The "Thesaurus Occitan": a multimedia database dedicated to Occitan dialects. Presentation of its morphosyntax module

Abstract

The Module MorphoSyntaxique (abbreviated MMS) is a computer tool especially designed for syntactic and morpho-syntactic analysis of Occitan dialects. It is part of the Thesaurus Occitan multimedia database (of which a general presentation can be found in these proceedings in another article by Guylaine Brun-Trigaud).
   Following the THESOC's general guidelines (i.e. localised and oral data only), this module contains both oral texts (including ethnotexts) and single sentences, such as answers to morphosyntactic questionnaires.
   The "oral data" criteria can be somewhat flexed: even if this module was originally conceived for oral data processing, its part-of-speech tagger and syntactic parser are still able to process written texts so far as they are written in a familiar or popular style, close to oral register. The locations where all these texts and sentences have been harvested are stored in the database, thus enabling on the long term a comparison between different dialects on a morphosyntactical or syntactical basis, thus opening new perspectives for dialectology.