21.3621, Diss: Comp Ling/Morphology/Syntax: Faa ß: 'A Morpho-Syntactic ...'

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Subject: 21.3621, Diss: Comp Ling/Morphology/Syntax: Faaß: 'A Morpho-Syntactic ...'

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1)
Date: 13-Sep-2010
From: Gertrud Faaß < gertrud.faasz at ims.uni-stuttgart.de >
Subject: A Morpho-Syntactic Description of Northern Sotho as a Basis for an Automated Translation from Northern Sotho to English
 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2010 10:55:44
From: Gertrud Faaß [gertrud.faasz at ims.uni-stuttgart.de]
Subject: A Morpho-Syntactic Description of Northern Sotho as a Basis for an Automated Translation from Northern Sotho to English

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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(s):
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 ?ll the gap.

Northern Sotho morpho-syntactic phenomena are explored which results in the
following descriptions: Language units (tokens) of Northern Sotho are
identi?ed. 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 de?ned within the
framework of generative grammar. Additionally, an attempt is made to ?nd
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 ?nd 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 de?nitions for a proposed machine
translation (MT) into English attempting to support the development of
MT-rules. An introduction to MT and a ?rst contrastive description of
phenomena of both languages is provided. 




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