LD&C Special Publication No. 4: Electronic Grammaticography

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https://hdl.handle.net/10125/24244

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    Whole volume
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012-10)
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    Acknowledgments
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012-10) Nordhoff, Sebastian
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    Contributors
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012-10)
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    Contents
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012-10) Nordhoff, Sebastian
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    Front matter
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012-10) Nordhoff, Sebastian
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    Appendix
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012-10) Nordhoff, Sebastian
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    Language description and hypertext: Nunggubuyu as a case study
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012-10) Musgrave, Simon ; Thieberger, Nick
    Any reasonably complete description of a language is a complex object, typically composed of a grammar, a dictionary, and a text collection with internal relationships that can be represented as hyperlinks. The information would be fully searchable, links between text and media could be implemented, and the presentation would be based on a well-defined data structure with advantages for archiving and reusability. We present a small fragment from Heath's Nunggubuyu text collection with links to parts of the other elements of the description to demonstrate the benefit which this approach can bring. This initial step involves a certain amount of hand-coding but establishes a basis for the necessary data structure which will then be used in a second phase where we develop techniques for the automatic processing of scanned versions of Heath's work. Grammatical descriptions written with the kinds of structure we are developing, or capable of being converted to that structure (while being 'born digital') are likely to be in short supply. Presentations of old materials in new formats will inform new electronic grammars, and help gain the acceptance of the linguistic community for preferred formats.
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    The grammatical description as a collection of form-meaning-pairs
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012-10) Nordhoff, Sebastian
    This paper analyzes the structure of books containing grammatical descriptions and builds up on work by Good (2004). It argues that the discussion of morphology, syntax, semantics, and intonation found in grammatical descriptions can be seen as a collection of interdependent form-meaning-pairs. These form-meaning-pairs form part of the larger structure of frontmatter, mainmatter and backmatter (Mosel 2006) and have themselves an internal structure which includes, among other things, linguistic examples as formalized by Bow et al (2003).
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    Advances in the accountability of grammatical analysis and description by using regular expressions
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012-10) Mosel, Ulrike
    This paper discusses the representativeness, coextensitivity and scientific accountability of corpus-based grammatical descriptions of previously unresearched languages. While a grammatical description of a previously unresearched language can hardly be representative for any kind of its varieties, it can be adequate n coextensitivity if it covers the linguistic phenomena presented in the corpus. In order to allow other researchers to retrieve the examples in their context and check the analysis, the corpus should not only contain text collections, but also the elicited data, provide metadata and be accessible to other researchers. Scientific accountability, however, can only be achieved, if the description facilitates the replicability of the analysis, which presupposes that the authors’ corpus linguistic search methods are documented, so that the readers can find other, if not all examples for the described phenomena, and scrutinize the search methods, the analysis and the description. As is illustrated in this paper, a suitable query language for this kind of scientific grammatical analysis and description are the so-called regular expressions which are implemented in the annotation tool ELAN.
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    Electronic Grammars and Reproducible Research
    (University of Hawai'i Press, 2012-10) Maxwell, Mike
    It is time for grammatical descriptions to become reproducible research. In order for this to happen, grammar descriptions must be testable, not only by the original author, but also by other linguists. Given the complexity of natural language grammars, and the ambiguity of prose descriptions, that testing is best done using computational tools to verify a computationally implementable grammar. At the same time, grammars need to be useful---and testable---for the foreseeable future; that is, they must be archivable. Yet if a computational grammar is tied to particular computational tools, it will inevitably become obsolescent. This paper describes a means of creating computationally interpretable grammars which are not tied to particular computational tools, nor (to the extent possible) to any particular linguistic theory, and which can therefore be expected to remain useful into the future. In order to make such formal grammars simultaneously understandable to humans, they are embedded into descriptive grammars of a more traditional sort, using the technique of Literate Programming. The implementation of this technology for morphology and phonology is described. It has been used to create morphological grammars for Bangla, Urdu and Pashto which are both human-readable and computationally testable.