Constructional Potentiality: Priscianic grammar as a disambiguation technique in the automatic recognition of Latin syntax

technique in the automatic recognition of Latin syntax In most languages word order plays the major role in determining which words form a single phrase or constitute. A tree s£ructure can be abstracted automatically from a sentence by linear determination of the major syntactic constitutes. However, in certain highly-inflected languages, of which Latin is perhaps the most extreme example, constitutes may be broken up in the word order of the sentence. Inflectional endings form the signals for placing each constituent in its constitute. Theoretically the higher degree of syntactic explicitness provided by inflectional morphemes should make these languages easier to analyse.mechanlcally. Yet it proves that there is a high degree of ambiguity in the morphemes or morphophonemie alternations used to mark inflection and that native speakers rely heavily on their ability to identify both~e semantic meaning and the inflectional habits of a given word. Recognizing this state of affairs those institutes involved with automatic parsing of Latin, the Laboratoire pour llAnalyse Statistique des Langues Anclennes, Liege, and the Centro Automazlone AnalisiLinguistica, formerly in Gallarate but now in Pisa, have constructed rather large parsing dictionaries which identify the word-class and inflectional habits of lexlcal lenmmta. These parsers do not, to my knowledge, produce tree structures of analysed sentences or give any deep-structure representatiflQ. Anlaternatlve approach to the automatic syntactic analyses of Latin is offered by the constructional syntax o~ Latin developed by ?riscian from Greek grammatical theory. Each word is a mc.,mber of at least one 2-member construction. There are two types of constructlonal relationship