Sketch grammar

The Afaan Oromo, Tigrinya and Somali sketch grammars were developed along the template used in the English and Spanish grammars within the Sketch Engine (so far the two most developed grammars), in terms of names of the grammatical relations (and their mapping to the template names which will enable matching the given language word sketches to word sketches in other languages) as well as in terms of the coding within the scope of the sketch grammar formalism which should simplify reading the grammar and make future modifications easy, which is important as there is not yet any feedback from native speakers. An important issue is, there is no lemmatization for these languages so the word sketches contain only particular word forms. The definitions of the relations are based on the Universal POS tagset [1].

In total, there is 19 relations in the current version of the grammar, covering the most important grammatical phenomena, such as modifiers of all parts of speech, subjects, objects, predicates and coordinations.

Figure 1: Word sketch for Oromo noun konkolaataan (car)

As can be seen from Figures 1-3, modifiers are the words that somehow modify or specify meaning of given word. This relation is called modifier of “word”. There are also a few complement relations called nouns/verbs/adverbs modified by “word”, where the word is the one who modifies the meaning (of noun, adjective, adverb or verb). These can be seen in Figures 1 and 3.

Figure 2: Word sketch for Tigrinya verb ዚብሀል (had)

Next grammatical phenomena to be described are subjects and objects, which can be either nominal or pronominal. These relations (objects of “word”, subjects of “word”, pronominal objects of “word”, pronominal subjects of “word”) can be seen in Figure 2.

A somewhat special case is relation subject of “be word”. Partially conjoining relation to subject of be “word” is “word” is… as well as relations “word” is a ... and … is a “word”. These relations can be seen in Figures 1 and 3

Another important grammatical phenomenon is predicate. Word sketches show two relations, verbs with “word” as object as can be seen in Figure 3 and verbs with “word” as subject as can be seen in Figures 1 and 3.

Figure 3: Word sketch for Somali adjective guduudan (red)

The last relation is “word” and/or, which shows frequent coordinations among words. This relation is shown in Figures 1-3.

[1] http://universaldependencies.org/u/pos/