morph

OntoLex-Morph definitions

(use this for drafting text fragments, the HTML template is under index.html – but this is empty)

When given and unless marked otherwise, definitions follow the wording of 2019-12-19, resp., the eLex -2019 paper

Current diagram under doc/diagrams.

Acknowledgements

editors (= past and present telco moderators, alph.; please double-check):

contributors (alph, incomplete/please add yourself/people you remember to have contributed):

Contents

Purpose and Scope

Morphology is a vital and, in many languages, very sophisticated part of language, and
as such it has been an important part of the work of lexicographers. In the traditional
print form, morphological information is provided in brief abbreviated terms that can
only be deciphered with significant knowledge of the language, however with the
transformation of the dictionary to an electronic resource a re-imagining of the
morphology information in a dictionary is certainly due.

The morphology module aims at fulfilling two modelling purposes:

  1. Stating elements that are involved in the decomposition of lexical entries and forms.
    • Morphological decomposition on the lexical entry level.

      scope: The kind of elements of which a lexical entry can consist should be as non-restrictive as possible. I.e. The decomposition of lexical entries encompass lexical entries, components, derivational affixes, inflectional affixes, stems, roots and zero morphs. However, a lexical entry can NEVER be composed of a form!

    • Morphological decomposition on the form level.

    scope: Elements of which a form can consist include roots, stems, inflectional affixes and zero morphs. A form can NEVER be decomposed into lexical entries (including ontolex:Affix), components and forms.

MP: should this be rephrased? Now Morph is a subclass of ontolex:LexicalEntry, and Forms can actually be decomposed into Morphs, and also into Forms

  1. Enabling the representation of building patterns that are involved in the formation of lexical entries and forms.
    • Representation of decompositional building patterns for lexical entries.
    • Representation of decompositional building patterns for forms.

A fine-grained description of phonological and morphophonological processes that are involved in any kind of stem or word formation on the phoneme level is excluded and not representable with this Morphology Module. Only the elements between the lexical entry and the morph levels will be covered. It is possible, however, that such information may be addressed in future OntoLex modules.

The OntoLex-Morph module aims to be adequate for both traditional dictionary content (which contains only abbreviated about morphological rules and paradigms, often organized in appendices) and structured computational data (morphological dictionaries) as used in Language Technology, with the goal of making resources from one community more accessible to the other.

Overall structure

OntoLex-Morph is designed to account for

OntoLex-Morph was intended for (but is not limited to) the following primary use cases:

At its core, OntoLex-Morph operates with three main classes:

They are related with each other and with OntoLex in the following way:

Individual morphological processes (derivation, compounding, inflection) and their relation to lexical entries and forms are represented by designated subclasses of ontolex:Rule as described below.

Limitations: OntoLex-Morph is designed with a focus on deep morphology. Morphophonological rules can be modelled with OntoLex-Morph to a certain extent, but we expect phenomena such as assimilation, dissimilation and morphological “Level-2” rules to be more adequately handled by a separate vocabulary specialized in surface generation (transcription, text-to-speech, morphophonology).

Morphological Segments

morph:Morph

Class morph:Morph is a subclass of ontolex:LexicalEntry that represents a concrete primitive element of
morphological analysis.

MP: morph:Morph can actually be not concrete - if used for an abstract morpheme, see below - and not primitive - if we use it for complex stems. Perhaps we can define it as “any element of morphological analysis below the word level”?

Notes:

DEPRECATED Class morph:RootMorph identifies morph:Morphs that constitute the semantic nucleus of a stem. A root morph cannot be further segmented and is often not specified for a part of speech. subClassOf: morph:Morph

DEPRECATED Class morph:StemMorph identifies morph:Morphs to which inflectional marking applies. subClassOf: morph:Morph

Note: we do not define affix (a bound segmental morph), but instead, ontolex:Affix is defined as a subclass of morph:Morph.

DEPRECATED Class morph:TransfixMorph is a discontinous ontolex:Affix subClassOf: ontolex:Affix, morph:Morph

DEPRECATED Class morph:SimulfixMorph: A simulfix is a bound morph that entails a change or replacement of vowels or consonants (usually vowels) which changes the meaning of a word, e.g. eat in past tense becomes ate. subClassOf: ontolex:Affix, morph:Morph

DEPRECATED Class morph:ZeroMorph: A morph that that corresponds to no overt form, i.e. orthographic or phonetic representation subClassOf: ontolex:Affix, morph:Morph

April 2022: morph subclasses deprecated and moved to LexInfo. Note that lexinfo does not yet reference morph:Morph, but only ontolex:Affix and ontolex:LexicalEntry, but that should be changed when publishing OntoLex-Morph. Also note that the LexInfo definitions should be consolidated with those in this document.

