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# Seeking Contact-Induced Syntactic Change in Endangered Languages: A Methodology for Building a Morphosyntactically Annotated Corpus for Corfioto

Georgios Vardakis, Giorgio Maria Di

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Georgios Vardakis, Giorgio Maria Di. Seeking Contact-Induced Syntactic Change in Endangered Languages: A Methodology for Building a Morphosyntactically Annotated Corpus for Corfioto. 2024. [hal-04788113](https://hal.science/hal-04788113v1)

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# Seeking Contact-Induced Syntactic Change in Endangered Languages: A Methodology for Building a Morphosyntactically Annotated Corpus for Corfioto

Georgios Vardakis, University of Padua
Giorgio Maria Di Nunzio, University of Padua

Language contact is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the world's languages manifested at all levels of linguistic analysis. While the role of corpora for research in language contact phenomena in widely spoken languages is well-established, contributions to contact linguistics via the compilation, annotation and archiving of corpora in endangered languages are recent but very promising. In the era marked by the most significant decline of linguistic diversity in the history of world languages, research in developing and deploying technical tools and methods dedicated to the mobilization of large digital corpora keeps demonstrating an ever-growing interest in integrating the collaboration of NLP researchers and formal, computational, and fieldwork linguists in language documentation and analysis. This paper presents current results of a work-in-progress project on the aims, goals, and the methods for compiling a state-of-the-art morphosyntactically annotated corpus of Corfioto, the endangered Italo-Romance variety of the Corfiot Jews.<fnref n="1" /> In particular, it outlines the workflow for building, archiving, managing and annotating the first mixed language corpus of oral and written data of Corfioto based on the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework, as well as the designing and the implementation of an application for the Interactive MorPhosyntactic Annotation of CorfioTo (IMPACT). The creation and the annotation of the corpus ultimately serve three goals: i) attain a quantitative analysis of variation and contact-induced syntactic change in the complementation system of Corfioto; ii) enable the creation of a gold standard and the training of a model for the linguistic annotation of all linguistic data in the Universal Dependencies framework; and iii) contribute to the ever-growing research in developing language resources and tools for endangered and low-resourced languages in the fields of computational linguistics and NLP via the collaboration of computational linguists, NLP researchers and formal, computational and fieldwork linguists.

## 1. Introduction

Contact-induced change (Seifart 2019) is a multifaceted and ubiquitous phenomenon in the world's languages and a property of the adaptive capacity of the faculty of language to recombine and rearrange linguistic features into new structure, in contexts where the speaker is exposed to languages, varieties and repertoires considered different (Aboh 2020, forthcoming). Since the seminal works of Weinreich (1953) and Haugen (1953), the study of language contact has evolved into an ever-growing field of interdisciplinary research in language sciences (for a historical overview see Bidese 2017; 2023; Adamou & Matras 2021; Mufwene & Escobar 2022). The field flows with different perspectives on the study of language contact which are mainly subsumed under the historical and the synchronic perspective (Adamou 2016). The quantitative and qualitative power of corpus linguistic methods has been crucial in our understanding of central issues in language contact, including code-switching in different contact settings and both in top-down and bottom-down approaches (see Adamou 2019 and the literature therein). The position of synchronic analysis in contact-induced phenomena for major languages is well established. However, the role of the documentation of lesser-known, non-

<footnote n="1">¹ Parts of this paper are based on previous publications (Vardakis & Di Nunzio 2022) and have been presented on the occasion of the 26th International Conference on the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2022 (Padua, 2022) and the Workshop *Creating Managing and Archiving Textual Corpora in Under-resourced Languages* of the DARIAH Working Groups Research Data Management and Multilingual DH, (Hamburg, 2024).</footnote>
standard and endangered languages (Hale et al. 1992; Himmelmann 1998; 2006, Woodbury 2011) in the study of language contact and language change has been acknowledged only recently (see O'Shanessy 2011; Aikhenvald 2020; Adamou 2021), now facing significant growth. While we are facing the most accelerating decline of linguistic diversity in the history of the world's languages (see Kik et al. 2021; Adamou 2024), research in developing and deploying computational tools and methods for resource creation and mobilization in language documentation (see Berez-Kroeker et al. 2023) via the interdisciplinary collaboration of NLP researchers, computational, formal and fieldwork linguists (Anastasopoulos 2019; Galliot et al. 2022) is an ever-growing domain of inquiry. Initiatives for the creation, management and archiving of written and oral corpora of endangered languages contribute not only to their documentation but to their use for the advancement of our understanding of language change based both in qualitative and quantitative terms (Adamou 2019). Still, as is the case for other languages, the compilation of multilingual corpora is hindered by numerous time-consuming tasks, including the transcription 'bottleneck' and manual annotation (see Travis and Torres Cacoullos 2013).

