From Ontological Attributes to Semantic Feature Structures– Experimental Research on Aspect in Polish
From Ontological Attributes to Semantic Feature Structures– Experimental Research on Aspect in Polish

Summary/Abstract: Our aim is the formalisation of semantic concepts using experimental Computer-aided Acquisition of Semantic Knowledge (CASK) method. This method is being used at CELTA with the SEMANA (SEMantic ANAlyser) software which was especially designed for this purpose. The case study we propose is the experimental research on Aspect in Polish: we show how although rich nevertheless intuitive notions resulting from years of traditional research can be formalised with computational methods of data analysis. We use the notation close to that of Semantic Feature Structures as a representation language for describing the category of aspect in Polish taking into account not only the grammatical core of this category but also the whole semantic field (called aspectuality by A.V. Bondarko) regardless of its pertaining to various levels of expression (morphological, syntactical or lexical). {To model the Category of Aspect we treat ontological types of situations as conditions for two relevant aspect parameters we call Analysis of the situation (or Internal Aspect) and Control of the situation (or External Aspect).} In order to cope both with the lexical diversity of aspectual morphemes (prefixes) and the grammatical (dichotomous and obligatory) character of aspect in Slavic languages, we have proposed to define the perfective aspect as a hypercategory. {The database of Polish Aspect was analysed using KDD statistical tools (Sauvet. G.34}): thus, we obtained the first preliminary experience-based semantic definitions of the perfective and imperfective values of the category of aspect in a Slavic language.}

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