Where corpus methods hit their limits: the case of separable adjectives in Bambara

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National institute for oriental languages and civilizations

French national centre for scientific research

St. Petersburg university

Where corpus methods hit their limits: the case of separable adjectives in Bambara

V. Vydrin

Annotation

Separable adjectives represent a morphosyntactic subcategory of the part of speech of adjectives in Bambara (< Manding < Mande < Niger-Congo, Mali, West Africa). A separable adjective is a compound lexeme consisting of a noun root designating most often a body part, a qualitative verb root and a connector -la- ~ -lan- or -ma- ~ -man-. When used predicatively, the final component of a separable adjective (the qualitative verb root) is split from the rest of the form by the auxiliary word ka or man. Separable adjectives express mainly human qualities (moral or physical), and their semantics are very often idiomatic. The productivity of this subclass is limited.

In order to establish an inventory of the separable adjectives, two approaches have been followed: elicitation and a search in the Bambara Reference Corpus (which included roughly 4,110,000 words at the time of this study). The potentially imaginable number of lexemes of this type equals 570 (15 noun roots x 19 qualitative verb roots x 2 connectors). Elicitation provided 75 separable adjectives, and the corpus study, 25, 3 of which are absent from the elicitated list.

This experiment proves that in studies of derivative morphology, when a linguist needs to fill out a matrix, elicitation cannot simply be replaced by a corpus study. On the other hand, the corpus data provides invaluable supplementary data that cannot be obtained through elicitation

Key words: elicitation, corpus study, adjective, qualitative verbs, Bambara, Mande languages.

Аннотация

Там, где корпусные методы теряют эффективность: пример разделяемых прилагательных в бамана

В.Ф. Выдрин, Национальный институт восточных языков и цивилизаций, Национальный центр научных исследований Франции, Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет

Разделяемые прилагательные в языке бамана (< группа манден < семья манде < макросемья нигер-конго, Мали) представляют собой морфологический подкласс в составе части речи прилагательное. Разделяемое прилагательное - это сложное слово, состоящее из именного корня, чаще всего со значением части тела, качественного глагола и соединительного элемента -la lan- или -ma- ~ -man-. В предикативном употреблении финальный компонент (т.е. качественный глагол) отделяется от левой части вспомогательным словом (предикативным показателем) ka или man. Разделяемые прилагательные обозначают в основном человеческие качества (моральные или физические), их семантика нередко идиоматична. Продуктивность этого морфологического подкласса ограничена.

Для выявления инвентаря разделяемых прилагательных были применены два подхода: элицитация и поиск в Справочном корпусе бамана (который на момент исследования включал около 4 110 000 слов). Теоретически возможное количество разделяемых прилагательных - 570 (15 зафиксированных именных корней х 19 качественных глаголов х 2 коннектора). Элицитация позволила обнаружить 75 разделяемых прилагательных, а корпусное исследование - 25, три из которых отсутствовали в списке, полученном путем элицитации.

Этот эксперимент доказывает, что при изучении деривационной морфологии, когда лингвист должен заполнять матрицу, корпусное исследование не может заменить элицитацию. С другой стороны, корпусной подход дает ценные дополнительные данные, которые невозможно получить путем элицитации.

Ключевые слова: элицитация, корпусные исследования, прилагательные, качественные глаголы, язык бамана, языки манде.

Introduction

In works on field linguistics methodology and in the current linguistic practice, elicitation is sometimes regarded as a rather inappropriate way of acquiring language data, and elicitated data is viewed as second-rate. Some colleagues tend to reject the elicitation altogether, in a more or less explicit way, and the following quotation is representative of this trend: In informal discussions, much more categorical judgements are often expressed.

Interview fieldwork is justified if there is nothing else to be done.

It is a very poor option if a speech community is available - but some researchers opt to concentrate on interview fieldwork with a few speakers conveniently placed in a city or in a township. A grammar of a language spoken by a few million people which is based on the work with one consultant in an urban environment could be interesting, but is unlikely to be comprehensive and fully reliable [Aikhenvald, 2007, p. 5].

According to this approach, only natural texts, only spontaneous data can be regarded as reliable, and any use of elicitation is just a desecration of linguistic fieldwork.

This negativity is a natural reaction to an inappropriate and maladroit application of elicitation methods. The position of other authors may be less categorical. Most often, they recognize the usefulness of elicitation for obtaining certain types of language data; cf. a detailed analysis of various elicitation methods in [Chelliah, De Reuse, 2011].

The value of the data from natural texts cannot be contested (although here too, one should beware of ungrammatical forms spontaneously used by speakers). There are however some aspects of language structure where one can hardly attain satisfactory results without elicitation. Among such spheres are word formation and derivation, verbal lability, fine-grained syntactic studies; in fact, any research topic where an exhaustive checking of numerous options in a matrix is necessary.

In this sense, I recollect Vladimir Nedjalkov's (p.c.) position on the utility of elicitation in the verbal derivation studies: “If you check a matrix with your language consultant, and if even in 20% of cases he produces wrong answers or fails to answer, you obtain 80% of correct data. And if you work exclusively with natural texts, you are lucky if you obtain data for 30 or 40% of positions in the matrix”.

I heard this argument from Vladimir Nedjalkov some 25 years ago, when big electronic text corpora were rare. Since that time, the progress in language documentation has been impressive. After the world-biggest languages, many mid-size languages were provided with multimillion text corpora accessible on line, and now, more and more new corpora for minor languages and those without official status in their countries, are becoming available.

