A Small U niversal D ependencies Treebank for H ittite (2020)

Abstract: We present the first Universal Dependencies treebank for Hittite. This paper expands on earlier efforts at Hittite corpus creation (Molina and Molin, 2016; Molina, 2016) and discussions of annotation guidelines for Hittite within the UD framework (Inglese, 2015; Inglese et al., 2018). We build on the expertise of the above works to create a small corpus which we hope will serve as a stepping-stone to more expansive UD treebanking for Hittite.

## introduction hittite is an extinct language of the anatolian sub-branch of the indo-european language family. it was the main language of the hittite kingdom (16th-13th centuries b.c.e.), and is recorded from the 18th to the 12th centuries b.c.e. @xcite . knowledge of hittite reached beyond the boundaries of the hittite kingdom as far as egypt. as the earliest attested indo-european language, it remains vital to indo-european studies and our understanding of the rest of the anatolian sub-branch, all of whose languages -luwian, palaic, lycian, lydian, and carian -are extinct @xcite @xcite . the hittite empire left behind a wide range of texts, which can be classified according to linguistic time periods -old hittite, middle hittite, and new hittite -with middle hittite acting more as a transitional period between the two @xcite . hittite's fragmentary corpus of cuneiform tablets with extensive borrowing of signs from both akkadian and sumerian make the language challenging for treebank creation @xcite . as a dependable source of unfragmented text, we annotated original hittite sentences presented in hoffner and melchert's tutorial @xcite , and which we had analyzed in a lecture setting. the sentences are drawn from a variety of texts, spanning legal, religious, and mythological, from the three linguistic periods. despite minor diachronic developments in morphology and syntax (see section 2), scribal recopying of older texts occasionally obscures a definitive chronological classification for the surviving texts. these considerations swayed us in favor of a single corpus for the three linguistic periods. we include the dating, whenever possible, in the sentence's metadata. ## previous work inglese (2015) discusses an annotation schema for a hittite universal dependencies treebank. his work primarily concerns sentences originating from the old hittite zalpa's text, so our treebank requires some other rules to account for grammatical conventions reflected only in later texts. these include use of the -za particle in nominal and "to be" sentences with 1st or 2nd person subject, and pronominal clitic repetition (see §28.32-42 and §30.19 of @xcite . furthermore, some of inglese's work must be updated to adapt it to the current universal dependencies 2.0, which was released subsequently to his paper. @xcite introduce a hittite treebank in the proiel (pragmatic resources in old indo-european languages) framework, whose treebanks for old church slavonic and latin have been mapped into the ud format. @xcite has done previous work on a large constituency mssql corpus of hittite texts; we do not use it as a guide to our annotation. ## scribal peculiarities scribal idiosyncrasies occasionally complicate the annotation process: the original cuneiform of sentence (6) uses ns (new script), but clearly contains old hittite elements. old hittite prefers the genitive with postpositions to the dative-locative, sometimes appending the genitive possessive clitic to the postposition, as in pé-ra-@xmath0. however, this sentence also includes the extra new hittite dative-locative element -š-ši, which could be the result of a scribal "correction". in this instance, the postposition pé-e-ran appears to govern two co-referential pronominal objects: =še-et and -š-ši (see §20.23 and §20.26 of @xcite . this situation is similar to the clitic doubling, as in bulgarian @xcite . for consistency, in (6) we have decided to mark the pronoun -š-ši as expl with respect to the verb in the clause, instead of making use of the reparandum relation, because there is no way to prove whether the extra pronoun is indeed a reparandum. ## conclusion we have provided a seedling universal dependencies corpus for the earliest attested indo-european language. with a view on making our work as extensible as possible, we have attempted to incorporate both the practical and the philological concerns voiced by @xcite for treebanking hittite in the ud framework. we hope that this treebank will serve as a stepping stone for increased computational analysis of hittite and typological research.