Language & Information Lab.

Word Formation as a Structuring Device

of the English and Italian Lexicons:

A Large-Scale Exploration

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[Outline of the project ] [Publications ] [Organization and collaborators ] [Workshops ]

General Information

The research project Word Formation as a Structuring Device of the English and Italian Lexicons: A Large-Scale Exploration is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation for the period 1 July 2000 - 30 June 2002 under grant 1214-058936.99. It is a joint project of the English Seminar at the  Universität Basel and the Facoltà di scienze della comunicazione at the Università della Svizzera Italiana , carried out within the general framework of Word Manager and coordinated by Pius ten Hacken .

Outline of the Project

Problem description Morphological descriptions and theories have so far been developed and discussed on the basis of a relatively small number of examples. In this way, a general validation has never been achieved and possible generalizations have been missed.
Purpose In this project, knowledge databases for English and Italian have been created. Each database contains the following information for one language: a significant portion of the lexicon (approximately 50'000 lexemes for each language), the word formation rules, and the relationships between words in accordance with these word formation rules. By building on the foundations available in the Word Manager project, the goal of developing high quality, consistent databases could be achieved with a reasonable effort.
Relevance It has not been the aim of the project to produce new dictionaries. The large-scale modelling of word formation, however, is a new feature. For each language, existing morphological descriptions can be tested and improved. The parallel modelling of two languages, together with the existing implementation for German, offers interesting perspectives for testing general morphological theories on a scale which could not really have been envisaged before.
Keywords
  • Formal description of word formation processes
  • Reusable morphological lexicon
  • Analysis and generation of words
  • Contrastive analysis of word formation in English and Italian
  • Large-scale testing of general morphological theories
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    Publications

    ten Hacken, Pius (2002), " Word Formation and the Validation of Lexical Resources ", in González Rodríguez, Manuel & Paz Suárez Araujo, Carmen (eds.),  LREC 2002 : Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation - Proceedings, p. 935-942.

    ten Hacken, Pius & Smyk, Dorota (2002): " Word Formation versus Etymology in Electronic Dictionaries ", in Braasch, Anna & Povlson, Claus (eds.), The Tenth Euralex International Congress, Copenhagen - Denmark, August 13-17, 2002, Proceedings , p. 221-230.

    Petropoulou, Evanthia & ten Hacken, Pius (2002): " Neoclassical word formation in an electronic dictionary ", in Braasch, Anna & Povlson, Claus (eds.), The Tenth Euralex International Congress, Copenhagen - Denmark, August 13-17, 2002, Proceedings , p. 169-174.

    Aspects of the project were presented at the following conferences:

  • EuroCALL 2001 [Presentation ]
  • LAGB 2001 (Autumn) [ Presentation ]
  • DGfS 2002, Workshop on Integrating Foreign Words
  • CerLiCo 2002

    • Collaborators and Organization

    General coordination and linguistic specifications
    Pius ten Hacken
     English lexicography
    Italian lexicography
    Coordination
    Pius ten Hacken
    Coordination
    Antonia Lüscher
    Lexicographic work
    Evanthia Petropoulou
    Dorota Smyk
    Lexicographic work
    Marco Passarotti
    Chiara Restivo
    Software support
    Sandro Pedrazzini

    Responsibles

    Prof. D.J. Allerton , Englisches Seminar, Universität Basel
    PD Dr. Bruno Moretti , Osservatorio linguistico della Svizzera italiana & Institut für Italienische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Bern
    PD Dr. Pius ten Hacken , Abteilung Geisteswissenschaftliche Informatik, Universität Basel
    Prof. Dr. Stefano Crespi Reghizzi , Facoltà delle Scienze della Communicazione, Università della Svizzera Italiana

    Workshops

    As part of the project, an introductory workshop was organized, as well as a course on the development of morphological theory . The PowerPoint presentations by Pius ten Hacken are available from separate pages which explain their context. They are intended for internal use, but if you are interested you are welcome to have a look at them.


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    13-Sep-2002    Pius ten Hacken