Regarding contact-induced structural change, statistical modeling adapted to the specificities of small free-speech multilingual large corpora from lesser-described languages can contribute to perceiving the mechanisms and constraints of replicated patterns covering a broader sample, providing greater diversity in the study of contact settings (Adamou 2016). Moreover, quantitative measuring of the degree to which mixed languages combine different portions of the grammatical and lexical subsystems of more than one source language is considered a crucial factor for determining different types of mixed languages as well as their typology (for a recent overview see O'Shanessy 2020). Moreover, it offers researchers a more empirical and verifiable base for achieving a consensus on the definition of convergence or contact-induced syntactic change (see Grant 2020), over what constitutes a change, how to recognize and distinguish it from inherent variability and how to determine whether it is contact-induced, via more reliable analyses of principled collections of bilingual performance, including data-driven reports of rates of occurrence and conditioning of variant choice (Poplack 2020: 54).

The important steps in integrating computational tools to endangered and lesser-described languages (see Anastasopoulos et al. 2020) serve a variety of different domains ranging from the facilitation and acceleration of the language documentation process, such as automatic alignment of corpora from lesser-known languages (Michaud et al. 2012), automatic phonemic recognition (Michaud et al. 2018), as well as progress in various tasks, including morphological and syntactic analysis including part-of-speech tagging; parsing and sequence labeling tasks, including code-switching identification, text labeling tasks; stylistic analysis; and text generation tasks, including machine translation or summarization. In this direction, the creation of the first morphosyntactically annotated corpus of written and oral data of Corfioto will offer the linguists community access to a previously undocumented variety within a FAIR data approach, and will enable statistically significant results on the contact-induced effect of clausal complementation based on the annotation of the whole corpus, via automatic annotation based on the creation of a gold standard.

## 2. Corfioto, the Endangered Variety of the Corfiot Jews

Corfioto (autoglossonym) is a critically endangered Italo-Romance variety traditionally spoken by the Corfiot Jews in Corfu, Greece. Today, it is still spoken by a small number of speakers mainly in Israel, as well as in Greece, Italy, Switzerland and Southern America. Sociolinguistic data and linguistic descriptions of the written and oral linguistic heritage of the Corfiot Jews highlight the role of language contact between Romance, Greek and Hebrew in
the lexicon and the grammar of the Corfiot Jews (see Mücke 2019; Vardakis 2023; forthcoming). Besides the limited sources of documentation in written data dating to the previous century (Gottheil & Belleli 1901–1906; Perotti 1909; 1910; Cortelazzo 1946, 1947, 1948; Levi 1961; Levi & Leydi 1959-1969; Colafemmina 2006) and recent academic works and publications on the linguistic analysis of original data collected in fieldwork (Nachtmann 2002; Mücke 2019; Vardakis 2019; 2021; 2023; forthcoming), a purely linguistic description and analysis of the diachronic and synchronic aspects of Corfioto, and the role of language contact in its genesis are yet to come.

