A Corpus of Liturgical Texts in G erman: Towards Multilevel Text Annotation (2024)

Abstract: The aim of the study is to create a “documented” literary and theological history of German Catholic hymnography. The paper focuses on the creation of a corpus of liturgical texts in German and describes the first stage of annotation dealing with the metatextual markup of Catholic hymns. The authors dwell in detail on the parameters of the multi-level classification of hymn texts they developed, which allows them to differentiate hymns on different grounds. The parameters include not only characteristics that represent hymns (the period and the source of their origin, rubrics, musical accompaniment), but also ones that are inherent for strophes. Based on the created markup, it is possible to trace general trends in texts divided according to certain meta-features. The developed scheme of annotation is given on the example of the hymnbook Gotteslob (1975). The results present statistics on different parameters used for hymn description.

## introduction it would not be an exaggeration to say that modern works related to the analysis of language and literature deal with corpora (being either corpus-based or corpus-driven), which have become a necessary condition for such studies. however, most corpora, regardless of the language they are aimed at, are focused on modern language (most often literary), since automatic processing of texts from other periods can still be difficult. additional difficulties in building corpora of historical texts are associated with the fact that there is no access to the texts in electronic form, so the task of searching, scanning and recognizing them still arises. in the case of church texts, there is a centuriesold tradition of their collection; however, there are no traditions of their systematization and presentation for research purposes. there are various indexes and reference books, archival materials, but they are fragmented and difficult to access. for example, archival materials are available in the archive of the german liturgical institute (deutsches liturgisches institut) in germany. therefore, our study makes the first attempt to create a corpus of texts that would include such material. in the article, we will focus on issues related to the creation of a corpus of liturgical texts using texts from @xcite , namely, their metatextual markup. in our case, the created corpus can be classified as both historical and poetic one; therefore metatextual parameters combine the features of these two types. we rely on the principles that were elaborated for the development of similar corpora and tei project and introduce new ones that take into account the features of liturgical texts and have not previously been presented in online systems. in our work, we limit ourselves to the material from @xcite , but we also consistently take into account @xcite and the sources of hymn material used by the editorial boards of the respective editions. in further research, we would also like to consider the regional parts of these editions. the users of the corpus will be historians and theorists of literature, verse scholars, liturgists, ethnographers, musicologists, and cultural researchers. it is this wide range of different specialists and their scientific interests that influenced the selection of features for metaannotation. ## corpus of liturgical texts in german the hymns from @xcite cover the period from the middle ages to 1973; in the future, the corpus will be supplemented with the results of the analysis of @xcite . text processing involves five stages: preparation, metamarking, tokenization, morphological and syntactic analysis. the preparatory stage involved determining the list of texts that should be included in the corpus. we have selected hymns that belong to the genre of kirchenlied (church chants, which are the core part of the hymns). outside the scope of our attention were the official translations of original latin prayers, psalms, as well as litanies, texts of formulas, sacramentals and sacraments set to music. text mark-up was performed manually using the close reading method, since not all the information about the hymns that should have been presented in the corpus was indicated explicitly in the texts themselves, so they needed to be additionally read by an expert. ## text annotation text annotation was described in detail in @xcite , in which the authors identified internal and external markup parameters. the paper by @xcite discusses units that should be used for annotation in our case, we follow the same approach, however, understanding the hymn as a separate text. the markup that is introduced in our corpus includes the following levels: characteristics of the hymn and characteristics of the strophe (see ## conclusion this article presents the results of creating a corpus of catholic hymns, which is the first attempt at developing such a corpus. this material has not been considered in existing text collections, databases, and corpora until now. the paper described the initial results obtained for metatextual markup of texts. currently, we plan to take into account such parameters of the verse as meter and rhyme. the next stage will include the morphological annotation of hymns, which will also require additional preparation, because automatic processing of diachronic texts can be tricky and laborious. future work will include topic modeling of hymns and their clustering in order to identify interrelations between texts.