Celata, Chiara

Talamo, Luigi

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How to deal with morphotactic and morphosemantic transparency in themorphological annotation of an Italian corpusLuigi Talamo & Chiara Celata (luigi.talamo|chiara.celata@sns.it)Laboratorio di Linguistica - Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa1 - OverviewBackground: Few linguistic corpora provide morphological information, either inflectional or deriva-tional. Regarding Italian, we may rely on Morph-IT (Zanchetta and Baroni 2005), containing the fullparadigm of about 400,000 Italian verbs, and the ongoing project AnIta, a morphological analyser basedon 120,000 lemma (Grandi, Montermini, and Tamburini 2011).Aim of the project: To realize a database of morphologically annotated Italian derived forms that allowsfor quantitative studies of the dynamics of derivation.Corpus: COLFIS (Bertinetto et al. 2005), a four million tokens corpus developed in the mid nineties withspecific psycholinguistic purposes. For each complex form contained in COLFIS, we describe the formaland semantic aspects of the derivational process.Dataset: 40 Italian affixes (11 prefixes, 29 suffixes), covering approximately 10,000 types in COLFIS (detailsin Talamo and Celata 2011).Annotation features: (i) base/derivational morpheme; (ii) type of base/affix allomorph, (iii) morphotactictransparency; (iv) morphosemantic transparency.Theoretical and empirical issues: Derivational processes have to be treated in terms of a graded notionof morphological transparency, which has to be further analyzed in its formal (i.e. morphotactic) andsemantic aspects. In this project, we follow a long-standing tradition of study that describes morphologicaltransparency with scales (Dressler 2005), and propose an adaptation for Italian.2 - Morphotactic transparencyOne of the key assumptions of Natural Morphology is that formal complexity of word forms has conse-quences on the cognitive level of linguistic processing. The table below is an adaptation of the morphotacticscale discussed in Dressler 2005 to Italian derivational processes. The fourth column shows the annotationlabels used in this project.DEGREE NATURE OF PHENOMENON EXAMPLE LABELI none de- + tassare = detassare ’to detax’ mt1II purely prosodic and phonological (e.g., resyl-labification, assimilation)sonorization: [z]-debitare ’to repay’ mt2IV morpho-phonological, without loss ofmorpho-phonological constituents (e.g.,fusion, articulatory weakening)affricativization: unt- ’to oil (irregular past participle)’→un[ts]ione ’unction’mt4V morpho-phonological, with loss of morpho-phonological constituents (e.g., deletion)polemico ’polemical’→polem-izzare ’to polemize’ mt5VI pure morphological (e.g., paradigmatic alter-nation of affixes)comunismo ’communism’→ comunista ’communist’ mt6VII lexical: weak suppletion pioggia ’rain’→pluv-iale ’rain (adj.)’ mt7VIII lexical: strong suppletion guerra ’war’→ bellico ’war (adj.)’ mt8Seven degrees in Italian word formation processes are shown, and the level of morphotactic opacity in-creases as we move from degree I (where no intervening phonological processes obscure the relation be-tween the base and the derived form) up to degree VIII.With respect to Dressler’s 8-level original scale for English, one degree (III) is missing in our proposal, namely, the degree thatconcerns the effects of neutralizing phonological rules (e.g., flapping: write + -er >wri[R]er). This degree does not seem to pertain toItalian morphotactics. Moreover, since several Italian suffixes begin with a vowel, most suffixation processes entail resyllabification,as in ri.ci.cla.re (’to recycle’) > ri.ci.clag.gio (’recycle (noun)’): thus, at least in principle, we have to reclassify these morphologicalprocesses under degree II because of their prosodic nature.According to Natural Morphology, forms belonging to the most natural degrees of the scale are expectedto show higher values of productivity. At the end of the project, we will be able to verify this hypothesisover