Combining W ord N ets with Treebanks to study idiomatic language: A pilot study on Rigvedic formulas through the lenses of the S anskrit W ord N et and the V edic Treebank (2023)

Abstract: This paper shows how WordNets can be employed in tandem with morpho-syntactically annotated corpora to study poetic formulas. Pairing the lexico-semantic information of the Sanskrit WordNet with morpho-syntactic annotation from the Vedic Treebank, we perform a pilot study of formulas including SPEECH verbs in the RigVeda, the most ancient text of the. Sanskrit literature.

## introduction the sanskrit wordnet (swn; hellwig 2017) 1 is currently under construction in the framework of an international project carried on by the university of pavia, the ucsc of milan, the university of exeter, and the center for hellenic studies at harvard university, which aims to build a family of wordnets (wns) for ancient indo-european (ie) languages. the family additionally comprises wns for ancient greek 2 and latin @xcite . these wns are designed to be interoperable with each other and with other wns for modern languages, as well as linkable to external resources (see also @xcite . furthermore, these wns bring together wn relational semantics with semantic theories of cognitive linguistics, while introducing a number of innovations to the wn architecture to account for the specificities of ancient ie languages @xcite . by means of a case study employing the swn, this paper shows how wns can be employed in tandem with morpho-syntactically annotated 1 https://sanskritwordnet.unipv.it . 2 https://greekwordnet.chs.harvard.edu . corpora to study poetic formulas, and more generally idiomatic expressions of ordinary language. building on the methodology by @xcite , we develop a pilot study on the rigveda (rv), the most ancient text of sanskrit literature, composed in the so-called vedic variety. 3 to extract formulas with different degrees of schematicity, we pair the lexicosemantic information of the swn with the morpho-syntactic annotation of the vedic treebank. the vedic treebank (vtb, @xcite ) is a morpho-syntactically annotated corpus of vedic literature, tagged according to the universal dependencies formalism @xcite . the paper is structured as follows. sec. 2 introduces the background. sec. 3 explains our methodology. in sec. 4, we show and discuss our results. sec. 5 concludes the paper and draws future lines of research. ## conclusion and future work with this case study, we showed the potential of employing wns in tandem with other language resources to study idiomatic expressions. pairing the lexico-semantic information of the swn with morpho-syntactic annotation contained in the vtb, we were able to extract poetic formulas involving a speech verb in the rv, and to detect recurring pairings of form and meaning at various levels of schematicity. in the future, as the swn grows, we intend to add semantic annotation to the entire vtb. furthermore, the same approach may be applied to the study of idiomatic expressions in everyday language by combining information contained in wns and treebanks of modern languages.