Re: Intermediate forms

Hi all,

Very interesting discussion.

I am not a specialist in any way, hence maybe a naive question, but in which way are such hypothetical forms related to lexical entries in reconstructed language ?

They may be of different nature, but share the “hypothetical” feature, hence are there any similarities that could be used to treat them similarly.

It also remind me of non lexicalized forms in derivational morphology when 2 derivations are used to model the derivation process, eg. Verb -> adj -> adv where the adjective form is not lexicalized and never attested. In the process modelling it is often “computed” and represented (with a star prefix).

Maybe these could inspire a similar modelling.

Regards,

Gilles,

> On 24 Nov 2024, at 11:46, Cristiano Longo <cristianolongo@opendatahacklab.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear Fahad Khan, thanks for your observations which deserve careful considerations. In the meanwhile,
> 
> at first glance, I observe that of course etymologies (in the sense of lemonEty) are just hypotheses,
> 
> but stating that a lexical expression is a ontolex:Form is an assertion with a precise meaning. In other words, etymologies are hypothetical derivations grounded on well attested lexical expression in some language.  Instead, our case is quite different as our intermediate forms are properly hypotetical. This is clarified by observing that a source expression (which of course is a form) can be turned into the corresponding one in the recipient language through more than one derivation.
> 
> In the example we have two derivations from patrem to padre:
> 
> patrem -> padrem -> padre, and
> 
> patrem -> patre -> padre.
> 
> For these reason, I think that asserting that "padrem" or "patre" was lexical expression of some intermediate language is quite hazardous.
> 
> CL
> 
> On 22/11/24 17:22, Fahad Khan wrote:
>> Dear Cristiano, 
>> As far as I'm aware an intermediate form is an unattested form that is hypothesized by linguists on the basis of (usually well-attested) linguistic rules; as such it is usually prefixed with an asterisk (e.g., *patrem). But the hypothesis *is* that it was used by speakers at a certain point in the evolution of a word, and therefore did belong to a certain historical stage of a language. In which case, I don't understand why you couldn't use Form, or at least create a subclass of Form for asterisked forms?
>> Cheers
>> Fahad
>> 
>> Il giorno mer 20 nov 2024 alle ore 12:49 Cristiano Longo <cristianolongo@opendatahacklab.org <mailto:cristianolongo@opendatahacklab.org>> ha scritto:
>>> Good morning all. In my last work I faced with strings that, in my 
>>> opinion, cannot be modelled using ontolex:Form, as they are just 
>>> "intermediate forms" which does not belong to any language.
>>> 
>>> An example is reported in Figure 2 at 
>>> https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3809/paper2.pdf. Here the latin word "patrem" 
>>> changes to an intermediate form "padrem" through lenition, and finally 
>>> becomes the italian word "padre".
>>> 
>>> However, the notion of intermediate forms was previously introduced in 
>>> the areas concerning phonology and morfology, as reported in [1].
>>> 
>>> To deal with such intermediate forms I introduced a new superclass of 
>>> ontolex:Form (i.e., LanguageObject). However, I'm not really sure that 
>>> this design choice is correct. Of course, intermediate forms are not morphs.
>>> 
>>> I wonder if there are other works where these kind of strings have been 
>>> modelled in OWL.
>>> 
>>> Any suggestion and hint is wellcome,
>>> 
>>> thanks in advance,
>>> 
>>> CL
>>> 
>>> [1] A. Hurskainen, K. Koskenniemi, T. Pirinen, L. Antonsen, E. Axelson, 
>>> E. Bick, B. Gaup, S. Hardwick,
>>> K. Hiovain, F. Karlsson, K. Lindén, I. Listenmaa, I. Mikkelsen, S. 
>>> Moshagen, A. Ranta, J. Rueter,
>>> D. Swanson, T. Trosterud, L. Wiechetek, Rule-Based Language Technology, 
>>> 2023.
>>> 
>>>