Despite the lack of official data regarding the level of language vitality and endangerment of Corfioto, according to the scale of six factors (henceforward, F1 to F6) proposed in Brenzinger et al. (2003), we estimate that: F1) the degree of Intergenerational Language Transmission of Corfioto is (2) i.e., severely endangered; F2) and F3), as for the absolute number of speakers and the proportion of speakers within the Total Reference Population, the language is critically endangered; F4) besides its use by the speakers for documentation purposes, Corfioto is used in highly limited domains, mainly on rare occasions of gatherings and cultural manifestations of the Corfiot Jewish life, such as cuisine; F5) regarding its Response to New Domains and Media, Corfioto is defined as inactive; F6) as for the Accessibility of Written Materials for Language Education and literacy, a practical orthography is known to the community and some material is being written. Corfioto is not taught and besides a limited number of glossaries compiled by speakers in Hebrew, Greek, and Romance script, Corfioto lacks any standardized orthography.

Regarding available corpora, to our knowledge, no annotated corpus of Corfioto exists to date. Linguistic research on the variety has focused mainly on the description and the analysis of the morphosyntax and the syntax of finite-type clausal complementation. Besides Nachtmann's transcribed recordings in Italian script (2002) and Vardakis (2019), all recent and contemporary oral data attested dates are limited to utterances produced via free-speech production or elicitation (see Mücke 2019; Vardakis 2019; 2021; 2023). In fact, among all different outcomes of language contact attested in the variety, finite-type complementation is the one that has received particular attention in the literature. This is indeed a result of the significant interest on the areal diffusion of infinitival retreat and its replacement by finite-type complementation in Corfioto. This is the second research question that the compilation of the corpus aims to address.

### 3. The Linguistic Issue Under Study

The replacement of infinitive by finite complementation is the most attested and eminent syntactic feature of Corfioto and the most perspicuous and widely spread morphosyntactic feature of the Balkan Sprachbund (Joseph 1983; Mišeska-Tomić 2006; Friedman & Joseph, forthcoming). Unlike Venetian (1), considered as the main language from which Corfioto has inherited most of its lexical and morphological elements, clausal complementation in contemporary Corfioto shows significant infinitival retreat and replacement by finite clausal complements. In Corfioto, finite clausal complements are all introduced by a homophonous grammatical element *ke*, with distinct distributional properties, while the complement predicate is encoded via a verb form indexing person and number, either in subject co-reference or disjoint reference with the matrix, as shown in (2).<fnref n="2" />

$$ (1) \quad \begin{array}{l} te=vogi-o \\ 2SCL=want-1SG \end{array} \qquad \begin{array}{l} parl-ar \\ talk-INF \end{array} $$

<footnote n="2">² DET=determiner; F=feminine; INF=infinitive; M=masculine; NEG=negation; OCL=object clitic; PL=plural; PRT=particle; SCL=subject clitic; SG=singular</footnote>
'I want to talk to you'
Venetian (Ferguson 2007: 139)

(2) **vój-o** **ke=te=** **párl-o**
want-1SG PRT=OCL.2SG=talk-1SG
'I want to talk to you'
Corfioto (Vardakis, fieldwork 2019)

Although elicited data show robust cohesion in finite complementation constructions across
informants, limited cases of infinitive complement clauses in spontaneous speech data need to
be integrated in the analysis and to be compared with those in other corpora suggesting
infinitive reduction but no clear loss (Mücke 2019; Vardakis, fieldwork 2019-2023).

(3) **no bizón-a parl-ár italián**
NEG need-3SG speak-INF Italian
‘But we must not speak Italian.’
Corfioto (Vardakis, fieldwork 2019)

(4) le tsinkue son ke skriv-er
DET.PL.F five know PRT write-INF
‘I can write in these five.’
Corfioto (Vardakis, fieldwork 2019)

Oral data show clear intra-speaker variation in complement clauses introduced by the
same matrix verb even in intrasentential contexts:

(5) bizón-a liγ-ár, [...] ke lo lígh-ano
need.3SG tie-INF PRT OCL.3SG.M tie-3PL
'It is necessary to tie, tie, for them to tie him.'

At the level of linguistic analysis, the creation of the corpus will enable a quantitative
approach to variation between finite and infinitival complementation, revealing the
environments which are more prone to the retreat or the retention of the phenomenon. The third
axe of the creation of the corpus serves the aim of its annotation and its digital representation
within the Universal Dependencies framework along with other lesser-studied languages.