Property morph:consistsOf states into which Morph resources a Form resource can be segmented. Domain: ontolex:Form, morph:Morph Range: ontolex:Form, morph:Morph

Note: this is the eLex-2019 definition, but now we have consists of between morphs and between forms, too

Note: we still have no way to encode the order of morphemes. We can model forms and morphs as an aggregate (here: rdf:List ?).

MP: If morph is a primitive, why it can consist of other morphs? see note above on the definition of morph

morph:GrammaticalMeaning

Class morph:GrammaticalMeaning: a grammatical feature that is assigned to a form or morph and corresponds to the value this has with respect to a grammatical category (e.g., value ‘nominative’ for ‘case’, ‘singular’ for ‘number’, etc.); it can also be a set of features in the case of forms or morphs characterised by a combination of features (for fusional languages) MP: Class morph:GrammaticalMeaning can be used to represent (bundles of) values of different morpho-syntactic properties expressed by a form or morph

Notes:

property morph:grammaticalMeaning assigns a grammatical meaning to a morph resource or a form domain: ontolex:Form or morph:Morph or morph:Rule range: morph:GrammaticalMeaning ——-

Discussion/History:

property morph:baseConstraint defines the grammatical characteristics of the stem or base that a derivational or inflectional morpheme can be combined with domain: ontolex:Morph or ontolex:Rule ——-

For example, an element for nominal inflection can only be applied to nouns, and derivational affixes can have similar constraints. Note that such information is not applicable to an ontolex:Form because this describes only the result of the application of a rule or the addition of a particular form.

Discussion/History:

morph:baseForm

Property baseForm is an ontolex:lexicalForm property that indicates the morphological base form of a lexical entry Domain: ontolex:Word (not lexical entry!) (MP: why not lexical entry?) Range: ontolex:Form

MP: Property baseForm is an ontolex:lexicalForm property that indicates the form (or morph? see below) that is taken as base by inflection or derivation rules to generate other forms.

This property is necessary in cases in which inflection or derivation relations do not take the canonical form as their basis, but a different one. One example is German verbal inflection (e.g., for gehen “to go”), where the canonical form (gehen, infinitive) is derived from the base form (geh-, stem) by means of a suffix (-en, infinitive marker), like other inflected forms (geh, gehst, geht “I/you go; he/she/it goes”).

MP: given this usage example, shouldn’t baseForm also have morph:Morph in its range? The German base geh- is a stem rather than a form

Morphological Rules

[deprecated] Class morph:Rule contains necessary information to add one morpheme to a single word form. It must contain either morph:example or morph:replacement (or both). “Tabular” value of a morpheme must be stored in rdfs:label (e.g. “-s”@en for usual PL in English)

Note: This class was in the Dec 2019 draft, but before Feb 2022, this class had been abandoned from diagram for visual reasons, it is a superclass of morph:WordFormationRule and morph:InflectionRule and defined as the domain of the properties morph:replacement and morph:example. Its deletion is to be reassessed, as this was for visual reasons only. Anyway, any information about both kinds of rules should go into this section.

Note: This class was originally introduced as morph:MorphologicalPattern: The morphological pattern states the inflectional, derivational or compositional building pattern that applies to a lexical entry. (eLex-2019)

morph:example

property morph:example: A single generated form that was generated using this rule Domain: morph:WordFormationRule or morph:InflectionRule Range: string literal

morph:Replacement

property morph:replacement states the replacement pattern that is involved in a morphological rule for the generation of a word MP: property morph:replacement links an InflectionRule or WordFormationRule to the Replacement it consists of. Domain: morph:WordFormationRule or morph:InflectionRule Range: morph:Replacement

note:

class morph:Replacement: An operation involving a source string and the target string that replaces it in order to generate a word according to a word formation rule MP: class morph:Replacement represents the modification that is performed by an InflectionRule or WordFormationRule on the form it takes as base.

processing analogy: replacement operations with regular expressions as in Perl or Sed.

