Zur Erstellung einer computerunterstützten Grammatik “Flexionsmorphologie des Frühneuhochdeutschen”

Abstract

The inflectional morphology of Early New High German is the subject of research at the Forschungsvorhaben Grammatik des Fruhneuhochdeutschen at the University of Bonn. Because the High German of the period 1350–1700 shows strong graphemic and morphemic variation, we could not use improved computational lemmatizing alogorithms for computer-assisted analysis. Instead, the data base was extended by philological information manually analyzed. To illustrate our proceeding in setting up the paradigms requires explaining the different algorithms for analyzing verb and noun inflection. The numerous grammatical positions, for most of which little evidence is given, and the prevailing inflected structure precluded an automatic segmentation of verb forms. The program for establishing verb paradigms is based on extended informations (for instance, those about endings, historical inflection classes, preterite suffixes, etc.), and consists of steps for sorting, collecting, and printing. For nouns, the automatic segmentation can be carried out by using as a word-stem the nominative singular form, which always shows a zero-morpheme. In a lemmatizing procedure different from those already in use, the nominative plural form (singular stem + plural formative) is taken as word-stem in order to segmentize the plural cases, and thus avoid the problem of stem variation which is due to the “Pluralumlaut.” A noun class is defined by the combination of a singular paradigm, which is characterized by a genitive formative and a plural formative.