Issues of adding grammatical structure to sentences of in medieval texts
What is it about?
The grammatical structure of a sentence can only be determined if its meaning is clear. In medieval texts, it is often difficult to select the "correct" structure out of several possiblities. In this article, I use the example of focus cleft sentences ("it is...that...") in Old French texts to exemplify the problem. They look like 'normal' relative clauses, and a good comprehension of the text is required in order to identify them. On a theoretical level, I discuss such ambiguous structures could be dealt with. This discussion is also related to the choice of the grammatical model that is preferred for the annotation.
Why is it important?
The linguistic discussion is connected to the choice of the grammatical model that is preferred for the annotation. This choice is highly relevant for the usability of an annotated text corpus in linguistic research and for software that learns syntactic structures and can be used in order to annotate new texts.