Opening the Romance Verbal Inflection Dataset 2.0: A CLDF lexicon

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 3027–3035 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 3027 Opening the Romance Verbal Inflection Dataset 2.0: a CLDF Lexicon Sacha Beniamine∗, Martin Maiden†, Erich Round∗‡§ ∗ Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany, † Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, England, ‡ School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, § Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK, beniamine@shh.mpg.de, martin.maiden@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk, e.round@uq.edu.au Abstract We introduce the Romance Verbal Inflection Dataset 2.0, a multilingual lexicon of Romance inflection covering 74 varieties. The lexicon provides verbal paradigm forms in broad IPA phonemic notation. Both lexemes and paradigm cells are organized to reflect cognacy. Such multi-lingual inflected lexicons annotated for two dimensions of cognacy are necessary to study the evolution of inflectional paradigms, and test linguistic hypotheses systematically. However, these resources seldom exist, and when they do, they are not usually encoded in computationally usable ways. The Oxford Online Database of Romance Verb Morphology provides this kind of information, however, it is not maintained anymore and is only available as a web service without interfaces for machine-readability. We collect its data and clean and correct it for consistency using both heuristics and expert annotator judgements. Most resources used to study language evolution computationally rely strictly on multilingual contemporary information, and lack information about prior stages of the languages. To provide such information, we augmented the database with Latin paradigms from the LatInFlexi lexicon. Finally, to make it widely avalable, the resource is released under a GPLv3 license in CLDF format. Keywords: Lexicon, Lexical Database, Morphology, Less-Resourced/Endangered Languages, Typological Databases, Phonetic Databases, Phonology, Multilinguality 1. Introduction We1 introduce the Romance Verbal Inflection Dataset 2.0. It is based on the Oxford Online Database of Romance Verb Morphology (Collective work coordinated by Mar- tin Maiden, 2010, hereafter ODRVM), which constitutes the most comprehensive available unified representation of Romance verbal morphology. The resulting database is a collection of multilingual inflectional lexicons giving full paradigms in phonological form for 74 Romance varieties, including Latin. It is annotated for lexical cognate sets, and paradigm cells are organized in such a way as to reflect cog- nacy. It is intended as a resource for the study of paradigm evolution, as well as the comparative study of the inflection of the Romance verb. Figure 1 synthesizes the family group and endangerment status of the varieties represented in the database, based on data from glottolog (Hammarström et al., 2018). Two varieties in our database are extinct: Latin and Dalmatian- Vegliote. Six varieties are considered shifting (in use, but not transmitted): Emilian from Travo, Cremonese Lombard, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian from Šušnjevica, Megleno-Romanian, Logudorese Sardinian. Five are con- sidered threatened (Picard from Mesnil-Martinsart, Friu- lian, Piedmontese from Cairo Montenotte, Northern Veneto from Alpago, Campidanese Sardinian). The glottolog data on endangerment is an aggregation of three sources on en- dangerment (UNESCO, Ethnologue, ElCat) and is the most …

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