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Un corpus per il sardo:
problemi e perspettive
45
Nicoletta Puddu
Creating a corpus for minority languages has provided an interesting tool to both study
and preserve these languages (see, for example, the DoBeS project at MPI Nijmegen).
Sardinian, as an endangered language, could certainly profit from a well-designed
corpus. The first digital collection of Sardinian texts was the Sardinian Text Database;
however, it cannot be considered as a corpus: it is not normalized and the user can
only search for exact matches. In this paper, I discuss the main problems in designing
and developing a corpus for Sardinian.
Kennedy (1998) individuates three main stages in compiling a corpus: (1) corpus
design; (2) text collection and capture; and, (3) text encoding or mark-up. As for
the first stage, I propose that a Sardinian corpus should be mixed, monolingual,
synchronic, balanced, and annotated, and I discuss the reasons for these choices
throughout the paper. Text collection seems to be a minor problem in the case of
Sardinian: both written and spoken texts are available and the number of speakers
is still significant enough to collect a sufficient amount of data. The major problems
arise at the third stage. Sardinian is fragmented into different varieties, and has not
a standard variety (not even a standard orthography). Recently, several proposals for
standardization have been made, but without success (see the discussion in Calaresu
2002; Puddu 2003). First of all, I suggest using a standard orthography that allows us
to group Sardinian dialects into macro varieties. Then, it will be possible to articulate
the corpus into sub-corpora that are representative of each variety. The creation of
an adequate morphological tag system will be fundamental. As a matter of fact, with
a homogeneous tag system, it will be possible to perform searches throughout the
corpus and study linguistic phenomena both in the single macro variety and in the
language as a whole.
Finally, I propose a morphological tag system and a first tagged pilot corpus of Sardinian
based on written samples according to EAGLES and XCES standards.
1. Perché creare corpora per le lingue minoritarie
La corpus linguistics o linguistica dei corpora (da qui LC) risulta di particolare
interesse, soprattutto per chi adotti un approccio funzionalista, in quanto “studia la