The Place of Linguistic Concepts within a General Ontology of Everyday Life

The ideas presented in this paper have arisen out of the work on a database system designed for the description and comparison of human languages in a theoretically well-founded and systematic way. The Cross-linguistic Reference Grammar (CRG) is a database application for unified descriptions of natural languages of any kind, including signed languages, that has been developed at LMU Munich. The core of the application is an XML-based client-server-DBMS called Systematics (Nickles 2001) that implements a class system of linguistic phenomena as a kind of Be-Have-tree representing taxonomic and meronomic subordination. The first version of this ontology of linguistic concepts is documented in Peterson (2002). Examples of linguistic expressions are uniformly coded in one of the interlinear representation formats provided by CRG for three ontological categories and modalities of linguistic signs: spoken, signed, and written. This aspect of CRG has been presented and discussed at the 2003 EMELD meeting (Zaefferer 2003, Dwyer 2003). One of CRG’s design principles, the support of competing descriptions of the same (raw) data, has been argued for at last year's EMELD workshop (Zaefferer 2004). This year's paper presents and comments on the current state of CRG's upper ontology, called GOEdL, and the embedded domain ontologies for mental entities (DOME) and linguistic phenomena (DOLPhen). It is essentially a condensed version of the core parts of Zaefferer (in preparation c).