Morphology Paradigms

Jonathan Robie
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Morphology Paradigms

Post by Jonathan Robie »

paorear wrote: December 26th, 2017, 5:57 pm Perhaps a different way of approaching what I think Peter was saying is - when do we agree with what grammars (and lexicons and commentaries) have always told us? What methodology do we have to validate or invalidate their assertions? (cf. John Lee's article that was shared here recently on lexicons, their dependence on earlier lexicons, and continuing to promulgate old, invalid assumptions)

If something like these odd feminine 2nd declension nouns and 2 termination adjectives 'smells funny' - what is our means of verifying what we've always been taught? To prove or disprove Peter's assertions we'd really want to be able to do exhaustive searches on feminine 2nd declension nouns with adjectives.
Yes, if we had that data in our morphologies and treebanks, it would make this and many other very useful queries possible.

I wonder how far along James is with this ...
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
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jtauber
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Re: Errors In Revelation?

Post by jtauber »

Jonathan Robie wrote: December 26th, 2017, 6:11 pm I wonder how far along James is with this ...
I'm a lot further with verbs than nominals but the infrastructure is in place and I can pretty quickly make progress on nominals, especially to serve specific use cases. I haven't looked at this thread in detail, but what sort of annotation are you looking for on the nouns and adjectives?
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Jonathan Robie
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Re: Errors In Revelation?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

jtauber wrote: December 26th, 2017, 6:14 pm
Jonathan Robie wrote: December 26th, 2017, 6:11 pm I wonder how far along James is with this ...
I'm a lot further with verbs than nominals but the infrastructure is in place and I can pretty quickly make progress on nominals, especially to serve specific use cases. I haven't looked at this thread in detail, but what sort of annotation are you looking for on the nouns and adjectives?
I basically want a set of inflectional classes for each kind of word that can be inflected. Traditionally, we have talked about first, second, and third declension for nouns and adjectives, and many books seem to have ~7 categories for verbs.

From what we've discussed, I suspect you may have ideas for doing this better. What would you recommend? It might be worth starting a new thread for this ... how do you accommodate both lumpers and splitters, for instance?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Jonathan Robie
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Re: Errors In Revelation?

Post by Jonathan Robie »

jtauber wrote: December 26th, 2017, 6:14 pm
Jonathan Robie wrote: December 26th, 2017, 6:11 pm I wonder how far along James is with this ...
I'm a lot further with verbs than nominals but the infrastructure is in place and I can pretty quickly make progress on nominals, especially to serve specific use cases. I haven't looked at this thread in detail, but what sort of annotation are you looking for on the nouns and adjectives?
I basically want a set of inflectional classes for each kind of word that can be inflected. Traditionally, we have talked about first, second, and third declension for nouns and adjectives, and many books seem to have ~7 categories for verbs.

From what we've discussed, I suspect you may have ideas for doing this better. What would you recommend? It might be worth starting a new thread for this ... how do you accommodate both lumpers and splitters, for instance?
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ διηποροῦντο, ἄλλος πρὸς ἄλλον λέγοντες, τί θέλει τοῦτο εἶναι;
http://jonathanrobie.biblicalhumanities.org/
Barry Hofstetter
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Re: Errors In Revelation?

Post by Barry Hofstetter »

paorear wrote: December 26th, 2017, 5:57 pm
If something like these odd feminine 2nd declension nouns and 2 termination adjectives 'smells funny' - what is our means of verifying what we've always been taught? To prove or disprove Peter's assertions we'd really want to be able to do exhaustive searches on feminine 2nd declension nouns with adjectives.

Just playing devil's advocate here a little. :) Though I'm not convinced Peter is right, I like that he was thinking outside the box a little here.
I'm sorry, but with all due respect to Peter, there is nothing that "smells funny" and anybody who spends sufficient time in the language knows this. And that is our means of verifying it. Not only can one examine the examples given in the lexicons and grammars, but one can read lots of Greek and see the same patterns repeated over and over. It's inductive, and it's objective. There is really no argument whatsoever to support Peter's assertions, which I believe stem more from theological considerations than grammatical/syntactical.
N.E. Barry Hofstetter, M.A., Th.M.
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Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy
καὶ σὺ τὸ σὸν ποιήσεις κἀγὼ τὸ ἐμόν. ἆρον τὸ σὸν καὶ ὕπαγε.
paorear
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Re: Errors In Revelation?

Post by paorear »

jtauber wrote: December 26th, 2017, 6:14 pm
Jonathan Robie wrote: December 26th, 2017, 6:11 pm I wonder how far along James is with this ...
I'm a lot further with verbs than nominals but the infrastructure is in place and I can pretty quickly make progress on nominals, especially to serve specific use cases. I haven't looked at this thread in detail, but what sort of annotation are you looking for on the nouns and adjectives?
Including declension information for nominals would be great, as well as when an adjective is considered two-termination. Those are at least the two primary use cases that came from this thread, I believe.
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Re: Errors In Revelation?

Post by jtauber »

Jonathan Robie wrote: December 26th, 2017, 6:28 pm I basically want a set of inflectional classes for each kind of word that can be inflected. Traditionally, we have talked about first, second, and third declension for nouns and adjectives, and many books seem to have ~7 categories for verbs.

