Study of Linguistic Semantics by Means of Formalisation of Queries to Corpus Data

Abstract

The advantages of using linguistic corpus data in education and research are obvious and well covered in specialized literature. This tool considerably simplifies acquisition of linguistic data and their processing. Two main corpora have been built for the Tatar language by now, each in open access: the Corpus of Written Tatar compiled in Kazan Federal University, (http://search.corpus.tatar/en) and the Tatar National Corpus (http://corpus.antat.ru/?lang=en) developed by researchers of the Institute of Applied Semiotics, Tatarstan Academy of Sciences, Russia. These corpora are being hourly replenished; the update of textual collections is mainly carried out through the use of media texts, which provides constant flow of fresh linguistic material. The Tatar language has complicated syntax and intricate agglutinative morphology, and corpus data is a reliable tool for enriching and deepening linguistic descriptions of Tatar. This paper is the first attempt to describe examples of complex queries to the search system of “Tugam Tel” Tatar National Corpus, these queries are aimed at studying complicated phenomena of Tatar linguistic semantics. The authors proceed from the viewpoint that correctly formulated queries to the Corpus provide data allowing to draw conclusions about theoretically relevant laws of the language system. The inventory of grammatical categories of the Tatar language and affixes that express these categories have been considered as a key to language semantics. The authors, by means of particular examples, have shown that search functionality of the Tatar National Corpus enables to extract data meeting certain semantic criteria, from semantically unstructured corpus data. Construction of special samples of corpus data requires an ability to formulate complex queries in a special language, designed for searching data in the corpus.

Keywords

• corpus
• tatar language
• search query
• grammar
• semantics