Article
Developing a polysynthetic language corpus: problems and solutions
Although there exist comprehensive morphologically annotated corpora for many morphologically rich languages, there have been no such corpora for any polysynthetic language so far. Developing a corpus of a polysynthetic language poses a range of theoretical and practical challenges for corpus linguistics. Some of these challenges have been partly addressed when developing corpora for languages with extensive morphological inventories and numerous productive derivation models such as Turkic or Uralic, while others are unique for this kind of languages. As we are currently working on a corpus of the polysynthetic West Circassian language, we had to identify these challenges and propose theoretical and practical solutions. These include the tokenization problem, which involves delimiting morphology from syntax, the problem with lemmatization and part-of-speech tagging, and a number of glossing and search issues. The solutions proposed in the paper are partly implemented and will be available for public testing when the preliminary version of the corpus is released.
The article discusses the most recent trends in the development of the English progressive. A corpus-based approach to linguistic research is seen as an effective means of determining reliability of the data retrieved and helps track the major diachronic dynamic in the increasing frequency of the progressive aspect that has taken place since the beginning of the 20th century. The article specifically deals with the extension of the progressive to new constructions, such as modal, present perfect and past perfect passive progressive, and also accounts for the use of progressive forms in the contextual environment not generally characteristic of them.
This paper is devoted to the use of two tools for creating morphologically annotated linguistic corpora: UniParser and the EANC platform. The EANC platform is the database and search framework originally developed for the Eastern Armenian National Corpus (www.eanc.net) and later adopted for other languages. UniParser is an automated morphological analysis tool developed specifically for creating corpora of languages with relatively small numbers of native speakers for which the development of parsers from scratch is not feasible. It has been designed for use with the EANC platform and generates XML output in the EANC format.
UniParser and the EANC platform have already been used for the creation of the corpora of several languages: Albanian, Kalmyk, Lezgian, Ossetic, of which the Ossetic corpus is the largest (5 million tokens, 10 million planned for 2013), and are currently being employed in construction of the corpora of Buryat and Modern Greek languages. This paper will describe the general architecture of the EANC platform and UniParser, providing the Ossetic corpus as an example of the advantages and disadvantages of the described approach.
Four electronic corpora created in 2011 within the framework of the “Corpus Linguistics: the Albanian, Kalmyk, Lezgian, and Ossetic Languages” Program of Fundamental Research of the RAS are presented. The interface and functionalities of these corpora are described, engineering problems to be solved in their creation are elucidated, and the promises of their development are discussed. A particular emphasis is made on the compilation of dictionaries and automatic grammatical markup of the corpora.
In this paper I will analyse the syntactic properties of valency-changing derivations and other syntactic processes in Adyghe (a language of the West Caucasian family spoken in the Republic of Adygheya and the Krasnodar region of Russia, and also in some countries of western Asia such as Turkey). My aim is to determine whether these processes testify to syntactic ergativity or accusativity in Adyghe, or whether they in fact shed no light at all on the question of Adyghe alignment behaviour.
In the present paper, I base my analysis of syntactic ergativity on the evidence of valency-changing derivation only. I choose not to consider other pivot properties related to ergativity / accusativity (coordination reduction, relativization, subordinate clauses etc.; see Dixon 1994; Van Valin and LaPolla 1997). It seems to me more justifiable to restrict myself to the data presented by derivational behaviour alone, since in a single article it is impossible to analyse the whole range of data related to ergativity in a polysynthetic language like Adyghe; moreover, the valency-changing derivational system may be organized ergatively, for example, while other syntactic processes are organized accusatively, or vice versa.
The processes analysed in this paper can be divided into two groups, based on the kind of information they provide about ergativity in Adyghe.
First of all, there are derivations which can be regarded as semantically motivated (though syntactic motivation can also be proposed for these processes).
Secondly, there are derivations which are only compatible with transitive verbs, namely the inadvertitive and potential. These transformations are more significant for our analysis, since they show that Adyghe is syntactically ergative.
The project we present – Russian Learner Translator Corpus (RusLTC) is a multiple learner translator corpus which stores Russian students’ translations out of English and into it. The project is being developed by a cross-functional team of translator trainers and computational linguists in Russia. Translations are collected from several Russian universities; all translations are made as part of routine and exam assignments or as submissions for translation contests by students majoring in translation. As of March 2014 RusLTC contains the total of nearly 1.2 million word tokens, 258 source texts, and 1,795 translations. The paper gives a brief overview of the related research, describes the corpus structure and corpus-building technologies used; it also covers the query tool features and our error annotation solutions. In the final part we make a summary of the RusLTC-based research, its current practical applications and suggest research prospects and possibilities.
The paper is focused on the study of reaction of italian literature critics on the publication of the Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Jivago". The analysys of the book ""Doctor Jivago", Pasternak, 1958, Italy" (published in Russian language in "Reka vremen", 2012, in Moscow) is given. The papers of italian writers, critics and historians of literature, who reacted immediately upon the publication of the novel (A. Moravia, I. Calvino, F.Fortini, C. Cassola, C. Salinari ecc.) are studied and analised.
In the article the patterns of the realization of emotional utterances in dialogic and monologic speech are described. The author pays special attention to the characteristic features of the speech of a speaker feeling psychic tension and to the compositional-pragmatic peculiarities of dialogic and monologic text.