MP: datatype property morph:source is used to express the string that is replaced by the target string in a morph:Replacement. domain: morph:Replacement range: string literal

MP: datatype property morph:target is used to express the string that replaces the source string in a morph:Replacement. domain: morph:Replacement range: string literal

As an example, a simple replacement operation would be concatenation, i.e., retrieve the baseForm (or canonicalForm, if no baseForm provided), check that it has the same stem type as the rule (if applicable), then append an affix to the written representation of the baseForm.

Note: Unless specified otherwise (in the documentation of a resource), implementations SHOULD provide NFD-normalized Unicode strings for morph:source and morph:target, so that diacritics are separated from the base character as combining characters. This is a best practice that simplifies the writing of rules in many cases, as diacritic and base character can be manipulated independently from each other.

Inflection

morph:Paradigm

Class morph:Paradigm represents a theoretically motivated type of declension, e.g.

May contain metadata information about this type of declension.

MP: not only declension, also conjugation. My proposal for a definition would be “the inflection class to which a LexicalEntry belongs/is assigned”. This raises the question of why this is not called morph:InflectionClass, if that’s what it is. A “paradigm” is rather a set of inflected wordforms: but as stated in the note below, morph:Paradigm is NOT that anymore

Book analogy: a full paradigm table with possible allomorphy/alternative variants

Note: eLex-2019: morph:InflectionalParadigm: A structured set of inflected forms according
to specific grammatical parameters. This is now not a set of inflected forms but a set of inflection types that are linked with the respective forms.

property morph:paradigm: A link to the paradigm to which an inflection type belongs (or is part of)(eLex-2019: assigns a form to an inflectional paradigm) (eLex-2019: assigns a form to an inflectional paradigm) Domain: morph:InflectionType Range: morph:Paradigm

Note: the link between paradigm and lexical entries is not defined in OntoLex-Morph, but modelled using ontolex:morphologicalPattern.

morph:InflectionType

Class morph:InflectionType represents a single slot for all values of a grammatical category or, in the case of bundles of grammatical categories, for all combinations of values thereof

Book analogy: a column from a paradigm table without allomorphy/alternative variants for just a single morpheme

Note: for fusional languages, the inflection type may be associated, for instance, with a combination of gender, number and case, as in the example of Greek nouns, while for agglutinative languages, each inflection type is associated with a single grammatical category (e.g. all values of case)

property morph:inflectionType assigns an inflectional pattern of a form as belonging to a morphological pattern of a lexical entry [eLex-2019 definition for belongsToMorphPattern, to be updated] Domain: morph:Rule Range: morph:InflectionType

property morph:next links two consecutive inflection types (“slots”), e.g. number and case in Finnish Domain: morph:InflectionType Range: morph:InflectionType

morph:InflectionRule

MP: Class morph:InflectionRule represents the generation of a form of a LexicalEntry from another form of that LexicalEntry.

Note: originally, we had the class Rule which contains necessary information to add one morpheme to a single word form. It must contain either morph:example or morph:replacement (or both). “Tabular” value of a morpheme must be stored in rdfs:label (e.g. “-s”@en for usual PL in English)

DEPRECATED property morph:inflects: Property to link an inflection rule with the (abstract representation of the) morph(s) involved in the application of this particular rule.

Domain: morph:InflectionRule Range: ontolex:Morph

Note: this is deprecated in favor of merging it with the analoguous morph:involves for derivation morphemes as decided telco 2022-04-20.

morph:baseType

Datatype property morph:baseType is used for coindexing a base, an inflection rule and the forms generated by the rule from the respective base in cases in which the inflectional paradigm of a single lexical entry involves bases, e.g., stems. Domain: ontolex:Form or ontolex:InflectionRule Range: literal

MP: as it has been shown that also derivation can be based a form different than the canonical one (e.g. Latin deverbal conversions from the Third Stem, like capio (Third Stem capt-) > capt-o), I think this should hold also for DerivationRules

Note: For an inflection rule with morph:baseType defined: If the lexical entry to which it is applied features a(n object of) morph:baseForm or (if these are not defined) a ontolex:canonicalForm with identital morph:baseType, apply the rule to this form, only. For a (generated) form, morph:baseType can be used to indicate from which form or with which rule it was generated. morph:baseType can also be used to mark stem classes in reseources for which no explicit inflection rules are given.

Note: This was introduced for modelling stem alternations. In this definition, we assume that we have one lexical entry for each stem variant, so that an inflection rule whose baseType doesn’t match of its lexical entry doesn’t fire.

Word Formation

morph:WordFormationRule

Class morph:WordFormationRule describes the general pattern how words are being formed.

