Morphosyntactic Description Research Articles

Tu sijè magnète. Hesse ha ite: some morphosyntactic characteristics of the verb in Ortonese compared with Italian

Introduction: The verb is one of the most complex grammatical categories, especially when the language in question is not official. This is the case with Ortonese, an Adriatic variant of Abruzzese spoken in Ortona (CH). The aim of this article is to provide a preliminary detailed analysis of the verb in Ortonese, starting with a morphosyntactic description compared to Italian. Methodology: The analysis begins by dividing Ortonese verbs into four main conjugations. Several relevant linguistic phenomena are examined, such as the transitivization of intransitive verbs, the presence of the prepositional accusative in verbs like "sendì" (to hear), which is absent in Italian, and the transformation of transitive and intransitive verbs into reflexive forms. Additionally, differences between "esse" (to be) and "sctè" (to stay), and between "avè" (to have) and "tenè" (to hold) are analyzed. Results: The core of the research is the analysis of all the tenses of the indicative mood in modern Ortonese. Simple tenses, such as the present and future, as well as compound tenses, like the future perfect, the present perfect, and the past perfect, are examined. The study also includes some irregular verbs and pays particular attention to the complexity of auxiliary selection, which in Ortonese, unlike Italian, depends not on the type of verb but on the subject's person. Discussion: The Ortonese verbal system exhibits a number of unique characteristics compared to standard Italian, particularly in terms of auxiliary selection and the formation of reflexive verbs. Some phenomena, such as the prepositional accusative and the distinction between "esse" and "sctè", reflect a structural complexity that warrants further investigation and highlights the linguistic richness of Abruzzese dialects. Conclusions: This study represents a first step towards a deeper understanding of the Ortonese verbal system. The morphosyntactic analysis compared to Italian reveals linguistic peculiarities that distinguish Ortonese as a dialectal variety of great interest to linguistics.

«¡La de + N + que…!» The Feminine Definite Article in Spanish Exclamative Clauses

The present study explores the exclamative use of the feminine definite article la in structures such as ‘¡La de chicos que besé en la fiesta!’ (How many guys I kissed at the party!). First, a morphosyntactic description of the pattern is offered so as to show that the data under analysis are pseudopartitive constructions which display all the characteristics of primary and partial exclamatives. Building on research on nominal exclamatives, we conclude that these examples are not CPs but indefinite DPs with an exclamative flavor which contain a semi-relative clause introduced by que. Within the framework of Distributed Morphology, we schematize a set of syntactic structures which capture the ‘chimeric’ and hybrid nature of the data, these being halfway between DPs and exclamative clauses. In order to do so, it will be necessary to split the DP into smaller projections (FocP, FinP), since la must move to Spec-FocP to be interpreted as an exclamative operator.

Вопрос о становлении классической традиции иранской музыки в аспекте проблемы языка и мышления

The article examines the historical prerequisites for the formation of the classical tradition of Iranian music of the Achaemenid and Sassanid dynasties period (6th century BCE — the first third of the 7th century CE) in a linguistic environment with the dominant function of the Aramaic language (Old Aramaic, Imperial Koine, Syriac/ New Aramaic dialects) at the sites of the “royal way”, where the local musical heritage of Indo-Iranian tribes melted in the phonosphere of the cosmopolitan palace vocal and instrumental music-making of ancient civilizations. The author of the article formulates the hypothesis that (1) when working with the concepts “Indo-European language family” or “Semitic language family”, we describe the contrasting mechanisms of speech information processing and transmission that (2) appear universal for different spheres of intellectual activity, including music, where they (3) are expressed in two formulae of the musical process I -- m -- t (B. Asafyev) and I -- t = m—temporalityy (G. Shamilli) (3) that is sensitive to certain patterns of thinking and (4) is fixed in the gestalt. Therefore, to think of derivation mechanisms of verbal and musical speech as unified means to provide a gestalt morphosyntactic description of structures from an interdisciplinary perspective, relying on (1) the fact of the linguistic community of cultures over a long historical period and (2) the assumption about the ability of the oral musical tradition to retain one gestalt or another with a change of the language domain.

