Structural derivation and meaning extraction: a comparative study of French/Serbo-Croatian parallel texts

Cvetana Krstev (1) , Dusko Vitas (2)

1 Faculty of Philology
2 Faculty of Mathematics

The traditional definition of inflective classes in Serbo-Croatian lexicography does not link entries with a close structural derivation relationship between them. Such relationship is usually expressed in dictionaries by a stereotyped definition based on the meaning of the basic entry. Several types of derivation from nominal bases of this kind are discussed in this paper: grammatical gender change, formation of diminutives and augmentatives, and derivation of adjectives from nouns. It is shown that all form the new noun from the initial one according to the same model and in a similar way as inflective classes are represented. The extension of the traditional nominal class can thus be seen as a tuple of the elementary classes that describe the derivatives of the basic entry.

Mots clés: Derivation; Inflection class; Serbo-Croatian; Electronic Dictionary

Domaines: Traitement du texte et du document; Linguistique; Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Cvetana Krstev, Dusko Vitas. Structural derivation and meaning extraction: a comparative study of French/Serbo-Croatian parallel texts. Geoff Barnbrook; Pernilla Danielsson; Michaela Mahlberg. Meaningful Texts. The Extraction of Semantic Information from Monolingual and Multilingual Corpora, Continuum, pp.165-176, 2005, 0-8264-9181-2. ⟨hal-01866673⟩