A NooJ Dictionary for the Rromani Language: Toward a NooJ-Relevant Sorting of Morphosyntactic Tags

• Published in: Formalizing Natural Languages with NooJ and Its Natural Language Processing Applications Vol. 811; pp. 3 - 15
• Main Author: Watabe, Masako
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2017; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Communications in Computer and Information Science
• Subjects: Countable; Morphosyntax; NooJ; Postpositions; Rromani dialectology; Rromani language
• ISBN: 9783319734194; 3319734199
• ISSN: 1865-0929; 1865-0937
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-73420-0_1

This paper aims at presenting how to elaborate a relevant sorting of morphosyntactic tags to be used in the NooJ dictionary for Rromani language through three topics: dialectal issues, treatment of postpositions and countableness of substantives. This module encompasses all four dialects of Rromani, the isoglosses of which are basically no longer geographical. We have thus defined each of the four dialects through a combination of two tags corresponding to specific isoglosses. For instance, the so-called O-bi dialect (i.e. O-superdialect with no mutation of alveolar affricates) is labelled as “rro + rrbi” in NooJ. Then, on typological grounds, it was decided to treat the Rromani postpositions as agglutinative, non-inflectional, morphemes. Rromani postpositions are appended to substantives in the oblique case and in some cases cumulative (as in Modern Indic). In addition, the postposition of possession may be inflected in gender, number and case as an adjective (-qo, -qi, -qeof as basic forms, with variants). Accordingly, no less than some 250 potential forms are to be encountered for postpositions, covering all basic dialectal variants. However, they may all be rendered, by a much more economical system, appropriate to both Rromani grammar and computational analysis. Moreover, we investigated the system of countableness in Rromani nouns when relevant.