WFL · Morphology beyond inflection. Building a wordformation based dictionary for Latin

Morphology beyond inflection. Building a wordformation based dictionary for Latin

In the past two decades there has been a considerable increase in the creation of computational linguistic resources for the investigation of classical languages, which have updated the state of the art almost to the same level as that of the resources currently available for modern languages. However, among the existing linguistic resources, we currently lack, for Latin (and Ancient Greek - and indeed even for the majority of modern languages), a morphological derivational dictionary that connects lexical elements on the basis of Word Formation Rules (WFRs). In linguistics, there are two kinds of morphological rules: 1. inflectional, which relate to different forms of the same lexeme (i.e. singular vs. plural, present vs. past tense); 2. word formation rules, which relate to different lexemes, e.g. love vs. lover. There are two types of word formation processes in Latin: derivation and compounding. Derivation can be further split into: 1. Affixation, where one or more morphemes, called affixes, can be attached to the base of a word. Affixation can be of two types, and can involve (or not) a change of part of speech: a. Prefixation: where the affix is attached before the base. b. Suffixation: where the affix is attached after the base. 2. Conversion, where the derived word incurs only in a change of part of speech without the addition of any affix. Compounding is the formation of a new lexeme from two or more lexemes. The WFL project has consisted in the compilation of a derivational morphological lexicon of the Latin language, Word Formation Latin (WFL), which connects lexical elements on the basis of word formation rules (WFRs), through the use of computational linguistic methods. The resulting lexicon has been integrated into the most recent version of the morphological analyser and lemmatiser for Latin Lemlat (www.lemlat3.eu), and can be browsed in its own dedicated website at http://wfl.marginalia.it. Enriching textual data with derivational morphology tagging promises to provide strong outcomes. It can organise the lexicon at higher level than words, by building word formation based sets of lexemes sharing a common ancestor. Moreover, information on word formation can act as a bridge between morphology and semantics, since core semantic properties are shared at different levels by words built by a common word formation process. The scope of WFL is to assign a WFR to each morphologically-complex lexeme (i.e. one word morphologically derived from another word) and to link each complex lexeme to its ancestor. All those lexemes that share a common (not derived) ancestor belong tothe same “word formation family”. For instance, the noun bellatrix ‘she who wages war’, the verb rebello ‘to revolt, rebel’, and the adjective bellicosus ‘fond of war’ all belong to the word formation family whose ancestor is noun bellum ‘war’. The semi-automatic insertion of lemmas into the WFL database establishes input-output relations for a set of lemmas matching the features that characterise each WFR.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union