Could it be that the easy access to great amounts of searchable natural texts has made Vladimir Nedjalkov's stance obsolete?

In this study, I attempt to answer this question drawing on Bambara data for the averagely-productive word-compounding model for adjectives.

1. The Bambara language

Bambara (< Manding < Western Mande < Mande < Niger-Congo) is the biggest language of Mali (West Africa). It is spoken, mainly in Mali (but also in its diaspora), by some 4 million L1 speakers and at least 10 million L2 speakers. Bambara has some written literature and periodicals; it is widely used in the literacy programs and, to some extent, in the primary and secondary education. Bambara is a relatively well-described language: there is a reference grammar [Dumestre, 2003], a number of university courses and textbooks [Bird, Kante, 1976; Bird, Hutchison, Kante, 1977; Kastenholz, 1989; Bailleul, 2000; Vydrin, 2008], big dictionaries [Vydrine, 1999a; Bailleul, 2007; Bailleul et al., 2011; Dumestre, 2011]; many dozens (or even hundreds) of research articles have been published.

Since 2011, there exists an electronic annotated corpus of Bambara texts freely accessible on line [Vydrin, Maslinsky, Meric, 2011]. In 2011, it contained about 1,100,000 tokens (of these, about 28,000 tokens in the disambiguated sub-corpus); in November 2018, it reached the size of 9,146,875 tokens (of these, 1,122,416 tokens in the disambiguated subcorpus), and it continues to grow. A language corpus of some 9 million tokens may seem unimpressive when compared with corpora of big and even mid-sized European or Asian languages which comprise hundreds of millions words; however, for an African language almost unrepresented on the Internet, this amount of data represents a revolutionary breakthrough and opens bright perspectives for language studies. Since its publication in 2011, the Bambara Reference Corpus is broadly used in Bambara grammar studies, lexicographic research and language teaching.

Bambara is a tonal language with two tones at the underlying level, low and high. The Bambara tonal system has been subject of numerous studies; for its compact presentation, see [Vydrin, 2016]. In the present paper, the tonal notation is phonological, it follows the principles formulated for the Bambara Reference Corpus [Vydrin, Maslinsky, и Meric, 2011b], in short: tone markers appear only on the initial syllables of The basic word order is S AUX (O) V X, where S is a subject, the tonal domain; co absence of tonal mark on a vowel means that the syllables belongs to the same tonal domain as the preceding one. Otherwise, all Bambara examples are transcribed according to the official Bambara orthography of Mali.

V is a verb, AUX is an auxiliary word expressing grammatical semantics of tense, aspect, mode and polarity (in the Mandeist tradition, AUX are named “predicative markers”), O is direct a object (whose absence makes the verb intransitive), X is an oblique (indirect object or adjunct), most often represented by a postpositional phrase. The word order in NP is N₂ - N1 (N1 is head noun, N2 is dependent noun), N - Adj (the adjectival modifier follows the head noun).

2. The case study: Separable adjectives in Bambara

2.1 Adjectives and qualitative verbs

Adjectives in Bambara represent a part of speech of its own [Vydrine, 1999b; Trobs, 2008]. The part-of-speech status of adjectives in Bambara has been amply discussed in the special literature, and it is hardly appropriate to resume this discussion here. An adjective follows the modified noun (1a); the tonal article (designated by a suspended acute diacritic) and the plural marker /-u/ (in the standard orthography represented by -w) follows the adjective (1b). The inverse word order, adjective-noun, appears in the inversive construction [Dumestre, 1987, p. 249-259; Vydrin, in press, lecon 30]. The article and the plural marker follow the noun immediately when the adjective is used as secondary predicate [Vydrin, in press, leon 31]. Both these constructions are relatively rare in texts and represent no special interest for the topic of the current study.

(1) a. so je house white\ART Abbreviations and glosses: adr - addressative postposition; art - tonal article; inf - t> infinitive marker; ipfv - imperfective; nmlz - nominalization suffix; np - noun phrase; pl - rn plural marker; qual.neg - negative predicative marker of qualitative verbs; recp - reciprocal ш pronoun; rel - relative marker (pronoun or determinative). `white house'

b. so je-w house white\ART-PL `white houses'

There are several morphological subclasses of adjectives; some of these are tonally compact with the modified nouns (i.e., they are prosodically non- autonomous), other subclasses are non-compact.

There is another class of lexemes in Bambara specialized in the expression of property values: qualitative verbs. Also referred to as “stative verbs” [Creissels, 1985] or “predicative adjectives” [Vydrine, 1990; Bailleul, 2007]. In the terminology of Gerard Dumestre (1987; 2003), these lexemes are just “adjectives”. They can be regarded as a separate part of speech or as a subclass of verbs. Their syntactic behavior is similar to that of “dynamic verbs” (i.e. all the other verbs of the language), but

- they can be only intransitive (while dynamic verbs are very often labile, and imtransitiva tantum are relatively rare among the dynamic verbs),

- they can be accompanied by only two predicative markers, ka affirmative and man negative, which express no tense, aspect or modal semantics. To the contrary, the dynamic verbs can appear with a whole set of predicative markers expressing various TAM meanings, but not with ka and man.

The qualitative verbs represent an unproductive closed class of about 60 lexemes (of these some 40 are frequently used, the others are more or less rare). Many qualitative verbs produce adjectives by the means of conversion.

2.2 Morphosyntax of separable adjectives