From what we've discussed, I suspect you may have ideas for doing this better. What would you recommend? It might be worth starting a new thread for this ... how do you accommodate both lumpers and splitters, for instance?
Mounce's categories will get you a decent way there, especially for nouns. In all cases, Mounce's categories are hierarchical which goes a long way to accommodating both lumpers and splitters. It works a bit better for nouns (although Mounce does still say odd things in MBG like "this noun is in category X but inflects like it's in category Y". If so, why not put it in Y? Oh, because you're confusing whether to go by stem form or paradigm realisation). With verbs it's problematic more often because there isn't a single dimension along which to categorise verb inflection. So I think ultimately you need multiple categories—separating, for example, how personal endings work from how stem formation works. In this regard, I think certain inflection classes really belong on verb stems rather than entire lexemes.

In my SBL 2015 talk [1], I outlined my own ongoing efforts to produce a "better" inflectional class system. In [2] I talked about my 2014 project looking at noun inflectional classes just in terms of headword patterns in Danker's concise lexicon. I think the resultant system is a promising start to an alternative to Mounce. [3] outlines a parallel approach based on actual noun forms found in the GNT and using Mounce's categories as a point of departure. Both [2] and [3] are rigorous in that (unlike most grammatical descriptions of inflection) there is a clear, machine-actionable definition of what is meant by a particular class and the data can be evaluated against the definitions to catch any exceptions or problems with the rules.

For an extreme example of lumping versus splitting: I point out in [4] that while dative singulars are _always_ formed by adding –ι (so, in that sense there is only one type of dative singular formation), when viewed as a distinguisher in a paradigm (particularly versus the nominative singular and its morphophonological contortions) there are 28 (!) distinct forms the dative singular distinguisher can take.

For verbs, I've started a very lengthy series of blog posts on their classification from the ground up starting at [5]. Even though the series only covers the present so far, there is a lot said in those posts about differing notions of inflectional classes. But again, the approach is a very rigorous, data-driven one, which inevitably leads to me creating new categories where, say, Mounce, would just have a footnote pointing out an exception. The approach I'm taking in that series is to firstly classify within systems and then later I'll classify stem formation.

Adjectives are probably the category I've done the least work on. I think the way to think of adjectives (and this isn't novel by any means—most people do it) is as a choice of which inflectional class is used for each gender. My work on [2] and [3] touches on adjectives too.

If people would like me to produce a list of nouns and adjectives with some sort of inflectional class information, I think I can do that pretty quickly just by bringing together this 2014 / 2015 work. Most of it already there, I guess it just hasn't been noticed before :-)

One final point on lumpers vs splitters, I presented a solution for lexemes in my SBL 2017 Annual meeting talk [6] that would be equally applicable to inflectional categories. This solution would allow, for example, my particular inflection classes to be linked to Mounce's or to Smyth's or whatever.

For those of you not familiar with the work going on for the new Perseus reading environment, I'm now expanding this morphological work from the 138k words of the GNT to the 21m words in the Greek corpus of the Perseus digital library. Once you have to deal with dialects and changes over time, it starts to get REALLY interesting :-)

[1] https://www.academia.edu/18816954/A_Mor ... ment_Greek
[2] https://jktauber.com/2015/11/18/full-ci ... l-classes/
[3] https://jktauber.com/2015/11/12/analyzi ... gy-part-1/
[4] https://jktauber.com/2015/11/13/initial ... ning-form/
[5] https://jktauber.com/2017/06/23/tour-gr ... gy-part-1/
[6] https://jktauber.com/2017/11/22/sbl-papers-now-online/
James Tauber
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paorear
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Re: Errors In Revelation?

Post by paorear »

jtauber wrote: December 26th, 2017, 10:35 pm For those of you not familiar with the work going on for the new Perseus reading environment, I'm now expanding this morphological work from the 138k words of the GNT to the 21m words in the Greek corpus of the Perseus digital library. Once you have to deal with dialects and changes over time, it starts to get REALLY interesting :-)
Love that you're doing that!

In terms of producing "a list of nouns and adjectives..." - for the purposes of this original thread, a listing of all 2nd declension *feminine* nominals in verses with adjective modifiers of any gender I think would help put a nail in this particular coffin. But don't exert yourself. :) And a belated Merry Christmas to you and Lisa, James!
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Re: Errors In Revelation?

Post by jtauber »

I've now read the thread and I'd add that my proposed new tagging scheme for gender in MorphGNT allow for "masculine or feminine but not neuter" for things like two-termination adjectives:

https://github.com/morphgnt/sblgnt/wiki ... er-Tagging
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Re: Errors In Revelation?

Post by jtauber »

paorear wrote: December 26th, 2017, 11:05 pm In terms of producing "a list of nouns and adjectives..." - for the purposes of this original thread, a listing of all 2nd declension *feminine* nominals in verses with adjective modifiers of any gender I think would help put a nail in this particular coffin.
Ah, so there's a syntax question here. I'd hoped I could help just by providing inflectional classes but it sounds like we need to extract the constructions from a treebank.
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