a large amount of data.3 - Morphosemantic transparencyThe following scale is inspired by Libben’s (1998) four-degree scale of morphosemantic transparency inEnglish compounding. The fourth column shows the annotation labels used in this project.LEVEL EXAMPLE TRANSPARENCY LABELBASE AFFIX1 stappare ’uncork’, allenamento ‘training’ + + ms12a aquilone ’kite’, disintegrare ‘disintegrate’ ± + ms2a2b costituzione ’constitutional law’, intrattenere ‘to entertain’ ± ± ms2b3 sbiadire ’unfade’, potabile ‘drinkable’ - + ms3At Level 1, both the base and the affix show full morphosemantic transparency. Derived forms that areopacified due to a process of lexicalization (half-transparency: ±) but still retain their affix meaning areassigned to Level 2a. Level 2b shows half-transparency of the affix instead. Finally, ‘base-less’ forms (Gaetaand Ricca 2003:71) that show transparency in their word formation meaning but opacity in the meaning oftheir base because the base is not a lexical morpheme in Italian, are assigned to Level 3.4 - AnnotationDerived forms are described according to their base and the word formation processes (wfps) synchron-ically recoverable. Apart from few exceptions, we assume that wpfs are linear and the structure of thederived word is layered (Manova and Aronoff 2010:113-114). Seven different slots are provided, one forthe annotation of the base and up to six for the wfps. Parasynthetic process are marked by the trailingcharacter -P on each wfp involved.Derived Base Wfp1 Wfp2 Wfp3 Wfp4 Wfp5 Wfp6AFFABULAZIONE FAVOLA:suppl AD:ad:mt7:ms2a-P C:N_V-P ZIONE:zione:mt1:ms1ANTIPROIBIZIONISTA PROIBIRE:vt ZIONE:zione:mt1:ms1 ISMO:ismo:mt1:ms1 ANTI:anti:mt1:ms1 ISTA:ista:mt6:ms1ASSENTEISMO BASELESS:unrecoverable NZA:nza:mt8:ms3 NTE:nte:mt6:ms1 ISMO:ismo:mt1:ms1COSTITUZIONALISTA COSTITUIRE:latpp ZIONE:ione:mt4:ms2b ALE:ale:mt1:ms1 ISTA:ista:mt1:ms15 - Further development3 Evaluation: Inter-annotation agreement (in progress)3 Psycholinguistic tests to assess the validity of morphosemantic scale3 Quantitative assessment of frequency and productivity for Italian derivational patterns3 Quantitative investigation of aspects of morphotactic-morphosemantic iconicity3 Automatically tagging of Italian corpora with morphological informationReferences - 1• Pier Marco Bertinetto et al. (2005). Corpus e Lessico di Frequenza dell’Italiano Scritto (CoLFIS). URL: http://linguistica.sns.it/CoLFIS/Home.htm.• W. U. Dressler (2005). “Word-formation in Natural Morphology.” In: Handbook of Word-Formation (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistics Theory,volume 64). Ed. by P. Štekauer and R. Lieber. Springer, pp. 335–352.• L. Gaeta and D. Ricca (2003). “Frequency and productivity in Italian derivation: A comparison between corpus-based and lexicographical data”. In:Italian Journal of Linguistics/Rivista di linguistica 15.1, pp. 63–98.• N. Grandi, F. Montermini, and F. Tamburini (2011). “Annotating large corpora for studying Italian derivational morphology”. In: Lingue e Linguaggio2.10, pp. 227–244.• G. Libben (1998). “Semantic Transparency in the Processing of Compounds: Consequences for Representation, Processing, and Impairment”. In:Brain and Language 61, pp. 30–44.References - 2• S. Manova and M. Aronoff (2010). “Modeling affix order.” In: Morphology 20.1, pp. 109–131.• L. Talamo and C. Celata (2011). “Toward a morphological analysis of the Italian lexicon: developing tools for a corpus-based approach”. In: Quadernidel Laboratorio di Linguistica 1.10. URL: http://linguistica.sns.it/QLL/QLL11.htm.• E. Zanchetta and M. Baroni (2005). “Morph-it! A free corpus-based morphological resource for the Italian language”. In: Corpus Linguistics 2005 1.1.

How to deal with morphotactic and morphosemantic transparency in the morphological annotation of an Italian corpus

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How to deal with morphotactic and morphosemantic transparency in the morphological annotation of an Italian corpus

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