Title
Language documentation: the Nahuatl grammar
Abstract
We describe an on-going documentation project for Nahuatl, an indigenous language of Mexico. While we follow standard recommendations for documenting text corpora and for the dictionary, the usual recommendations are not explicit concerning the grammar. Since Nahuatl is an agglutinating language, the morphological component of the grammar is highly complex. Accordingly, we consider it essential to not only provide static information about the language, such as a lexicon and parsed text, but dynamic documentation in the form of a working morphological grammar. When compiled into a finite state transducer, this grammar provides parses for arbitrary inflected forms, including many not in the corpus, as well as the generation of the partial or full inflectional paradigms. In keeping with the archival goals of language documentation, we argue that this grammar should be simultaneously human readable and computer processable, so that it will be re-implementable in future computational tools. The notion of literate computing provides the appropriate paradigm for these dual goals.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1007/978-3-540-30586-6_52
CICLing
Keywords
Field
DocType
agglutinating language,language documentation,text corpus,dynamic documentation,on-going documentation project,nahuatl grammar,indigenous language,appropriate paradigm,morphological component,parsed text,morphological grammar,finite state transducer
Attribute grammar,Link grammar,Computer science,Emergent grammar,Grammar,Affix grammar,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Regular grammar,Generative grammar,Linguistics,Mildly context-sensitive grammar formalism
Conference
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
3406
0302-9743
3-540-24523-5
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.42
4
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mike Maxwell171.86
Jonathan D. Amith220.76