RoLEX: The development of an extended Romanian lexical dataset and its evaluation at predicting concurrent lexical information

AbstractIn this article, we introduce an extended, freely available resource for the Romanian language, named RoLEX. The dataset was developed mainly for speech processing applications, yet its applicability extends beyond this domain. RoLEX includes over 330,000 curated entries with information regarding lemma, morphosyntactic description, syllabification, lexical stress and phonemic transcription. The process of selecting the list of word entries and semi-automatically annotating the complete lexical information associated with each of the entries is thoroughly described.The dataset’s inherent knowledge is then evaluated in a task of concurrent prediction of syllabification, lexical stress marking and phonemic transcription. The evaluation looked into several dataset design factors, such as the minimum viable number of entries for correct prediction, the optimisation of the minimum number of required entries through expert selection and the augmentation of the input with morphosyntactic information, as well as the influence of each task in the overall accuracy. The best results were obtained when the orthographic form of the entries was augmented with the complete morphosyntactic tags. A word error rate of 3.08% and a character error rate of 1.08% were obtained this way. We show that using a carefully selected subset of entries for training can result in a similar performance to the performance obtained by a larger set of randomly selected entries (twice as many). In terms of prediction complexity, the lexical stress marking posed most problems and accounts for around 60% of the errors in the predicted sequence.

Organising lexica into analogical grids: a study of a holistic approach for morphological generation under various sizes of data in various languages

ABSTRACTMorphological generation is a task where given a lemma and a morphosyntactic description of the target form, we are asked to generate the target form. Knowing that the syntactic and semantic relations to other forms are reflected by the word form itself, we show how to exploit these relations between word forms, holistically, that is, as a whole, to derive the target form without even breaking them into morphemes. Experimental results show that by organising the lexica into analogical grids we are able to improve the accuracy of morphological generation by up to 8% in low data scenarios. Our holistic approach always performs better than a morpheme-based baseline. We also enquire possible improvements by using data augmentation for neural approaches, especially in low data scenarios. However, our system seems not to gain any advantage from having more data after some point in time.

Morphosyntax and Semantics in the NooJ Italian Dictionary of Simple Words

The main topic of this paper is to describe how to transform effectively the “lexical matter” of a language (not only Italian) into a formal and taxonomic morphosyntactic classification of the simple words stored and tagged inside NooJ electronic dictionaries. The ultimate goal is to build electronic dictionaries for NooJ that can be used effectively in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Automatic Textual Analysis (ATA). To achieve this task, we will start from the following assumption: nouns inflection codes may prove useful not only to describe morphological behaviours and features, but also to “predict” syntactic combinations inside sentences. This means that inside NooJ finite-state automata (FSA) and transducers (FST), nouns inflection codes can account for Lexicon-Grammar (LG) co-occurrence and selection restriction rules, thus also providing for several aspects of formal semantics (FS). The method we intend to outline here can therefore become a descriptive and applicative standard, reusable for all those languages in which word inflection has a value not only morphological (as for gender, number and possibly case) but also syntactic. As is known, such a formal descriptive approach is absent in paper dictionaries, in which there is a tendency to “flatten” the morphosyntactic description of words in favour of a list of words which uses rely heavily on the linguistic competence of readers and speakers.

On the Use of Morpho-Syntactic Description Tags in Neural Machine Translation with Small and Large Training Corpora

With the transition to neural architectures, machine translation achieves very good quality for several resource-rich languages. However, the results are still much worse for languages with complex morphology, especially if they are low-resource languages. This paper reports the results of a systematic analysis of adding morphological information into neural machine translation system training. Translation systems presented and compared in this research exploit morphological information from corpora in different formats. Some formats join semantic and grammatical information and others separate these two types of information. Semantic information is modeled using lemmas and grammatical information using Morpho-Syntactic Description (MSD) tags. Experiments were performed on corpora of different sizes for the English–Slovene language pair. The conclusions were drawn for a domain-specific translation system and for a translation system for the general domain. With MSD tags, we improved the performance by up to 1.40 and 1.68 BLEU points in the two translation directions. We found that systems with training corpora in different formats improve the performance differently depending on the translation direction and corpora size.

Double plurals in Breton: Evidence for a split analysis of plurality

Traditional analyses of plurality situate number features within Num(ber)P between NP and DP projections. However, such an analysis does not easily account for all of the properties of plural forms cross-linguistically, particularly those that surface with multiple plural morphemes affixed simultaneously to a single stem. Kramer (2016b) proposes that number features can be exponed on the n category head in addition to on the Num head, generating plural nouns with either one or two plural suffixes. Yet, questions remain about the ability of this analysis to generate multiple plurals in other languages, such as Breton. In this paper, I test the predictions made by Kramer on Breton, which has a complex set of possible plural nominal forms. I present a morphosyntactic description of Breton noun phrases from the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), and I propose several adjustments to the theory of split n/Num plurality as presented by Kramer (2016a). This analysis is an alternative to previous descriptions of Breton number that situate double plurals within theories of lexicality (e.g., Acquaviva 2008) or that assume a strict dichotomy between inflectional and derivational morphology (e.g., Stump 1989, 1990).

