The projection of meanings in multilingual corpora and examples of its application in corpus research on the Polish language

Abstract

The Institute of Slavic Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, as part of the CLARIN-PL consortium, is engaged in the creation of multilingual corpora of Slavic and Baltic languages. Some of the planned corpora have already been made available in the dSpace CLARIN-PL repository and in the KonText online browser. One of these corpora is the Polish–Lithuanian corpus, which in this article serves to illustrate the possibilities of applying CLARIN-PL corpora in research into the Polish language. The Lithuanian language has an archaic structure in comparison with Polish. Lexemes are characterised by a clearer structure. There are regular connections between grammatical form and meaning, with a small number of exceptions. These features of Lithuanian ensure that the projection of strongly formalised meanings onto Polish-language resources is a straightforward operation, leading to a significant narrowing of Polish-language resources, which can be analysed in the context of unequivocal interpretations based on Lithuanian meanings.