Establishing a Language by Annotating a Corpus

Marine Courtin (1) , Bernard Caron (2) , Kim Gerdes (3) , Sylvain Kahane (4)

1 UPN - Université Paris Nanterre
2 IFRA-Nigeria - Institut Français de Recherche en Afrique - Nigeria
3 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
4 MoDyCo - Modèles, Dynamiques, Corpus

In this paper, we show that building a treebank can be used as a way to establish a language. Annotated corpus can be used as tools when arguing that some linguistic data belongs to a separate language (rather than a dialect or variety of another established language). We provide here a case study on a treebank of Naija, a Post-creole spoken in Nigeria which presents us with significant differences from treebanks of English in terms of existing constructions and frequency of several syntactic units.

Mots clés: Naija; Nigerian Pidgin; Treebank; Quantitative Linguistics; Typology

Domaines: Linguistique

Marine Courtin, Bernard Caron, Kim Gerdes, Sylvain Kahane. Establishing a Language by Annotating a Corpus: The Case of Naija, a Post-creole Spoken in Nigeria. annDH 2018 Annotation in Digital Humanities, Aug 2018, Sofia, Bulgaria. pp.7-11. ⟨halshs-01958330⟩