Dependency structures in Irish Gaelic

Quick note to say that Teresa Lynn at DCU has been working on a project based on dependency treebanks for Irish. This is relevant to this blog because Irish Gaelic is very closely related to Scottish Gaelic and much of the grammar is similar, and there has also been work in the past (Clark and Curran 2007, Table 2, for example) on deriving dependency structures from CCG lexical structures.

Here are two papers I’ve had a quick look at:

Resources present and future

Excitingly, William Lamb at the University of Edinburgh?tells me in the comments on this earlier post has been funded by the B?rd na G?idhlig to work on a tagset and corpus for Scottish Gaelic.

I have been delighted to be pointed to his 2003?Scottish Gaelic (2nd edn, Lincom Europa, Munich), which is exactly the sort of book I have been looking for. Worth careful study.

Ambiguity everywhere

Much of the basic grammatical machinery of Gaelic consists of overloaded words. This is nothing unusual, of course; in English, for example, to?is both a preposition and marks the infinitive, but there seems to be an awful lot of it going on in Gaelic.?One of the more striking examples is?an. This can be:

  • the definite article:?an t-eilean
  • an interrogative particle:?An do ch?rd e riut?
  • the interrogative form of is:?An toil leat ball-coise?
  • a possessive pronoun (their): an c?r

Do has several meanings too:

  • a possessive pronoun (your): do bhaidhseagal?
  • a preposition:?do Ghlaschu
  • ?a past-tense marking particle:?An do ch?rd e riut?

A?has at least the following meanings and there may well be some I’ve missed:

  • numerical particle:?a h-aon
  • vocative particle: a Mh?iri
  • the infinitive particle: an uinneag a dh?nadh
  • an interrogative particle: A bheil thu a’ dannsadh?
  • two possessive pronouns (her and his): a ch?r, a h-athair
  • relative particle: D? an t-ainm a tha ort?

not to mention its homophonous friend?a’:

  • definite article:?anns a’ chidsin
  • the participle particle:?Tha mi a’ dol

If I want to start part-of-speech-tagging Gaelic text, as a preliminary to building a grammar, I’m going to need to write some guidelines as to when each of these words is what.

 

It’s fine

This confused me, so I mention it in case it confuses anyone else.

If predicative adjectives have type S[adj]\NP (because they come after the noun), NPs have type NP and the predicative copula has type (S[dcl]/(S[adj]\NP))/NP, then how do we cope with sentences that only have one NP? Where I went astray was assuming that if you have a word of type X/Y, then there has to be a Y somewhere in that sentence.

Not true! Tha i br?agha? “it’s fine” (talking about the weather) is a good and simple example.

Tha i br?agha
V NP ADJ
(S[dcl]/(S[adj]\NP))/NP NP S[adj]\NP
S[dcl]/(S[adj]\NP) S[adj]\NP
S[dcl]

In this case, tha is of type (X/Y)/Z, and just forward composes with Z to its right and then Y next to the right. It just so happens that Y is a non-atomic type.

Now I’ve understood this I can worry about more complicated things.