4. A methodology for the creation and management of a morphosyntactically annotated corpus of Corfioto

A major future step that needs to be taken in view of the creation of the first language
resource for Corfioto is the creation of a morphosyntactically annotated corpus of Corfioto.
This section presents a structured methodology on the progress made in building and annotating
the corpus to date, as well as directions for the future development of the project. The
methodology as conceived in its current form means to i) integrate the different tasks required
for the annotation of morphosyntactic features in any language variety; ii) facilitate the
reproducibility of the experiments; and iii) include an in-depth linguistic analysis to furthering
our understanding of contact-induced syntactic change in Corfioto.

The workflow adopted for the creation of the corpus is divided in four major steps:
building, managing, annotating, and archiving the corpus. The output of the workflow aims at
creating the first corpus of mixed oral and written data of Corfioto, the endangered Italo-
Romance variety of Corfu which is based on a) the transcription of more than 30 hours of i) original oral linguistic data (produced via free, semi-structured methods or elicitation) collected in fieldwork with the collaboration of at least 10 consultants in Greece, Israel and Italy from 2019 to date and ii) audio and video recordings dated to the previous century found in institutional and personal archives and offered to us by the informants and; b) written glossaries compiled by speakers or groups of speakers, which contain words and short phrases in Latin, Greek and Hebrew script together with translation equivalents in Italian, French, Greek and Hebrew.

The oral data set are transcribed using ELAN while written sources will be digitized by means of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Following current standards, we opt for near-phonological transcription in Latin script which follows unified spelling conventions established in our metadata. Besides the transcription and the tokenization, morphosyntactic annotation at the morpheme level and translation of the data is carried out on ELAN. All transcribed texts are extracted in a .txt format. Notice that annotation in ELAN may allow for distinct morphological via different L1, L2 and L3 tagging, while syntactic annotation in the Universal Dependencies framework would not allow further tagging of the languages involved.

A crucial step in the compilation of the corpus is the production and the maintenance of the XML metadata including information on the authors, the date and place of the drafting or publication of the written sources, the type of original documents, and sociolinguistic information on the consultants and date and place of recordings. Metadata are also stored in XML data standards, including Dublin Core<fnref n="3" /> or Open Language Archives Community<fnref n="4" /> or the Component Metadata Infrastructure<fnref n="5" /> provided by CLARIN.

The first data set to be used for morphosyntactic annotation is limited to the corpus transcribed to date. Following the transcription of data and the transformation of the data to text, the compilation of a fraction of the final dataset will serve for the creation of a gold standard which will allow training and evaluating a model and thus create a data set to facilitate and accelerate the morphosyntactic annotation of the whole dataset. Since the goal of the project is to exploit and process oral data to produce specific rules on the quantitative identification of diachronic and synchronic variation and change in complementation constructions in Corfioto, emphasis will be given on the distribution of variation in complementation constructions in the compilation of a representative corpus. Of course, the limited size of the documentary-linguistic character of the corpus cannot deal with theoretical issues regarding how to obtain a balanced and representative corpus of such a low-resource language, and which is confronted with general attrition under the pressure of the dominant language.

A central task is that of the selection of a representative sample of data which will be annotated to create a gold annotated standard that will be used later to train and evaluate the model. Morphosyntactic annotation is a central activity in the documentation workflow aiming to transform raw linguistic data into primary data that can be derived via analytical or presentational methods and turned into linguistic analyses, teaching materials or useful language product (Himmelmann 2006; 2012). Morphosyntactic annotation consists in the segmentation and labeling of form-meaning units based on cross-linguistic or language-specific categories, such as Part-of-Speech tagging. The morphosyntactic annotation on IMPACT will be carried out using the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework (de Marneffe et al. 2021).

