Aims an objectives

A brief summary of Joint Data meeting:

      Hiwa Asadpour as a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge will have discussion with Geoffrey Khan about different issues mainly the design of a multilingual Corpus-driven database. The development of a unified, fine-grained database is one of the key objectives, because it will represent the base for further research and the envisaged project. The agenda of Asadpour’s visiting Cambridge contains the following items:

1) harmonizing the existing data structures in order to make them fit into one database and processable for regular expression searches (including orthographical conventions, different transcription systems);

2) agreeing on a unified annotation model and stipulation of automatable annotation processes;

3) identifying relevant parameters for the research questions concerning contact induced change of word order.

      Considering the high multilingualism of the region, code switching and calques constitute an important issue for the identification of original and newly developed structures. This is important for data analysis and for the results of the CLiCK projects so that generalizations concerning the development of mentioned languages will be possible. In addition, the members of the network need to discuss whether foreign elements should also be glossed as such or should be stored in a comment section in the database.

      Asadpour will also discuss thoroughly the problematic areas of defining verb classifications for each language and selecting the verbs which are salient in the study of semantic and syntactic borrowings and how we should classify them.