NP coordination in Choctaw -- FLEx and non-FLEx resources

[Aaron Broadwell]

Choctaw has a few coordination strategies for NPs. A colleague at another university recently asked if I could share some data on this topic, and I found that I could not easily find what I wanted in my FLEx database.  I suspect what I want cannot be done in FLEx, so I may need some advice on whether it is possible to use external NLP tools on the FLEx data. 

Here is the problem --

Conservative Choctaw uses zero conjunction for NPs:

Another possibility for nominal coordination is the temporal adverb anóti (or ano̱ti) which should mean ’and then’ in conservative Choctaw:

(use-ah) is the English verb use, adapted to Choctaw phonology.

Sometimes ano̱ti or anóti seems to come before both conjuncts:

 

he strategy is the use of a ’pro-verb’ hi, meaning ’doing so; being so’ followed by a same-subject switch-reference marker:

Another example:

My problem -- I cannot search for the zero coordination between NPs.  The other two lexical items anóti ~ ano̱ti and hicha  are used in hundreds or thousands of examples where they connect clauses -- not NPs.

That makes me wonder if any of my colleagues can suggest a way to identify or locate examples in my database.  It strikes me that it might be possible to use modern NLP tools to identify NP coordination in the English translation and then to use the translation as a tool to find the relevant Choctaw examples.

But that would require some interaction between FLEx and non-FLEx resources that it is beyond my current knowledge. I’d be curious if other FLEx users have experience in exporting a FLEx database for use by other tools.  

[Kevin Hahn]

Hi Aaron, it looks like the images you sent in the last email didn't make it though. Could you maybe send them as attachments?

[Craig]

Hi Aaron,

If you're comfortable with coding in Python, then you can use Python libraries such as nltk within FlexTools to analyse/search your Flex texts. You can, of course, also access any other files/databases/look-up tables/etc. that you might need.

If you'd prefer to create your own standalone program, you can do that too by using the flexlibs library directly.

Craig.