Inspired by the descriptive and the theoretical tradition of dependency grammar (de Marneffe & Nivre 2019), the UD framework is a framework aiming at developing a framework for cross-linguistically consistent morphosyntactic annotation (Nivre et al. 2016). UD adopts a lexicalist view of syntax, in which syntactic words are the basic units of annotation. The

<footnote n="3">³ https://www.dublincore.org/ [last access on 22/10/2024]</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ http://wwwlanguage-archives.org/ [last access on 22/10/2024]</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ https://www.clarin.eu/content/cmdi-component-metadata-infrastructure [last access on 22/10/2024]</footnote>
framework, which has been so far applied to 161 languages<fnref n="6" />, aims "to capture similarities and idiosyncrasies among typologically different languages and support multilingual research in NLP and linguistics by enabling sound comparative evaluation across languages, crosslinguistic learning to support low-resource languages, development of multilingual natural language understanding systems, and comparative linguistic studies (de Marneffe & Nivre 2019: 209-210). A significant number of tools for the morphosyntactic annotation of corpora based on UD are available today e.g., Arborator-Grew (Guibon et al. 2020)

To summarize, the step-by-step methodology conceived in this work will facilitate the reproducibility of the experiments, integrate the different elements required for the annotation of morphosyntactic features in any language variety, and include an in-depth linguistic analysis to furthering our understanding of contact-induced syntactic change in Corfioto. The methodology of the management and analysis of the linguistic data collected with the interviews is the following:

1. Data Collection and Compilation: gather a substantial dataset of texts, representing various text types and registers. Ensure that the dataset covers a wide range of syntactic structures and linguistic features.

2. Preprocessing: Clean and preprocess the dataset, including tokenization, sentence segmentation, and lowercasing. Ensure that the text is in a format suitable for parsing.

3. Selection of a Universal Dependency (UD) Parser: Choose a UD parser that supports Corfioto or a closely related language or family, e.g., Italo-Romance.

4. Annotation Guidelines: Develop annotation guidelines specific to Corfioto's morphosyntactic features. Define dependency relations, part-of-speech tags, and other linguistic categories relevant to the language.

5. Create a Gold Standard: Annotate a representative portion of the Corfioto dataset manually to create a gold standard. This annotated data will serve as the basis for training and evaluation.

6. Train, Validate, and Evaluate Model: Train the selected UD parser using the annotated Corfioto data. Fine-tune the model to ensure it captures the language's unique morphosyntactic features.

7. Documentation and Sharing: Document the integration process, guidelines, and the trained model. Make the parser accessible to other researchers interested in analyzing Corfioto or similar languages. Engage with the linguistics and NLP research community, sharing insights, best practices, and resources.

The annotation of the golden standard today is limited to a total of 117 sentences coming from transcribed oral data from two distinct documents. In most of the cases, the sentences are segmented at the prosodic level whereas syntactic and semantic criteria are taken into consideration for the segmentation of sentences that are too long. All the sentences include clausal complements of the types described in this thesis, which are marked by the subordinator/modal marker *ke*. Since no prior spelling conventions of the variety exist, tokenization of the dataset is based on 'syntactic words', which are defined at a language-specific level. Tokenization includes separation of clitic particles and argumental clitics from the verb host. Hence, the sequence *ke=ti=ghe=lo=dágha* (PREP=SCL=IOCL=OCL.3SG.M=give.SUBJ.2/3SG) is manually separated into five words. Morphological contractions e.g., preposition-article *al* (PREP.EL) are kept. Syllabic accent is kept on words with more than two syllables. Proper nouns are represented only using the initial

<footnote n="6">⁶ According to the last release on 05/05/2024 the Version 2.14 includes a total of 283 treebanks for 161 languages
http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-5502 [last access on 22/10/2024].</footnote>
letter to protect anonymity of the participants. Preprocessing of the data includes lowercasing for all tokens in the corpus, but for the initial letter of proper names which is capitalized. Punctuation is kept only whenever relevant at the prosodic and/or syntactic and semantic level e.g., interrogative or exclamative clauses. Sentences from the same audio file are assigned a unique number common single number representing the common audio file as well as a second integer for the single number of each sentence. A first automatic annotation is performed via the use of an existing UD annotation treebank used for a genetically affiliated language, preferably a Romance language. At this point, the automatic pre-annotation stage has been performed using the UD_Italian-VIT corpus.<fnref n="7" />

