Morphological analysis

What we’re doing

We are morphologically parsing our digital edition of Pliny the Elder’s Natural Histories. Our aim is to parse every word of our edition.

How we’re doing it

With Tabulae, we are able to build a Latin parser using nothing more than a simple tabular text file. The process begins by creating tables of rules. Word endings are recorded into a table with a corresponding set of characteristics. For example, in a table of rules for first conjugation verbs, “o” is matched with the appropriate person, number, tense, mood, and voice. Lexical stems are, then, created in a separate table and matched with the appropriate rule set. So “am” (the stem for “amo”) would be matched with rules tables for first conjugation verbs.

In tandem with building a parser for Pliny, we are also creating a parser for Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar. In treating the vocabulary found in A&G’s paradigms as a corpus, we can build out rules for every possible form found in the grammar. Since the rules found in A&G cover the vast majority of extant classical Latin, we are importing these rules into our Pliny parser. Then, only lexical stems from Pliny need to be added.