Ancient Greek Annotated Corpora for Digital Humanities and Language Teaching

The corpus-based methods are becoming increasingly central to present-day research in historical linguistics and digital humanities. One type of linguistic corpora — treebanks (large collections of syntactically parsed sentences) have recently emerged as a valuable resource not only for traditional linguistic and philological researches, but for computational tasks such as automatic morphological and syntactical parsing. The article is devoted to the comparison of ancient Greek treebanks, the most universal tools for natural language processing and text analysis that these treebanks use are considered, and a description of the experience of using treebanks in teaching the ancient Greek language is given.Корпусные методы становятся все более значимыми в современных исследованиях в исторической лингвистике и в цифровых гуманитарных науках. Одна из разновидностей лингвистических корпусов — трибанки (большие коллекции синтаксически проанализированных предложений) стали ценным ресурсом не только для традиционных лингвистических и филологических исследований, но и для задач компьютерной лингвистики, таких как автоматический морфологический и синтаксический анализ. Статья посвящена сравнению трибанков древнегреческого языка, рассмотрению наиболее универсальных инструментов обработки естественных языков и анализа текстов, использующих эти трибанки, а также опыту применения трибанков в обучении древнегреческому языку

Cyberinfrastructure for Classical Philology

No humanists have moved more aggressively in the digital world than students of the Greco-Roman world but the first generation of digital classics has seen relatively superficial methods to address the problems of print culture. We are now beginning to see new intellectual practices for which new terms, eWissenschaft and eClassics, and a new cyberinfrastructure are emerging

The semantic network of the Latin preposition per: a diachronic investigation.

This paper explores the semantic network of the Latin preposition per (“through”) in a diachronic perspective derived from the analysis of two electronic corpora of 3rd century BCE – 4th century CE (PHI5; Intratext Digital Library). Drawing upon the insights of Cognitive Grammar (e.g. Langacker 1991), we analyze the role of the schematic import of per in the spread from basic to abstract meanings, thus accounting for the interconnections among the various senses of the polysemous entity. This theoretical position is integrated with Croft’s (1991) model of causal structure of events, as well as the results of an extensive analysis of Early Latin (Brucale & Mocciaro fc.), in order to address the following issues: 1. the diachronic shifts in the ratio of spatial to abstract meanings: spatial meanings are predominant in Early Latin (e.g. per urbem ire, Pl., Poen 522; per cribrum transire, Cat., De Agr. 76.3.4), while the only abstract values which are fully grammaticalized at this stage are MEANS (a less prototypical and abstract instrument: per vim retinere, Pl., Bacch. 843; see Croft 1991: 178) and REASON (the motivation for an agent to act: per metum mussari, Pl., Aul. 131; see Pinkster 1990). We aim at tracing back the path(s) through which new abstract meanings arise. 2. the role of Animacy: MEANS and REASON involve non-animate (abstract) participants, whereas the spread to Animacy represents a secondary development within the area of Causation, documented in Early Latin in a few instances of CAUSE (the motivation of a non- agentive event: per aliquem vivere, Pl., Poen. 1187) and INTERMEDIARY (per me interpretem, Pl., Mil. 910). Out of the causal domain, however,, Animacy is a rather ancient feature, represented in the expressions of Appeal (with performative verbs such as iuro, e.g. per Iovem iurare, Pl. Amph. 435) and Judgment of licitness (per me licet, Pl., Merc., 989). On the other hand, the expression of (concrete) INSTRUMENT represents a later development (cf. Luraghi 2010: per nauiculam uenire, Itala, cod. d., Ioh. 21, 8). In other words, the spread from concrete to abstract meanings appears to be non-unidirectional, rather drawing the following trajectory: SPATIAL (CONCRETE) > ABSTRACT > ANIMATE > INANIMATE (CONCRETE). 3. the grammaticalization of the expression of PURPOSE: another later development, which is based on an extension of Reason: “The objects we aspire for are usually also the cause for our aspiration” (Radden 1989: 562; see also Croft 1991: 293). Finally we propose a semantic map of the range of values conveyed by per, showing that they do not arrange on a linear continuum, but rather represent a multi-directional configuration originating from the progressive (metonymical) extension of a prototypical nucleus over time. Brucale, L. & Mocciaro, E. (fc.), Continuity and discontinuity in the semantics of the Latin preposition per: a cognitive hypothesis, in STUF 63/1. Croft, W. (1991), Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hewson, J. & Bubenik, V. (2006), From Case to Adposition: The development of configurational syntax in Indo-European Languages. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Langacker, R. (1991), Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Luraghi, S. 2010, Adverbial Phrases, in P. Baldi & P. Cuzzolin (eds), New Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax, 2. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pinkster, H. (1990), Latin Syntax and Semantics. London: Routledge. Radden, G. (1989), Semantic roles, in R. Dirven, & R. Geiger (eds), A User’s Grammar of English. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 421–471

A computational approach to Latin verbs: new resources and methods

Questa tesi presenta l'applicazione di metodi computazionali allo studio dei verbi latini. In particolare, mostriamo la creazione di un lessico di sottocategorizzazione estratto automaticamente da corpora annotati; inoltre presentiamo un modello probabilistico per l'acquisizione di preferenze di selezione a partire da corpora annotati e da un'ontologia (Latin WordNet). Infine, descriviamo i risultati di uno studio diacronico e quantitativo sui preverbi spaziali latini