Jeeagh er bun Gaelic/Using Corpas na Gàidhlig

Ass Celtic Languages.

← Gaelic/Using Corpas na Gàidhlig

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[https://dasg.ac.uk/corpus/ ''Corpas na Gàidhlig''] (the ''DASG corpus'') is a publicly available corpus of Scottish Gaelic literary texts (from 1200 to 21st century, though most texts are modern, ie. 19th century and later) – books, newspapers, poems, advertisements. It will possibly be expanded with non-literary texts later too (eg. transcriptions of recorded folk tales). The interface of the corpus uses the open source [https://cwb.sourceforge.io/ ''Corpus Workbench''] (''CWB'') software and a custom modification of the [https://cwb.sourceforge.io/cqpweb.php ''CQPweb''] web interface. The texts included in the corpus are annotated with information about the time priod they’re from, the literary type of the work, its author, etc. Unfortunately, the words are not annotated with part-of-speech tags and there’s no meta-information about structure of the sentences which limits somehow queries that are possible. Still, the interface allows users to use wildcards in the queries, use the CQP query syntax to make complex queries. This article is not meant to be a comprehensive documentation of the corpus’s interface, but its aim is to provide some tips how to use it effectively. == Simple query == When you go to [https://dasg.ac.uk/corpus/ the Corpus home page] you’ll see a ⟨Standard Query⟩ form with a text area for inputing ''simple query''. This is the simplest way to search texts in the corpus. If you insert a word or a sentence, it’ll try to find occurences of the string of words as provided, in a case-insensitive manner by default. That means that if you type <code>tha</code>, you’ll get results with both sentence-initial ''Tha'' ‘is’ and ''tha'' in the middle, but you won’t find other words beginning with ''tha''. If you type <code>cha robh leughadh aige</code> you’ll find a sentence beginning with ''Cha robh leughadh aige'' ‘He could not read’. All punctuation marks are treated as their own tokens, so if you input any commas, dots, apostrophes, etc. they’ll get separated from the words and they also have to match the texts. Thus the queries <code>b ' fheàrr leam</code> and <code>b fheàrr leam</code> will return different result sets. You don’t need to type a space between a word and the apostrophe yourself – it will be added automatically by CQPweb (so if you type <code>b' fheàrr leam</code> the query will automatically change to <code>b ' fheàrr leam</code>). But simple queries are much more powerful. They allow you to use some ''wildcards'' and also group words using parentheses. You can use those special characters to define words in your queries: * <code>?</code> to substitute ''any single character'', that is <code>leu?hadh</code> will find all occurences of two different spelling variants of the verbal noun ‘reading’: ''leughadh'' and ''leubhadh''; * <code>*</code> to substitute ''any string of characters'' (ie. zero or more of anything), so you can for example type <code>leugh*</code> to find all the forms of the verb ''leugh'' ‘read’ (''leugh, leughadh, leughaidh, leughainn'', etc. – anything starting with ''leugh'', including ''leugh'' itself), and <code>*</code> in itself means ‘any or no token’ (<code>tha * agam</code> will find instances of ''tha fhios agam'' ‘I know’, and ''tha dòchas agam'' ‘I hope’, and ''tha e agam'' ‘I have it’, etc. and it will find ''tha agam'' without any noun in between); * <code>+</code> to substitute ''at least one character'' (ie. one or more of anything), for example <code>leugh+</code> will find ''leughaidh'' ‘reads, will read’ and ''leughadh'' ‘reading, would read’, but it won’t find ''leugh'' itself; * brackets <code>[x,y]</code> to list alternative strings of characters separated with commas, eg. <code>[t,b]ha</code> finds two forms of the verb ''bi' ‘to be’: present independent ''tha'' and past independent ''bha''; <code>[leugh,sguab]adh</code> will find both ''leughadh'' ‘reading’ and ''sguabadh'' ‘sweeping’. To search for one of those characters verbatim in a text, you have to escape it with a backslash. So to find questions of the form ''A bheil cat agad?'' ‘Do you have a cat?’, ended in a question mark, with any single noun and in any grammatical tense, you could write: :<pre>A[m,n,] [bheil,robh,bi,biodh] + agad \?</pre> Note the <code>\?