[B-Greek] Lemmatization (was "Inaccurate electronic versions")
James Tauber
jtauber at jtauber.com
Thu Jan 25 10:34:13 EST 2007
Carl, you will be pleased to know that my own views on this matter have
been greatly influenced by you and, although what's currently available
at morphgnt.org doesn't reflect this yet, much of the work I've been
doing over the last year, including my doctoral work, is well aligned
with exactly what you describe below, even on the more 'radical' issues
:-)
James
On Thu, 25 Jan 2007 09:22:44 -0500, "Carl W. Conrad"
<cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu> said:
>
> On Jan 25, 2007, at 6:26 AM, James Tauber wrote:
>
> >
> > It's the lemmatization that I've mostly focused on over the last
> > twelve years on and off.
>
> Lemmatization and parsing are more problematic than is commonly
> realized, I think, particularly with respect to verb-forms.
> Lemmatization in lexica and parsing tags in parsing guides could be
> altered in ways that would better reflect the real structure of the
> ancient Greek verbal system especially.
>
> One hesitates to depart from the convention of listing verbs
> preferably by the first-person singular present indicative active,
> even if an active-voice form or a present-tense form is either rare
> or non-standard.
> It's customary, for instance, to list contract verbs in the
> uncontracted form of the present indicative 1 sg. -- despite the fact
> that one doesn't ever see the uncontracted forms (outside of old
> Ionic). The rationale for this is that knowing the stem vowel is -A-,
> -E-, or -O- assists one consulting the lexicon to recognize
> contracted forms of the verb (provided that one really knows the
> contractions, of course).
> Two changes in standard lemmatization of verbs have been suggested:
> (1) Infinitives, rather than 1 sg. indicative forms, might better
> characterize the verb, e.g. LEGEIN instead of LEGW, POIEIN instead of
> POIEW. POREUESQAI instead of POREUOMAI.
> (2) Randall Buth (and perhaps some others) has suggested that the
> aorist-tense form should be used as a lemma instead of a present-
> tense form, in which case we'd have ELEXA (or better LEXAI,
> especially since the infinitive is unaugmented) for LEGW, EPOIHSA (or
> POIHSAI) for POIEW, EPOREUSAMHN (or better POREUSAI) for POREUOMAI. I
> personally think that using the aorist infinitive instead of the
> present-tense indicative 1st sg. would be a more useful lemmatization.
>
> Much of my own focus of though in recent years has been on voice
> morphology and designations most appropriate for the standard
> categories and of voice-form notation:
>
> (1) Middle-passive and Passive morphoparadigms: If we can rid
> ourselves of the useless and misleading notion of "deponency" and
> recognize that the -QH- and -H- aorists (conventionally termed "first
> passive" and "second passive") are identical in form with non-
> thematic second aorists ("active") such as ESTHN and EFANHN, and
> grasp that, beginning already in Homeric poetry, -QH- aorists
> increasingly over the centuries replaced the older aorist Middles in -
> OMHN, etc. while retaining both middle and passive semantic force,
> then we should distinguish in our parsing (a) the Middle-passive
> forms in -MAI/SAI/TAI, MHN/SO/TO from (b) the Middle-passive forms in
> -QH- (including futures in -QHSOMAI and -HSOMAI). The question is how
> best to do this; I have suggested in the past that we should
> designate the MAI/SAI/TAI, MHN/SO/TO forms as "MP1" and the -QH-
> forms as "MP2" (this would properly indicate that any of these forms
> might potentially carry either "middle" or "passive" semantic force
> -- although whether it is "passive" rather than "middle" really
> depends upon the particular verb in question). If, however, adoption
> of these designations ("MP1" and "MP2") seems too radical, then we
> might retain the more traditional markers "M" for the MAI/SAI/TAI,
> MHN/SO/TO forms and "P" for all the -QH- forms. Of course, changes
> such as this would require a "paradigm shift" in pedagogy with
> respect to the teaching of the voice-system of ancient Greek (it was
> not I but Neva Miller who first spoke of such a pedagogical "paradigm
> shift").
>
> (2) Middle verbs and verbs for which the Middle form is standard
> (e.g., hISTAMAI, EGEIROMAI): Perhaps as 'radical' as using the aorist
> infinitive as the primary lemma for verbs would be a shift to
> indicating as lemma the middle form (present indicative active 1 sg.
> or aorist infinitive) of verbs that are fundamentally middle and
> intransitive despite the fact that they have active causative forms.
> So-called "deponents" even now are lemmatized with middle-forms
> (POREUOMAI, DUNAMAI, ERCOMAI), but there are several verbs (termed
> "ergative" by some linguists) that are fundamentally intransitive and
> have middle-voice forms although they have transitive active-
> causative forms: hISTAMAI "come to a stand" and EGEIROMAI "rise" are
> examples; their corresponding active forms are hISTHMI "make to
> stand" and EGEIRW "make to rise/raise." There are also some less-
> frequently-used verbs that are pretty clearly middle but are
> occasionally used in active forms: AGALLIAOMAI, for instance, appears
> eleven times in the GNT, 9x in the middle-passive or passive, 2x in
> the active; clearly the middle-passive forms are standard, yet the
> active form AGALLIAW is the lemma in the lexica: it ought not to be.
>
> >
> > You are correct that the original CCAT database made available in
> > 1993 has a lot of errors -- thousands, if you count instances.
> >
> > If you get the CCAT file from anywhere other than jtauber.com or
> > morphgnt.org, you are probably getting either the original CCAT
> > release from 1993 or one from around 1995 with my first round of
> > corrections. It's the latter which Broman and others were making
> > available (and which was the basis for the late Tony Fisher's site).
> >
> > However, many significant corrections have been made since then,
> > especially in 2002 and since 2004.
> >
> > Since December 2005, I've been working with Ulrik Petersen (who in
> > parallel to my CCAT/UBS work had been working on Tischendorf and
> > other texts). We are working on integrating our data, the first
> > fruits of which should be available soon.
> >
> > James
> >
> >
> > On 24/01/2007, at 6:35 PM, Alan Bunning wrote:
> >
> >> Thanks for the info! I'll take a look and compare it with what I
> >> have. I
> >> certainly don't want to have to reinvent the wheel. It does look
> >> like there
> >> is some overlap. Let me know if anything I am doing can help your
> >> cause. The
> >> next thing I was planning on doing, was correcting the parsings and
> >> roots
> >> for those same texts. As I said, I barely got started and already
> >> found a
> >> tremendous number of errors. What sort of work have you done in
> >> this regard?
> >> I will certainly add the set you have to the mix when I compare them.
>
> Carl W. Conrad
> Department of Classics, Washington University (Retired)
> 1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
> cwconrad2 at mac.com
> WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
>
>
--
James Tauber http://jtauber.com/
journeyman of some http://jtauber.com/blog/
More information about the B-Greek
mailing list