What is a corpus?

A language corpus is a collection of texts in that language which has been enriched with additional linguistic information, called annotation, and, preferably, equipped with a search engine. Here you will find a short list of frequently asked questions about the Meadow Mari corpora.

— Who needs corpora?

First of all, corpora are used by linguists. The search engine and annotation of corpora are designed in such a way that you can make linguistic queries such as “find all nouns in the genitive case” or “find all forms of the word пырыс followed by a verb”. Apart from linguists, corpus can be a useful tool for language teachers, language learners, and even the native speakers.

— Can I use the corpus as a library?

No, these corpora are not designed for that. When you work with a corpus, you make a query, i.e. search for a particular word, phrase or construction, and get back all sentences that contain what you searched for. By default, the sentences are showed in random order. You can expand the context of each of the sentences you get, i.e. look at their neighboring sentences. However, you may do so only a limited number of times for each sentence. Therefore, it is impossible to read an entire text in the corpus. This is done for copyright protection.

— Can I use the corpus as a dictionary?

Each Mari word in the corpus has Russian translation (no English translations are available at the moment). However, they are only provided as auxiliary information for users who do not speak Mari. The translations in the corpus are kept short and simple by design, they do not list all senses and do not provide usage examples like real dictionaries. If you want to know how to translate a word, the right way to do so is consulting a dictionary, e.g. here.

— What is morphological annotation and how do you get it?

The corpora located here are lemmatized and morphologically annotated. Lemmatization means that each word in the texts is annotated with its lemma, i.e. dictionary/citation form. Morphological annotation means that each word is annotated for its grammatical features, such as part of speech, number, case, tense, etc. Since the corpora in question are too large for manual annotation to be feasible, they were annotated automatically with a program called morphological analyzer. The analyzer uses a manually compiled grammatical dictionary and a formalized description of Meadow Mari inflection. The analyzer together with the necessary materials is freely available in my bitbucket repository. Automatic annotation unfortunately means that, first, out-of-vocabulary words are not annotated, and, second, that some words have several ambiguous analyses. Russian sentences in the social media corpus were annotated with the mystem analyzer.

Mari language

Meadow (or Eastern) Mari is one of several Mari languages, which form a group in the Uralic family. The number of Meadow Mari speakers is estimated at 356,000. Mari languages use Cyrillic orthography based on the Russian alphabet, with several additional letters. There is limited vowel harmony in Mari. Almost all morphological markers are suffixes that mostly attach to the stem agglutinatively. Nominal grammatical categories are number, case, and possessiveness. The direct object can be marked either in the nominative or in the accusative (DOM). The default word order in the sentence is SOV (subject – object – verb).

Tagset

The grammatical features of the words in the corpora are marked with short tags. Here is the full list of tags used in Meadow Mari corpora. Both corpora have identical set of tags.

• A — adjective
• ADV — adverb
• CONJ — conjunction
• IMIT — ideophone
• INTRJ — interjection
• N — noun
• NUM — numeral
• PARENTH — parenthetic word
• PART — particle
• PN — proper noun (subtype of nouns)
• POST — postposition
• PREDIC — predicative
• PRO — pronoun
• V — verb
• 1 — 1st person
• 1pl — 1pl possessive suffix
• 1sg — 1sg possessive suffix
• 2 — 2nd person
• 2pl — 2pl possessive suffix
• 2sg — 2sg possessive suffix
• 3 — 3rd person
• 3pl — 3pl possessive suffix
• 3sg — 3sg possessive suffix
• abbr — abbreviation
• acc — accusative case
• add — additive particle
• anim — animate noun
• attr — any attributive
• attr_an — general attributive in -an
• attr_le — attributive in -le
• attr_loc — locative attributive in -se
• attr_neg — negative attributive in -di̮me
• body — body part
• case_comp — case compounding
• caus — causative (-i̮kt-)
• com — comitative
• comp — comparative (-rak)
• cvb — any converb
• cvb.consec — consecutive converb
• cvb.gen — general converb
• cvb.neg — negative converb
• cvb.prec — precedence converb
• cvb.sim — converb of simultaneity
• dat — dative case
• dem — demonstrative pronoun
• emph — emphatic particle
• famn — family name
• gen — genitive case
• hort — hortative particle
• hum — human
• ill — illative case
• imp — imperative
• indef — indefinite pronoun
• inf — infinitive
• lat — lative
• loc — locative/inessive
• missp — typo
• neg — negative form
• nmlz — nominalization
• nom — nominative case
• nonposs — non-possessive form
• npst — non-past tense
• opt — optative/desiderative mood
• ord — ordinal number
• pass — passive
• patrn — patronymic
• pers — peronal pronoun
• persn — personal (given) name
• pl — plural
• pl.assoc — associative plural
• plen — full form of adjectives/numerals
• pst — first past tense
• pst2 — second past tense
• ptcp — any participle
• ptcp.act — active participle
• ptcp.neg — negative participle
• ptcp.pass — passive participle
• ptcp.prosp — prospective participle
• refl — reflective pronoun
• rus — Russian borrowing (or borrowing through Russian)
• rus_afx — Russian affix with native stem
• sg — singular
• short — short form of adjectives/numerals
• supernat — noun that denotes a supernatural beingThis category is a byproduct of animacy/humanness annotation. Since it is not clear whether these cases should be classified as human, we put them in a separate box, so that the user can decide that for themselves.
• sim — similitive case (in -la)
• topn — toponym (geographical name)
• transport — transport

The tagset for the Russian-language part (Russian sentences in the social media corpus) can be found in the Russian National Corpus.

Authors

The corpora and morphological analyzer are developed and maintained by Timofey Arkhangelskiy. The first versions of the corpora were released in 2019 as part of his postdoctoral project supported by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The background picture was kindly provided by Aigul Zakirova. The corpora are hosted by the School of linguistics at HSE, Moscow.