FYI: Syntactic Database/Spanish

[Scott McGinnis]

Date:  Tue, 15 May 2001 09:21:22 +0200 (MET DST)
From:  Paula Santalla del Rio <fempsr at usc.es>
Subject:  Syntactic Database of Current Spanish (SDB, release 3.5.1)

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Syntactic Database of Current Spanish (SDB, release 3.5.1)
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The research group on Spanish Syntax of the University of
Santiago de Compostela ( http://www.sintx.usc.es ) makes
available for the interested researchers the Syntactic
Spanish Database (SDB), the result of the work carried out
by the group throughout the last ten years. The data can be
looked up in

	http://www.bds.usc.es/busquedas.html

Developed with the financial support of the Dirección Xeral
de Educación y Ordenación Universitaria of the Xunta de
Galicia and of the Dirección General de Investigación
Científica y Técnica of the Ministerio de Educación, SDB is
the result of the manual analysis, having in mind
constitutional and functional analysis principles, of the
syntactic characteristics of the almost 160.000 clauses
contained in the contemporary part of the Hispanic Texts
Archive of the University of Santiago, constituted by
approximately million and a half words of texts taken from
all the Hispanic countries and including oral samples as
well as novels, press and theater, all of them published
between 1980 and 1990.

In SDB the primary unit of description has been the clause
and the analysis has been encoded so as to make obvious the
organization of the syntactic functions around the verb form
functioning as the predicate of the clause. For every clause
in the database, the syntactic characteristics considered
relevant in this first stage of development have been
included. In first place, we have recorded general
information about the clauses: clause type, clause function,
voice, modality, verb inflection, syntactic functions found
in the clause and order of them. Next, we have recorded
detailed information about each of the syntactic functions
found in the clause: type of structural unit, determination,
animation, countability, preposition introducing the
syntactic function, etc. Current search possibilities (as
well as other not yet fully available but already on
schedule) are conceived from an internal point of view, that
is, they are devised so as to show the internal structure of
clauses organized around verb forms in the corpus: syntactic
schemes and subschemes of each verb documented in it, verbs
documented with one scheme or subscheme, verbs requiring one
preposition, etc.

These are, however, a web page and a search interface still
under development. For this reason, on the one hand, we
apologize for the fact that certain search options on the
menu are not yet ready, and on the other, we will be very
grateful for any suggestion about search possibilities that
you miss in the system and to which we have not given
priority in this first phase of distribution of results.

Currently, with the financial support of the Secretaría
Xeral de Investigación e Desenvolvemento of the Xunta de
Galicia, SDB has started a second phase of development in
which we will analyse in depth the syntactic and semantic
characteristics of the approximately 160.000 clauses
constituting the corpus under study.

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 María Paula Santalla del Río

  Dpto. de Lingua Española
  Facultade de Filoloxía, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
  Avda. Burgo das Nacións, s/n,
  Santiago de Compostela 15782

      Tfno: (+34) 981 575340/563100, ext. 11908
      Fax: (+34) 981 574646