GreekLex 2: a comprehensive lexical database with part-of-speech, syllabic, phonological, and stress information

Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress information, as well as combination of several metrics to investigate linguistic properties of the Greek language are highlighted. To address these issues, we present a new extensive lexical database of Modern Greek (GreekLex 2) with part-of-speech information for each word and accurate syllabification and orthographic information predictive of stress, as well as several measurements of word similarity and phonetic information. The addition of detailed statistical information about Greek part-of-speech, syllabification, and stress neighbourhood allowed novel analyses of stress distribution within different grammatical categories and syllabic lengths to be carried out. Results showed that the statistical preponderance of stress position on the pre-final syllable that is reported for Greek language is dependent upon grammatical category. Additionally, analyses showed that a proportion higher than 90% of the tokens in the database would be stressed correctly solely by relying on stress neighbourhood information. The database and the scripts for orthographic and phonological syllabification as well as phonetic transcription are available at http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/greeklex/

Diachronie et synchronie dynamique

In this paper A. Martinet's theory on the dynamic character of language synchrony as well as its impact on diachrony are discussed. On the grounds of language data Martinet indicates that variation and language change constitute the dynamics of synchrony which also explain language change on diachronic level Synchronic dynamics makes a constant systematic process of certain synchronic structures toward convergence or divergence. Thus Martinet - early among the first linguists - rejects the « static » character which was attributed to synchrony by Saussure. Instead, he describes and explains the (convergent or divergent) mechanisms in structure and change of language systems on their transition from synchronic to diachronic stages