LINGUIST List 21.3621 Tue Sep 14 2010 Diss: Comp Ling/Morphology/Syntax: Faaß: 'A Morpho-Syntactic ...' Editor for this issue: Mfon Udoinyang <mfonlinguistlist.org> To post to LINGUIST, use our convenient web form at http://linguistlist.org/LL/posttolinguist.cfm. Directory         1.    Gertrud Faaß, A Morpho-Syntactic Description of Northern Sotho as a Basis for an Automated Translation from Northern Sotho to English Message 1: A Morpho-Syntactic Description of Northern Sotho as a Basis for an Automated Translation from Northern Sotho to English Date: 13-Sep-2010 From: Gertrud Faaß <gertrud.faaszims.uni-stuttgart.de> Subject: A Morpho-Syntactic Description of Northern Sotho as a Basis for an Automated Translation from Northern Sotho to English E-mail this message to a friend Institution: University of Pretoria Program: Department of African Languages Dissertation Status: Completed Degree Date: 2010 Author: Gertrud Faaß Dissertation Title: A Morpho-Syntactic Description of Northern Sotho as a Basis for an Automated Translation from Northern Sotho to English Dissertation URL: http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~faaszgd/PhD-thesis.html Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics                             Morphology                             Syntax Subject Language(s): Sotho, Northern (nso) Dissertation Director: Ulrich Heid Danie Jacobus Prinsloo Dissertation Abstract: This PhD thesis provides a morpho-syntactic description of Northern Sotho from a computational perspective. While a number of publications describe morphological and syntactical aspects of this language, mostly in the form of prescriptive study books (e.g. Lombard (1985); Van Wyk et al. (1992); Poulos and Louwrens (1994)) or of descriptive articles (e.g. Anderson and Kotzé (2006); Kosch (2006); De Schryver and Taljard (2006)), so far no comprehensive description is available that would provide a basis for developing a rule-based parser to analyse Northern Sotho on sentence level. This study attempts to fill the gap. Northern Sotho morpho-syntactic phenomena are explored which results in the following descriptions: Language units (tokens) of Northern Sotho are identified. These are sorted into word class categories (parts of speech), using the descriptions of Taljard et al. (2008) as a basis; the formal relationships between these units are described in the form of productive morpho-syntactic phrase grammar rules. These rules are defined within the framework of generative grammar. Additionally, an attempt is made to find generalisations on the contextual distribution of the many items contained in verbs that are polysemous in terms of their parts of speech. The grammar rules described in the preceding chapter are now explored in order to find patterns in the co-occurrence of parts of speech leading towards a future, more general linguistic modelling of Northern Sotho verbs. It is also shown how a parser could work its way step-by-step doing an analysis of a complete sentence making use of a lexicon and the rules developed here. A number of relevant phrase grammar rules have also been implemented as a constraint-based grammar fragment, in line with the theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG, Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982). Here, we utilized the Xerox Linguistic Environment (XLE) (with permission from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). Lastly, the study contains some basic definitions for a proposed machine translation (MT) into English attempting to support the development of MT-rules. An introduction to MT and a first contrastive description of phenomena of both languages is provided. Read more issues|LINGUIST home page|Top of issue Page Updated: 14-Sep-2010       About LINGUIST    |   Contact Us       While the LINGUIST List makes every effort to ensure the linguistic relevance of sites listed on its pages, it cannot vouch for their contents.