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LingDepend.xsl

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STANLEY Security edited this page Jul 12, 2015 · 5 revisions

Uses a TEI syntactic dictionary to inflect specified words, e.g. determiners, adjectives, and relative pronouns, in an XML document.

Parameters

[Verbose]

  • Verbose (Boolean) — Whether full error messages should be displayed.

Input

An XML document. You must mark up the source document with linguistic attributes identifying the dependent words in the document and describing the syntactic and / or phonetic environment for each dependent word.

Output

An XML document, identical to the input except that dependent words are inflected by phonology, case, gender and number.

Description

The stylesheet recurses through the document and copies each element. If any element has the attribute ling:type='depend', the stylesheet changes the text nodes in this element to match the phonological and syntactic environment.

This is useful for transclusion. If you transclude a term into a document, you can inflect dependent words such as determiners, adjectives, and relative pronouns which surround the transcluded term.

To determine the phonetic environment for a dependent word, the stylesheet looks for the nearest following sibling element which has a ling:pron attribute, or which has a child element with a ling:pron attribute.

To determine the syntactic environment for a dependent word, the stylesheet looks for the nearest element in the document tree with a ling:num, ling:case, ling:gen or ling:class attribute. In elements containing a single head word, these attributes can be marked on the head word. (The head word must be wrapped in a suitable element such as <phrase> in DocBook.) In elements containing multiple head words, attributes which are intrinsic to the head word (i.e. ling:num and ling:gen) may be marked on the head word, and attributes which describe the syntactic role of the word in the sentence (i.e. ling:case and ling:class) may be marked on another wrapper element that surrounds a single head word and all its dependent words.

The linguistic attributes are as follows:

  • ling:pron — Indicates the pronunciation or phonetic environment that the head word governs. This is not the full pronunciation of the word. For most languages that require this feature, ling:pron="V" indicates that the word is pronounced with an initial vowel; ling:pron="C" that the word is pronounced with an initial consonant. The value of the attribute can be tailored to the language. So for Italian, ling:pron="S" indicates that the word is pronounced with an initial “s” cluster, “gn”, “ps”, “x” or “z”. For Spanish, ling:pron="A" indicates that the word has an initial stressed “a”.

  • ling:num — Indicates grammatical number. Possible values are sg singular, pl plural, etc.

  • ling:case — Indicates grammatical case. Possible values are nom nominative, gen genitive, dat dative, acc accusative, etc.

  • ling:gen — Indicates grammatical gender. Possible values are c common, m masculine, f feminine, n neutral, etc.

  • ling:class — Indicates the inflection class. Possible values are def definite, ind indefinite, strong, weak, mixed, etc.

The namespace URI for the linguistic attributes is http://stanleysecurity.github.io/PACBook/ns/linguistics.

Having found the head word and determined the syntactic and phonetic environment, the stylesheet looks for the correct syntactic dictionary for the current language, as specified by the nearest ancestor xml:lang attribute. The syntactic dictionaries are XML dictionaries using a schema which complies with the dictionary module of the Text Encoding Initiative TEI. The dictionaries are primarily designed to handle words in closed semantic categories, e.g. definite and indefinite articles, demonstrative adjectives. The dictionaries also contains common contractions, such as German im, vom, beim, or French des, aux. Words in open semantic categories pose more of a problem. They does not yet contain very many adjectives.

The syntactic dictionaries for the supported languages are stored in the tei subdirectory.

The stylesheet uses the text content of the dependent word to look up the correct word in the dictionary. It then uses the syntactic and phonetic environment to select the correct inflected form of the word, and copies this into the document.

If the Verbose parameter is set to true, i.e. anything other than 0 or the empty string, detailed messages are displayed as each dependent word is inflected. This can help to work out what’s gone wrong when a word is not inflected properly.

Roadmap

In DocBook files, this stylesheet matches <wordasword> elements as well as elements with the ling:type='depend' attribute. This may be removed in a future release.

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