Avérogavér?

AbstractThis contribution is an investigation of the distribution and nature of a structure found across Northern Italian varieties, a reflex of Latinhabereto which a locative particleghas been added, within the contexts of the relation between microvariation and gradual language change. A detailed morpho-syntactic description forms the basis for an analysis that suggests a probable path of univerbation of the two elements. Driving the analysis is the consideration of the original semantic features of the Latin element from which the locative particle has developed, in particular of the order of their weakening.

Predicados nominais em Kaiowá

Neste artigo apresentamos uma proposta de descrição dos predicados nominais da língua Kaiowá, membro do sub-ramo I da família Tupí-Guaraní, segundo Rodrigues (1984/1985). Trata-se, portanto, de um estudo da descrição morfossintática dos nomes nessa língua. A análise encontra-se fundamentada primordialmente em Rodrigues (2001), mas também nos aproximamos e nos sentimos contemplados com as ideias de Payne (1997). Neste texto encontra-se, portanto, uma descrição das propriedades sintáticas dos nomes que ocorrem em função de núcleo de predicado. O olhar dado à questão nos possibilitou descrever predicados existenciais, equativos e atributivos, ampliando nosso conhecimento acerca desses fenômenospor meio da análise linguística de uma variedade da língua Kaiowá falada no cone sul de Mato Grosso do Sul. Acreditamos que os resultados podem ser comparados com outras línguas Tupí-Guaraní com o objetivo de buscar possíveis explicações das mudanças ocorridas dentro da família e identificar o que tem sido conservado sob este aspecto.

Morphosyntactic, prosodic, functional and distributional description of the information unit of Parenthesis in spoken Brazilian Portuguese

Resumo: Este tem por objetivo apresentar uma descrição preliminar da unidade informacional de Parentético (PAR), baseada no corpus C-ORAL-BRASIL (RASO; MELLO, 2012), representativo da fala informal da variedade mineira do português brasileiro, e embasada na Language into Act Theory (L-AcT; CRESTI, 2000). Foram pesquisadas as principais características prosódicas (duração, frequência fundamental, intensidade) e morfossintáticas (núcleos sintáticos, preenchedores mais frequentes), bem como características funcionais (metanarrativos, metalinguísticos e modais) e distribucionais (posição dentro do enunciado) desta específica unidade informacional. Nossos resultados sugerem que exista uma distinção funcional entre PAR curto vs. longo. Além disso, a unidade informacional de PAR parece, por vezes, carregar força ilocucionária.Palavras-chave: Fala espontânea. Parentético. Português brasileiro. C-ORAL-BRASIL.Abstract: This paper aims at presenting a preliminary description of the informational unit of Parenthesis (PAR), based on the corpus C-ORAL-BRASIL (RASO; MELLO, 2012), representative of the informal speech of the Minas Gerais’s variety of Brazilian Portuguese, and underpinned on the Language into Act Theory (L-AcT; CRESTI, 2000). The main prosodic (length, fundamental frequency and intensity) and morphosyntactic (head types and most frequent fillers) characteristics, as well as functional (metanarrative, metalinguistic, and modal) and distributional (position within the utterance) characteristics were surveyed for this specific information unit. Our results suggest that a distinction between short and long PAR exist. Also, the information unit of PAR seems at times to carry illocutionary force.Keywords: Spontaneous speech. Parenthesis. Brazilian Portuguese. C-ORAL-BRASIL.

Language contact in Gibraltar English: A pilot study with ICE-GBR

The variety of English used in Gibraltar has been in contact with a number of European languages, such as Spanish, Italian, Hebrew and Arabic (Moyer, 1998: 216; Suárez-Gómez, 2012: 1746), for more than 300 years. Studies of this variety have traditionally been based on interviews and observation (e.g. Moyer, 1993, 1998; Cal Varela, 1996; Levey, 2008 2015; Weston, 2011, 2013, etc.), and a detailed morphosyntactic description is yet to be published. In this context, the compilation of a reliable Gibraltar corpus using the standards of the International Corpus of English (ICE) will constitute a landmark in the analysis of this lesser known variety of English. In the present paper we describe the ICE project and the current state of the compilation of ICE-GBR. In addition, we present a detailed comparison between the section on press news reports of ICE-GB (standard British English) and ICE-GBR, with the aim of identifying morphosyntactic features that reveal the influence of language contact with Spanish in this territory. We explore variables such as the choice of relativizer (assuming a higher preference for that in GBR, in agreement with Spanish que, the most frequent relativizer, Brucart, 1999: 490), the use of titles and pseudo-titles preceding proper names (which, as shown by Hundt and Kabatek, 2015, are very frequent in English journalese and extremely infrequent in Spanish), and the frequency of the passive voice (expected to be lower in ICE-GBR), among others. A preliminary analysis of these variables reveals that the influence of Spanish on the variety of English used in the Gibraltarian press, at the morphosyntactic level, is almost non-existent, limited to occasional cases of code-switching between the two varieties. We hypothesize that a possible explanation for this strong exonormative allegiance to British English, at least in press news reports, can be found in a strong editorial pressure to reflect the prestigious parent-variety.

