Implementation of a part-of-speech ontology : morphemic units of Bantu languages

Abstract

In a previous article (Faaß et al, 2012), a first attempt was made at documenting and encoding morphemic units of two South African Bantu languages, i.e. Northern Sotho and Zulu, with the aim of describing and storing the morphemic units of these two languages in a single relational database, structured as a hierarchical ontology. As a follow-up, the current article describes the implementation of our part-of-speech ontology. We give a detailed description of the morphemes and categories contained in the database, highlighting the need and reasons for a flexible ontology which will provide for both language specific and general linguistic information. By giving a detailed account of the methodology for the population of the database, we provide linguists from other Bantu languages with a road map for extending the database to also include their languages of specialization.