## 5. IMPACT System

IMPACT is an application designed and implemented using the R shiny framework for Web Interactivity, the datatable (DT) package<fnref n="8" /> to review the annotation, and the textplot package<fnref n="9" /> for text visualization and analysis. The current interface of the IMPACT system is shown in Figure 1. The user can 1) select the sentence to analyze, then 2) transliterate and translate the original sentence, 3) automatically parse the text, 4) interact (edit and modify) with the morphosyntactic annotations produced by the UD parser, and 5) analyze the corresponding dependency parser tree. IMPACT is an integrated Web environment which has been designed and implemented to allow for on-the-fly adjustments, enabling users to fine-tune annotation results or modify display preferences. While the application has been created to serve as a valuable tool for linguistic analysis of Corfioto, it aspires to become a valuable tool for automatic morphosyntactic annotation, especially of genetically affiliated languages. The work-in-progress made here aims at contributing to the creation of a first gold standard of the variety, as has been already done for other minority and under-resource languages (see Millour et al. 2024; Karahóga et al., 2022).

An example of the morphosyntactic annotation and the representation of the syntactic dependencies of an utterance in the first dataset is presented in the figures below:

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. Morphosyntactic annotation in IMPACT</figcaption></figure>

<footnote n="7">⁷ https://universaldependencies.org/treebanks/it_vit/index.html [last access on 22/10/2024]</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ https://github.com/rstudio/DT [last access on 14/11/2024]</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ https://github.com/bnosac/textplot [last access on 14/11/2024]</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. Morphosyntactic annotation and dependency relations in IMPACT</figcaption></figure>

IMPACT is an integrated Web environment has been designed and implemented to allow for on-the-fly adjustments, enabling users to fine-tune annotation results or modify display preferences. In this way, experts can explore dependency trees, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic relationships in an intuitive, interactive manner. This Web application (that can also be used in a stand-alone mode) will serve as a valuable tool for linguistic analysis and facilitate research on language contact and change, particularly in the context of Corfioto or similar languages.

The source code of the Web application is constantly updated and made available to the research community. The morphosyntactic annotation has produced until now the complete annotation and validation of 111 sentences in Corfioto and their respective transliterations and translations in English (for a total of 333 sentences). The annotation of the 1310 tokens were revised together with the dependency tree structure. This initial output constitutes the first dataset for Corfioto, consisting of POS-tagging and representing the universal dependencies.

## 6. Conclusions

The creation of a morphosyntactically annotated corpus of Corfioto serves multiple goals. Besides the urgent need to preserve the rich linguistic heritage of the Corfiot Jews, it will enable a quantitative approach to the analysis of contact-induced phenomena, including infinitival loss and the emergence of Balkan-type complementation. Finally, it will contribute to current goals on the wider representation of endangered and low-resource languages within the fields of computational linguistics, highlighting the joint opportunities that the collaboration between linguists, fieldworkers and computer scientists can bring.

In this paper, we have presented a methodology for the creation of a morphosyntactic annotated corpus of Corfioto and the current Web application named IMPACT for the collection of morphosyntactic annotations for the analysis of variation and change in the complementation of Corfioto. The steps for the implementation of the annotation process focus on integrating a Universal Dependency (UD) parser for the tagging of morphosyntactic features of Corfioto, or similar varieties, in order to keep this resource up-to-date with the current state of the art in linguistic annotation, make annotation guidelines available as language change occurs, and make this resource available for training syntactic parser with new data.
An additional step will be publishing linguistic data in accordance with the OntoLex-Lemon paradigm.<fnref n="10" /> This represents a crucial step in ensuring the interoperability and semantic richness of the data within the broader linguistic and semantic web community. Through this approach, linguistic data, such as morphosyntactic annotations in Corfioto, can be seamlessly integrated into the LOD (Linked Open Data) cloud, enabling researchers and applications to access and utilize the data in a structured and consistent manner. Ongoing work for the implementation of step 7 of the methodology will include a mapping of the tabular morphosyntactic annotation to an RDF one (Chiarcos et al. 2021). The integration of linguistic data into the CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure) framework represents a strategic step for ensuring that the linguistic dataset, annotated in accordance with the OntoLex-Lemon paradigm, becomes an integral part of a broader research infrastructure.

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