Luščenje definicijskih kandidatov iz specializiranih korpusov

Predstavljamo metodo za luščenje definicij iz specializiranih korpusov. Metoda je bila razvita za slovenščino in angleščino, sestavljajo pa jo trije pristopi: v prvem definicije luščimo z leksikoskladenjskimi vzorci, drugi uporablja avtomatsko izluščeno terminologijo, tretji pa lušči stavke, v katerih se nahajata pojem in njegova nadpomenka iz semantičnega leksikona wordnet. Metodologijo smo preizkusili na primeru področja jezikovnih tehnologij. Za namene modeliranja izbranega področja smo zgradili primerljivi slovensko-angleški Korpus jezikovnih tehnologij, izluščene kandidate pa smo uporabili pri gradnji Glosarja jezikovnih tehnologij. Celotno metodologijo smo strnili v prosto dostopen delotok, implementiran v spletnem okolju za gradnjo delotokov Clowdflows. V delotok lahko uporabnik prek spleta naloži korpus v različnih formatih, ga jezikoslovno označi, izlušči terminologijo in kandidate za definicije ter rezultate vizualizira ali shrani.

Korpusi in konkordančniki na strežniku nl.ijs.si

V prispevku predstavimo referenčne, specializirane in vzporedne korpuse, do katerih je mogoče dostopati prek konkordančnikov na strežniku nl.ijs.si. Večina korpusov vsebuje besedila v slovenščini, nekaj pa je tudi tujejezičnih. Mnogi od korpusov obstajajo že dalj časa, vendar so sedaj na novo označeni, pri nekaterih so dodana nova besedila, nekateri pa so v celoti novi. Besedila v korpusih so opremljena z metapodatki, besednim pojavnicam pa so ročno ali avtomatsko pripisane vsaj leme in oblikoskladenjske oznake. V večini primerov so korpusi prosto dostopni, in sicer prek dveh spletnih konkordančnikov, ki omogočata iskanje po obsežnih označenih korpusih, ponujata bogat nabor analitičnih orodij, možnosti filtriranja glede na metapodatke in shranjevanje rezultatov na lastni računalnik. Poleg korpusov in obeh konkordančnikov v prispevku obravnavamo tudi nekatera vprašanja, ki so se zastavila pri zagotavljanju tovrstne infrastrukture za namene korpusnega jezikoslovja, ter zaključimo s smernicami za nadaljnje delo.

