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In a previous article (Faaß et al., 2012), a first attempt was made at documenting and encoding morphemic units of two South African Bantu languages, i.e. Northern Sotho and Zulu, with the aim of describing and storing the morphemic units of these two languages in a single relational database, structured as a hierarchical ontology. As a follow-up, the current article describes the implementation of our part-of-speech ontology. We give a detailed description of the morphemes and categories contained in the database, highlighting the need and reasons for a flexible ontology which will provide for both language specific and general linguistic information. By giving a detailed account of the methodology for the population of the database, we provide linguists from other Bantu languages with a road map for extending the database to also include their languages of specialization.
Towards a part-of-speech ontology: encoding morphemic units of two South African Bantu languages
(2012)
This article describes the design of an electronic knowledge base, namely a morpho-syntactic database structured as an ontology of linguistic categories, containing linguistic units of two related languages of the South African Bantu group: Northern Sotho and Zulu. These languages differ significantly in their surface orthographies, but are very similar on the lexical and sub-lexical levels. It is therefore our goal to describe the morphemes of these languages in a single common database in order to outline and interpret commonalities and differences in more detail. Moreover, the relational database which is developed defines the underlying morphemic units (morphs) for both languages. It will be shown that the electronic part-of-speech ontology goes hand in hand with part-of-speech tagsets that label morphemic units. This database is designed as part of a forthcoming system providing lexicographic and linguistic knowledge on the official South African Bantu languages.
This paper looks at whether, after two decades of corpus building for the Bantu languages, the time is ripe to begin using monitor corpora. As a proof-of-concept, the usefulness of a Lusoga monitor corpus for lexicographic purposes, in casu for the detection of neologisms, both in terms of new words and new meanings, is investigated and found useful.
This paper provides a formal semantic analysis of past interpretation in Medumba (Grassfields Bantu), a graded tense language. Based on original fieldwork, the study explores the empirical behavior and meaning contribution of graded past morphemes in Medumba and relates these to the account of the phenomenon proposed in Cable (Nat Lang Semant 21:219–276, 2013) for Gĩkũyũ. Investigation reveals that the behavior of Medumba gradedness markers differs from that of their Gĩkũyũ counterparts in meaningful ways and, more broadly, discourages an analysis as presuppositional eventuality or reference time modifiers. Instead, the Medumba markers are most appropriately analyzed as quantificational tenses. It also turns out that Medumba, though belonging to the typological class of graded tense languages, shows intriguing similarities to genuinely tenseless languages in allowing for temporally unmarked sentences and exploiting aspectual and pragmatic cues for reference time resolution. The more general cross-linguistic implication of the study is that the set of languages often subsumed under the label “graded tense” does not in fact form a natural class and that more case-by-case research is needed to refine this category.