ÜHENDVERBID EESTI MURRETES
Phrasal Verbs in the Corpus of Estonian Dialects

Summary/Abstract: The development of electronic language resources enables us to conduct more extensive studies on different linguistic phenomena, but it also requires development of tools for retrieving data of interest. Since 1998, the Corpus of Estonian Dialects (CED) has been compiled to make (so far only) recorded data available to researchers. This article describes phrasal verbs in Estonian dialects and the possibility of automatic retrieval of phrasal verbs in the CED. The purpose of the work was to develop an automatic method for extracting phrasal verbs from the CED, which would enable us to discover the differences and similarities in the usage of phrasal verbs in all dialects and to compare them with standard Estonian usage. The resulting method for automatic phrasal verb extraction achieved a 98% recall and 78% precision. The results indicate bigger differences of phrasal verb usage between the west and the east of the country. The eastern part, including the Coastal, Alutaguse, Eastern, Tartu, Setu and Võru dialects, uses a less analytical way of expression, whereas the western part, comprising the Central, Mulgi, Western and Island dialects, uses a significantly larger number of phrasal verbs. Surprisingly, the Mulgi dialect appeared more similar in this respect to the North-Estonian dialect group than to its traditional group. About 1065 phrasal verbs used in the dialects were not found in the standard Estonian database of multiword expressions. Although the current scope of the CED can be considered sufficient for the study described, enlargement of the corpus will be essential for drawing more thorough conclusions.

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