Documenting variation across Europe and the Mediterranean: the Pavia Typological Database
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2006)
Abstract
This paper describes the Pavia Typological Database (PTD), a follow-up to the MED-TYP database (Sansò 2004). The PTD is an ever-growing repository of primary linguistic data (words, clauses, sentences) documenting a number of morphosyntactic phenomena in the languages of Europe (and including in some cases languages from the Mediterranean area). Its prospective users are typologists wanting to access primary, typologically uninterpreted (but glossed) data, but also anyone interested in linguistic variation on a continental scale. The paper discusses the background and motivation for the creation of the PTD, its present coverage, the techniques used to annotate the primary data, and the general architecture of the database.