An Annotated Corpus of Adjective-Adverb Interfaces in Romance Languages

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 953–957 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 953 An Annotated Corpus of Adjective-Adverb Interfaces in Romance Languages Katharina Gerhalter1, Gerlinde Schneider2, Christopher Pollin2, Martin Hummel1 1Department of Romance Studies, University of Graz, Austria 1Centre for Information Modelling, University of Graz, Austria {katharina.gerhalter, gerlinde.schneider, christopher.pollin, martin.hummel}@uni-graz.at Abstract The final outcome of the project Open Access Database: Adjective-Adverb Interfaces in Romance is an annotated and lemmatised corpus of various linguistic phenomena related to Romance adjectives with adverbial functions. The data is published under open-access and aims to serve linguistic research based on transparent and accessible corpus-based data. The annotation model was developed to offer a cross-linguistic categorization model for the heterogeneous word-class “adverb”, based on its diverse forms, functions and meanings. The project focuses on the interoperability and accessibility of data, with particular respect to reusability in the sense of the FAIR Data Principles. Topics presented by this paper include data compilation and creation, annotation in TEI/XML, data preservation and publication process by means of the GAMS repository and accessibility via a search interface. These aspects are tied together by semantic technologies, using an ontology-based approach. Keywords: Corpus linguistics, Romance languages, Linguistic annotation, Semantic web, TEI/XML 1. Introduction Romance languages have a large inventory of adverbs formed through different morphosyntactic word-formation processes based on adjectives. The basic process, inherited from Latin, consists of using the masculine singular form of the adjective for an adverbial function, that is, using an adjective in the syntactic position of an adverb. The follow- ing examples (meaning ‘to see clear(ly)’ and ‘to fly high’) show that the so-called adjective-adverbs are shared by sev- eral Romance languages (Hummel 2017): 1. Spanish: ver claro, volar alto Portuguese: ver claro, voar alto French: voir clair, voler haut Italian: vedere chiaro, volare alto Romanian: a vedea chiar / clar, a zbura ˆınalt On the other hand, several – but not all – Romance lan- guages use the derivational suffix -mente as a specific ad- verbial word-formation process based on adjectives (Sp./Pt. claramente, Fr. clairement, It. chiaramente ‘clearly’). Fur- thermore, the pattern “preposition + adjective” produced some prepositional phrases that were lexicalized as adver- bial locutions, for example Sp. de seguro ‘surely’, Pt. de novo ‘again’, Fr. pour de vrai ‘certainly’, It. sul serio ‘seri- ously’ and Rom. cu derept ‘fairly and equitably’ (Hummel et al. 2019). Therefore, adjective-adverbs in Romance languages are an interesting phenomenon in terms of interfaces with other adverbial formations based on the same lexical stem. Since the word-class “adverb” in general is highly heterogeneous, it subsumes various syntactic functions. On the one hand, adjective-adverbs are used as manner adverbs that mod- ify the verb (as in examples 1, ‘to see clear(ly)’ or ‘to fly high’), but also as focus-adverbs or specifiers (Fr. juste une minute ‘just a minute’) or as discourse markers (Sp. Nece- sitar´a dinero, claro, como siempre ‘S/he needs money, sure / clearly, as always’). …

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