Compound words and "interfixes(?)"

[Linguist Girl]

Hi,

I have just recently begun working on Koine Greek and many of the language's verbs are compound words, consisting of a preposition and the verb root.  These verbs I have included as complex forms in my lexicon.  So far so good.  However, in some conjugations, a morpheme is placed between the preposition and the verb root e.g

anablep /ana-blep/ ---> aneblep /ana-e-blep/

proseuch /pros-euch/ ---> prose:uch /pros-e-euch/

proskune /pros-kune/ --> prosekune /pros-e-kune/

Ideally I would like to have these forms included when I do a concordance search on each verb stem but I am just not sure how to go about making that happen.  Obviously this sort of thing takes place in other languages (German and Dutch come immediately to mind) so there must be a way of having FLEx do this....I just can't figure it out. 

Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

[Kevin Warfel]

It's been a while since I studied Greek, but if this interfixing morpheme is the aorist prefix, then you have what is referred to as a "prefixing interfix" in the document, "Introduction to Parsing...", found on the FLEx Help menu, under Resources. See section 2.2.4 of that document if you haven't already read it. If you need more specific information than is available there, maybe someone else can provide it.

-Kevin

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[Ron Moe]

First to clarify the situation-- The prefix in question is the past tense morpheme e-. (Historically it was called the "augment", a profoundly useless label.) The perfect aspect prefix Ce- (reduplicating the first consonant of the stem) also comes between the preposition and the stem. A few verbs take an imperfective aspect prefix Ci- (also reduplicating the first consonant of the stem). I consider the prepositions to be proclitics, not derivational prefixes. However there are a couple of problems. Sometimes the inflectional prefixes can occur before the preposition. For instance the past tense of epistamai 'understand' (epi- sta -mai) is eepistameen (e- epi- sta -meen).

ἠπιστάμην    'I understood'

ἐ- ἐπί= στα -μην

PST- on= stand -1S.MID

It is as if the preposition is reinterpreted as part of the stem. Smyth lists some examples in sections 449-454 of his grammar.

The challenge is how to model this in FLEx and stick with traditional citation forms for the verbs. I don't know if FLEx would allow a complex form consisting of a proclitic and verb stem (e.g. ana= blep). If we could combine such a lexeme form with a citation form anablepoo (ἀναβλέπω), then we might have an elegant and easily implemented solution. (The equivalent in English is our phrasal verbs, which we treat as a kind of idiom.)

Kevin has given the other option--treating these affixes as prefixing interfixes.

Unfortunately grammar has its irregularities. For instance aphijmi 'allow, forgive' (ἀφίημι from ἀπό= ἀφίημι) can prefix the past tense both ways:

ἤφιεν     'he was allowing'

ἐ- ἀπό= Cι- ἑ -ν

PST- from= IPFV- let -3S

ἀφῆκεν     'he allowed'

ἀπό= ἐ-  ἑ -κε -ν

from= PST- let -AOR -3S

Since ἐ- and Cι- are both prefixing interfixes, the form ἤφιεν tries to have it both ways, prefix and prefixing interfix. (Perhaps calling them "interfering imperfixes" would better express how I feel about them.) Probably one or both of these forms will have to be treated as irregularly inflected forms.

By the way, I'm working on a new Greek lexicon of New Testament Greek. The project is on LanguageDepot (Greek-SBL). Let me know if you are interested in downloading it.

Ron Moe

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[Linguist Girl]

Thanks Ron and Kevin.  I forgot I was posting to a list about an SIL designed program and hence a lot of people would have some knowledge about  Greek!  :)  And thank you, Ron, I would be very keen to download the new lexicon you have been working on.  

Up to now I have had this past tense morpheme categorised as a prefixing interfix (and was planning on doing the same for the imperfective prefix you mentioned, Ron).  I have been working around the fact that the past prefix sometimes occurs before the proclitic by including those verb stems as if they were comprised of a single morpheme rather than being compounds - a less than perfect solution but for the purposes of my research it works.  (I haven't yet entered afiemi into my lexicon - that is a bit of fun yet to be had.)

The main concern I have right now is how to find all the forms of a verb in a single concordance search.  After playing around with it for a while this morning, I have a feeling the issue is I may be searching for and/or interlinearising these verbs incorrectly.  I have been interlinearising them in their component forms (i.e. as pros-e-kune- rather than e-proskune-)  and then also searching for the component morphemes in the complex concordance.  Is this completely wrong in terms of how to find them all in a single search in FLEx?

Thanks again for your help.  

[Ron Moe]

I've played around with the FLEx parser (and other parsers) on a number of languages. But I'm not an expert. If you want to be able to find all concordance entries for verbs like aphiemi and proskunew, then you will have to treat them as stems aphe and proskune. You also have to deal with e- Ce- and Ci- as prefixing interfixes. You don't want to parse down to the level of roots. (You can, but the only value would be to study derivation and compounding.) To study lexical meaning you have to look at stems (and idioms).

The bottom line is that if you parse apheeken as apo= e- e -ke -n, you cannot then search for the stem aphe. If FLEx can do complex corpus queries (e.g. find apo= and e in the same word), then it would be able to find all instances of the word.

My suggestion to treat apo= and pros= as proclitics would only work if apo=e and pros=kune were treated as idioms. Presumably the FLEx concordance function would be able to find all instances of an idiom. I don't know if it can, but it would need to. Unfortunately idioms are notoriously difficult for machine parsers and search engines to handle. They are often flexible, allow insertions, have variants, permit included words to be inflected, and other things.

Perhaps someone else on this list has experience with complex concordance searches in FLEx. (I do concordance searches using a different program.)

In order to get the Greek-SBL dictionary, you need to create an account for yourself on LanguageDepot and then send me your name. I can then grant you access to it.

Ron

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[Linguist Girl]

Thanks Ron.  Yes, that was the conclusion I came to this morning - to parse to the stem level not the root.  I think that will be most productive for my research objectives at the moment.

I tried to create an account on LanguageDepot but don't seem to be able to sign in after registering.  I will try again a bit later in the day.

Thanks again for all your help!!  I very much appreciate it.

Amy

[Marcus Vanhountenmeyer]