (c) the rule type (derivation, compounding) and (c) the affix at work when predication or suffixation processes are concerned. WFL data were included into the database of the Latin analyser Lemlat (Passarotti et alii, 2017), thus enhancing its inflectional analysis (lemmatisation and features) with information about word formation. WFL is freely available as part of the Lemlat database (https://github.com/CIRCSE/LEMLAT3) and accessible through a graphical web application (http://wfl.marginalia.it). Such application enables users to query WFL via WFR, affix, input/output PoS and lemma. While querying a specific lemma, users are provided with its full word formation cluster, i.e. a tree graph showing the full derivation of the lemma in question, consisting of its ancestor(s) as well as its descendant(s). In case the lemma is not morphologically derived, it is considered to be the ancestor of a morphological family, i.e. the set of lemmas morphologically derived from a common ancestor. In the tree graphs of the WFL web application, nodes are lexical items and edges are WFRs. Beside this tree-like representation of word formation based lexical relations, we are experimenting also with a kind of visualisation where those lexical items that belong to the same family are cells of a word formation paradigm instead of nodes of a derivation tree. The paradigm of a specific family is then connected with those of the other families in WFL and can be compared with these in terms of shared (and not shared) cells. Such an alternative view on WFL data follows the more recent approaches to derivational morphology based on Word & Paradigm models (Stekauer, 2014). We believe that a linguistic resource aiming to support studies in derivational morphology must provide access to data from both perspectives, thus enabling users to exploit the empirical lexical evidence made available in the resource either by following one single approach or by joining (and possibly comparing) the node-based and the paradigm-based one. Our contribution wants (1) to introduce WFL, by detailing both the theoretical and the practical aspects behind its building and (2) to raise a discussion with the workshop attendees about the two approaches to word formation, by showing examples of running queries on WFL in both kinds of visualisations available in the web application. Not only will this help us to refine the WFL application by understanding the needs coming from the community of the users, but it will provide the workshop attendees with enough expertise to use WFL in their research work about Latin derivational morphology.