MP: Class morph:WordFormationRule represents the generation of a target LexicalEntry from one (or more) source LexicalEntry.

MP: move rhe remark on the fact that they can be used to refer to general patterns here?

For the analysis of a specific compound or derivation, use morph:WordFormationRelation.

Note: originally, we had the class Rule which contains necessary information to add one morpheme to a single word form. It must contain either morph:example or morph:replacement (or both). “Tabular” value of a morpheme must be stored in rdfs:label (e.g. “-s”@en for usual PL in English)

MP: Property morph:involves links an InflectionRule or a DerivationRule with the Morphs that are involved in the process. Domain: morph:WordFormationRule or morph:InflectionRule Range: morph:Morph

links a word formation rule or an inflection rule (see below) with one or multiple morphemes involved in the process. Note that this does not encode order. One possibility to approximate order for most cases would be to restore morph:Suffix and morph:Prefix.

Note: updated according to telco April 21, 2022.

Property morph:generates is to be defined Domain: morph:WordFormationRule Range: ontolex:LexicalEntry

MP: given the parallelism between the inflection and derivation subcomponents of the generation component, I would expect InflectionRule to generate something too – namely, ontolex:Forms. Should we change the domain and range accordingly?

Note: updated according to draft from Feb 2022.

subclasses CompoundRule and DerivationRule. Normally, a derivation rule will involve one specific morpheme or one allomorphic variant. A compound rule can involve an interfix or another morphophonological process.

Class morph:DerivationRule: Derivation is a lexical process that generates one lexical entry from another by means of a derivational affix.

MP: Class morph:DerivationRule refers to rules that take one LexicalEntry as input.

MP: I would rather not mention the presence of an affix so as to make the definition sufficiently general to cover conversion too (as happens in WFL data)

MP: Class morph:CompoundingRule refers to rules that take more than one LexicalEntry as input.

morph:WordFormationRelation

class morph:WordFormationRelation is an vartrans:LexicalRelation that describes the way that a specific lexical entry is formed, with the vartrans:target representing the resulting lexical entry, and the vartrans:source representing the morphological base (in derivation) or head (in compounding).

CC: new; note that this definition covers derivation and morph:CompoundHead but not morph:CompoundRelation. MP: can this be solved simply by specifying “head or other constituents”?

Note that word formation relations do not (= no longer) replicate the full typology of word formation processes. Also, a word formation does not provide a link with derivational affixes or interfixes in compounding involved in the compound. Instead, this is modelled via morph:WordFormationRule:

property morph:wordFormationRule relates two lexical entries that stand in some word formation relation. Domain: morph:WordFormationRelation Range: morph: WordFormationRule

MP: property morph:wordFormationRule relates a word formation relation to the rule that is applied to the source lexical entry in order to obtain the target lexical entry. Domain: morph:WordFormationRelation Range: morph: WordFormationRule

Accordingly, the morphological derivation of German Schönheit “beauty” can be encoded as:

:schoenheit-entry a ontolex:LexicalEntry;
             ontolex:canonicalForm [ ontolex:writtenRep "Schönheit"@de ].
:schoen-entry a ontolex:LexicalEntry.
             ontolex:canonicalForm [ ontolex:writtenRep "schön"@de ].
:schoen_heit a morph:WordFormationRelation;
             vartrans:source :schoen-entry;
             vartrans:target :schoenheit-entry;
             morph:wordFormationRule :_heit-rule.
:_heit-rule a morph:WordFormationRule, morph:DerivationRule;
            morph:involves :_heit-morph;
            morph:generates :schoenheit-entry.
:_heit-morph a morph:Morph, morph:Suffix;
            ontolex:lexicalForm [ ontolex:writtenRep "-heit"@de ].

class morph:CompoundRelation is a morph:WordFormationRelation that connects a (lexical entry representing a) morphological consituent of a compound with the (lexical entry representing the) compound. This is a reification of decomp:subTerm: A compound relation entails that the constituent is a subterm of the compound.

CC 2022-02-23 (offline): is that really necessary? why can’t we just use decomp ? I guess this is for cases in which we don’t know the head, but then, we can also just omit the source.

telco 2022-04-20: is to be redefined as a reification of decomp:subTerm.

class morph:CompoundHead is a morph:WordFormationRelation that connects the (lexical entry representing the) morphological head of a compound with the (lexical entry representing the) compound.

Open questions

These are questions we decided to postpone until finalization of the module. Don’t use that for on-going discussions, that’s what minutes are for.