Extending the core functionalities of Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0

The paper describes new layers of linguistic annotation and explorative tools that were added to the project ‘Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0’. These additions make it possible to execute complex research queries in the digital version of Pāṇini’s grammar with minimal knowledge both of Sanskrit and database query languages. In the project ‘Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0’, we have developed a digital edition of Pāṇini’s grammar of Sanskrit. Pāṇini introduced linguistic concepts, such as thematic roles, abstract derivation levels, rewrite rules, and pre-concepts of phonemes and morphemes, all of which are used intensively in contemporary Linguistics. In addition, the Aṣṭādhyāyī compresses the grammar rule system into text form by making use of inheritance structures, a sophisticated meta-language, and a marker system (Kiparsky 2009). Although these concepts and methods continue to be of highest scientific interest, the Aṣṭādhyāyī is rarely studied in modern formal Linguistics because readers who are not thoroughly acquainted with the Sanskrit grammatical tradition don’t understand the terse Sanskrit text. The research environment of ‘Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0’ now opens up the content, the formal structure, and the encoding mechanisms of the Aṣṭādhyāyī to a wider scientific audience. We have built a webbased database edition with annotations on several linguistic levels. While Petersen & Soubusta (2013) and Petersen & Hellwig (forthcoming) have dealt with the core database structure and the linguistic analysis, this paper describes the upper layers of annotation and introduces a customizable query mechanism for our database. In Section 2, we will describe the annotation of anuvṛtti inheritance and of word-semantic concepts. Section 3 deals with the implementation of the search engine. Section 4 illustrates what kind of research problems can be tackled with the research environment Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0.