Building a Knowledge Base of Morphosyntactic Terminology

This paper describes the beginning of an effort within the Linguist List’s Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data (E-MELD) project to develop markup recommendations for representing the morphosyntactic structures of the world’s endangered languages. Rather than proposing specific markup recommendations as in the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), we propose to construct an environment for comparing data sets using possibly different markup schemes. The central feature of our proposed environment is an ontology of morphosyntactic terms with multiple inheritance and a variety of relations holding among the terms. We are developing our ontology using the Protégé editor, and are extending an existing upper-level ontology known as