</code> matching exactly question marks in texts. This will find phrases like ''Am bheil airgiod agad?'' ‘Do you have money?’, ''… an robh fhios agad?'' ‘… did you know?’, ''A bheil salainn agad?'' ‘Do you have salt?’, etc. It won’t find any instances starting with ''A’'' though – and because the apostrophe is treated as a separate token, adding it to the list of the characters after ''A'' (like eg. <code>A[m,n,',]</code>) won’t help. But you can use the parentheses <code>(</code> and <code>)</code> to group tokens and the syntax provides several additional tools to operate on those groups: * <code>|</code> (the pipe character) inside a group allows you to list alternative strings of tokens, eg. <code>(cat mòr | cù beag)</code> will find either ''cat mòr'' or ''cù beag'', but not ''cat beag'' or ''cù mòr'', etc.; * and after a group: :* <code>?</code> to make the group optional, eg. <code>ri (a)? chèile</code> will find both spellings for ‘to/with each other’: ''ri chèile'' and ''ri a chèile''; :* <code>*</code> to allow the group to be repeated any number of times, including zero; :* <code>+</code> to require the group to match at least once but allow it to repeat; :* <code>{min, max}</code> to require the group exactly between <code>min</code> and <code>max</code> times (where <code>min</code> and <code>max</code> must be numbers), eg. <code>(b*){3,5}</code> will match any string of at least 3 and at most 5 words starting with the letter ''b''. So you can do: :<pre>(A ' | A[m,n,]) [bheil,robh,bi,biodh] + agad \?</pre> or :<pre>A[m,n,] (')? [bheil,robh,bi,biodh] + agad \?</pre> and they both will find ''A’ bheil ceaird agad?'' written in the corpus as ''A ' bheil ceaird agad ?'' too. That’s because the first query allows anything that starts with either <code>A '</code> or any of <code>Am</code>, <code>An</code>, or <code>A</code>, and the second query allows anything starting with <code>A[m,n,]</code> optionally followed by <code>'</code> – they both allow <code>A '</code> at the beginning. === Restricted query === The simple query syntax can be used also in ''restricted queries'' (switch to the ⟨Restricted Query⟩ tab above the query form). They allow you to restrict the set of texts to be search. This way you can for example limit the time period of the texts you’re interested in. Or the geographical location of the text (for example to see if a given expression exists in a specific dialect), etc. For example if you’re interested in the change of the use of demonstratives like ''sin'' ‘that’ and ''seo, so'' ‘this’ with the compound preposition ''airson'' ‘for’ (which also can be spelt ''air son'') through time – specifically how the ratio of forms like ''air a shon sin'' to forms like ''airson sin'' changed throughout centuries, you could write queries like these: :<pre>air a shon (sin | s[e,]o | sud)</pre> :<pre>(airson | air son) (sin | s[e,]o | sud)</pre> The first one will catch all instances with the possessive, ''air a shon sin'' ‘for that’, ''air a shon so'', ''air a shon seo'' ‘for this’, etc. The second one will catch the ones without the possessive: ''airson sin'', ''air son so'', ''airson seo'', ''airson sud'', etc. And now you run those queries in the ⟨Restricted Query⟩ tab first choosing the time period using the ⟨Date of Language⟩ button. The time periods are divided into three parts per century, eg. Early 19th c., Mid 19th c., Late 19th c., etc. You can choose multiple time periods (eg. to find all instances in a given century) or do a more fine-grained search. Running the above queries over all periods from the Early 18th c. one by one gives these results: * Early 18th c. :* possessive (''air a shon sin'', etc.): 1 match in 1 text, :* no possessive (''airson sin'', etc.): 0 matches, * Mid 18th c. :* possessive: 17 matches in 1 text, :* no possessive: 1 match in 1 text, * Late 18th c. :* possessive: 29 matches in 8 texts, :* no possessive: 38 matches in 9 texts, * Early 19th c. :* possessive: 33 matches in 7 texts, :* no possessive: 24 matches in 8 texts, * Mid 19th c. :* possessive: 42 matches in 16 texts, :* no possessive: 62 matches in 15 texts, * Late 19th c. :* possessive: 289 matches in 26 texts, :* no possessive: 212 matches in 28 texts, * Early 20th c. :* possessive: 81 matches in 31 texts, :* no possessive: 108 matches in 29 texts, * Mid 20th c. :* possessive: 33 matches in 13 texts, :* no possessive: 72 matches in 22 texts, * Late 20th c. :* possessive: :* no possessive: * Early 21st c. :* possessive: :* no possessive: [TODO] [[Category:Text corpora]] [[Category:Tool guides]] [[Category:Gaelic]]

Gow er ash gys Gaelic/Using Corpas na Gàidhlig.