1. Challenges in Annotating Medieval Latin Charters Timo Korkiakangas 1, Marco Passarotti 2 1 University of Helsinki (Finland) 2 CIRCSE - Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Milan - Italy) 1. The Corpus Approx. 500 Tuscan private charters (ca. 200,000 words) Era: 8th and 9th centuries Published in three copyright-free diplomatic editions Digitised, proofread and converted into XML Annotated portion: 1,452 sentences (32,552 words) Annotation style: Guidelines for the Syntactic Annotation of Latin Treebanks (Bamman et al. 2007) Latin Dependency Treebank (LDT) & Index Thomisticus Treebank (IT-TB) 2. The Problem Standard Latin vs. Substandard Latin Substandard Latin: technical, non-literary language variety resembling the style of the Lombard Laws deliberately closer to spoken language several orthographic variations affecting inflectional endings the equivalence between form and function is not as transparent as it is in standard Latin The existing annotation guidelines are designed for standard Latin: not always able to manage substandard forms or standard forms used in a substandard way 3. The Solution If a word appears in the correct standard form:  morphological tagging has no relevance (form and function are matching) If a word appears in a substandard form: If the form is language-evolutionarily deducible from the corresponding standard Latin form used in the same function:  it is assigned a functionally-based morphological analysis If no connection with the functionally required standard form exists:  it is assigned a formal analysis 4. Specific Guidelines 5. Two Case Studies 4.4 Subjects “ego nec heredibus meis exire de ipsa res non presumamus […]” (“neither me nor my heirs dare to leave this property […]”) Functional analysis: ablative (standard Latin: re) Formal analysis: dative/ablative (standard Latin: heredes) Formal analysis = functional analysis: ablative Undefined items Sb_ _Adv 4.1 Undefined Items, Vocatives, Ellipsis Vocative (≠ LDT/IT-TB: ExD depending on the verbal head) Ellipsis 4.3 Gender Change Lemma: pretium (neuter) Neuters occurring in masculine or feminine forms are lemmatised under their standard lemmas and labelled as neuters Formal analysis applies to third declension singular subjects ending in whose stem has an additional syllable in all the cases except nominative (e.g. nominative potes-tas vs. accusative potes-ta-tem) Formal analysis: accusative (standard Latin: potestas) “duplum pretius et re melioratas […]” (“double price and things improved […]”) “[…] eius hecclesie sit potestatem […]” (“[..] the possession be of that church […]”) “et si amplium fueret, ipse terra in tua Grasolfe sit potestatem comodo et ille alia” (“and, if it might be larger, that land be in your possession, Grasolfus, just as that other, too”) 5.1 Prepositional Phrases Headed by ad Non-accusative caseAccusative-case Formal = Functional---81 Functional---119 Formal19--- TOTAL by case19200 TOTAL219 5.2 Ablative Absolute Subject in non-ablative caseSubject in ablative case Formal = Functional---47 Functional---71 Formal18--- TOTAL by case18118 TOTAL136 FORMAL = FUNCTIONAL: regnante Liutprando (“under the reign of Liutprand”) FUNCTIONAL: regnante Liutprand (“under the reign of Liutprand”) FORMAL: Dominus interueniente (“with the intervention of God”) “[…] uobis cui supra empturibus uel ad filii uel ad heredibus […]” (“[…] to you, above-mentioned purchaser, or to [your] sons or heirs […]”) “[…] per singulus anus dare ad ipsa sancta ecclesia […]” (“[…] to give to the same holy church each year […]”) 4.2 Nominal Attributives The head is chosen according to the following animacy hierarchy: personal pronouns > proper names > other nouns referring to humans Personal pronoun Proper name Other nouns “Ego Autulu uir religiosus clirico filio Bonuald de Uico Turrite […]” (“I, Autulus, religious man, cleric, son of Bonuald, from the village of Turrita […]”) “[…] ad ecclesiam sancti Elari […]” (“[…] to the church of Saint Hilarius […]”)