Historical Slovenian Language Resources

EXTENDED ABSTRACT:The paper presents three language resources enabling better full-text access to digitised printed historical Slovenian texts: a hand-annotated corpus, a hand-annotated lexicon of historical words and a collection of transcribed texts. The aim of the resources is twofold: on one hand they support empirical linguistic research (corpus, collection) and represent a reference tool for the research of historical Slovenian (lexicon) while on the other hand they may serve as training data for the development of Human Language Technologies enabling better full-text search in digital libraries containing Slovenian written cultural heritage, modernisation of historical texts, and the development of better technological solutions for text recognition and scanning. The hand annotated corpus of historical Slovenian contains the text from 1,000 pages sampled from the years 1750 to 1900, two texts date to the end of the 16th or 17th century. The corpus contains a little more than 250,000 word tokens; each of them being annotated with hand validated linguistic features: modernised form, lemma or base form, and morhpo-syntactic description. Thus the word token »ajfram« is annotated with the normalised form »ajfrom«, by the lemma »ajfer« and morphosyntactic description »Som« or »Samostalnik« (noun), »občni« (common), »moški« (masculine) and a modernised form »gorečnost« (fervour). At first the corpus was annotated automatically and then manually verified and corrected. The lexicon was created automatically from the hand-annotated corpus. It contains only attested word-forms and examples of use. The word-forms are ordered under their modern equivalents. All the modern forms of a particular word constitute a dictionary entry, defined by its lemma with conjoint information i.e. the morpho-syntactic description and the closest contemporary synonyms. Thus the entry »ajfrer/Som/gorečnost« is annotated by two modernised words »ajfra « and »ajfrom« and their archaic forms »ajfram« and »aifram« and by attestattion: »…shaz noi frihtei tu shebranje karbo sdei udrukono is velzhim aifram noi is flisam inu is andohtjo 3 vezhiere saporedama …« (Tapravi inu tazieli Colemone-Shegen, 1800, p. 183). At present, the lexicon contains over 25,000 entries (including modern words in archaic texts), 50,000 word-forms and 70,000 archaic forms. The third resource is represented by an extensive collection of digitised texts similar to the corpus. The difference is that the words are annotated automatically by a tool developed to process historical Slovenian text named ToTrTaLe. The tool implements a pipeline, where it first tokenises the text and then attempts to transcribe the archaic words to their modern day equivalents. Then, the text is tagged and lemmatised using the models for modern Slovenian language. It contains about 5 million words of hand-corrected transcriptions from the following digitised texts: • Slovenian books and editions of the newspaper »Kmetijske in rokodelske novice«, digitised by the National University Library (NUK) in the frame of the EU project IMPACT (5000 pages); • Digital library AHLib,1 comprising Slovenian books translated from German (100 books); • A selection of Slovenian books2 All three resources (corpus, lexicon, collection) are encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines TEI P5, which enable the definition of XML schemas for encoding texts for scholarly purposes. The home page of the project at http://nl.ijs.si/imp/ enables access to the resources. The collection and the lexicon are available for on-line browsing, the corpus and the automatically annotated collection for linguistics searches via a concordancer, while all the resources can be also downloaded in their source XML form under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence. In future we expect to extend the resources, however, even their present scope is sufficient for corpus based diachronic studies of historical Slovenian language and for developing useful language technology tools for processing cultural heritage texts.

A Morpho-Syntactic Description of mancok/pwulman for Building an Electronic ictionary of Predicates

A Morpho-Syntactic Description of mancok/pwulman for Building an Electronic ictionary of Predicates

MULTEXT-East: morphosyntactic resources for Central and Eastern European languages

The paper presents the MULTEXT-East language resources, a multilingual dataset for language engineering research, focused on the morphosyntactic level of linguistic description. The MULTEXT-East dataset includes the morphosyntactic specifications, morphosyntactic lexica, and a parallel corpus, the novel "1984" by George Orwell, which is sentence aligned and contains hand-validated morphosyntactic descriptions and lemmas. The resources are uniformly encoded in XML, using the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines, TEI P5, and cover 16 languages, mainly from Central and Eastern Europe: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, English, Estonian, Hungarian, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Resian, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovene, and Ukrainian. This dataset, unique in terms of languages covered and the wealth of encoding, is extensively documented, and freely available for research purposes. The paper overviews the MULTEXT-East resources by type and language and gives some conclusions and directions for further work.

Personal Pronouns in the Kakavandi Laki Dialect of Harsin (Kermanshah, Iran)

This study aims to analyze the positions and syntactic functions of dependent and independent personal pronouns in the Kakavandi Laki dialect in the region of Harsin (Kermanshah/Iran), an endangered dialect of Persian. The paper provides a morpho-syntactic description and investigates the dialectal characteristic positions of the pronominals in regard to their syntactic functions, which illustrate noticeable differences in comparison to Persian. The main functions under investigation include: subjective, objective, oblique and possessives, on the basis of which the pronominal positional variety is classified in the dialect. The study further examines the dialectal agreement patterns which demonstrate both ergative and non-ergative features.

Reduction of Morpho-Syntactic Features in Statistical Machine Translation of Highly Inflective Language

We address the problem of statistical machine translation from highly inflective language to less inflective one. The characteristics of inflective languages are generally not taken into account by the statistical machine translation system. Existing translation systems often treat different inflected word forms of the same lemma as if they were independent of each other, although some interdependencies exist. On the other hand we know that if we reduce inflected word forms to common lemmas, some information is lost. It would be reasonable to eliminate only the variations in inflected word forms, which are not relevant for translation. Inflectional features of words are defined by morpho-syntactic descriptions (MSD) tags and we want reduce them. To do this the explicit knowledge about both languages (source and target language) is needed. The idea of the paper is to find the information-bearing MSDs in source language by data-driven approach. The task is performed by a global optimization algorithm, named Differential Evolution. The experiments were performed using freely available parallel English-Slovenian corpus SVEZ-IJS, which is lemmatized and annotated with MSD tags. The results show a promising direction toward optimal subset of morpho-syntactic features.

The Syntax-Pragmatics Interplay in Yaqui

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