An Ontology Of Systematic Relations For A Shared Grammar Of Slavic


Sharing portions of grammars across languages greatly reduces the costs of multilingual grammar engineering. Related languages share a much wider range of linguistic information than typically assumed in standard multilingual grammar architectures. Taking grammatical relatedness seriously, we are particularly interested in designing linguistically motivated grammatical resources for Slavic languages to be used in applied and theoretical computational linguistics. In order to gain the perspective of a language-family oriented grammar design, we consider an array of systematic relations that can hold between syntactical units. While the categorisation of primitive linguistic entities tends to be language-specific or even construction-specific, the relations holding between them allow various degrees of abstraction. On the basis of Slavic data, we show how a domain ontology conceptualising morpho-syntactic "building blocks" can serve as a basis of a shared grammar of Slavic.