This paper addresses challenges encountered in constructing lexical databases, specifically WordNets, for three ancient Indo-European languages: Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. The difficulties partly arise from adapting concepts and methodologies designed for modern languages to the construction of lexical resources for ancient ones. A further significant challenge arises from the goal of creating WordNets that not only adhere to a neo-structuralist relational view of meaning but also integrate Cognitive Semantics concepts, aiming for a more realistic representation of meaning. This integration is crucial for facilitating studies in diachronic semantics and lexicology, and representing meaning in such a nuanced manner becomes paramount when constructing language resources for theoretical research, rather than for applied tasks, as is the case with lexical resources for ancient languages. The paper delves into these challenges through a case study focused on the TEMPERATURE conceptual domain in the three languages. It outlines difficulties in distinguishing prototypical and non-prototypical senses, literal and non-literal ones, and, within non-literal meanings, between metaphorical and metonymic ones. Solutions adopted to address these challenges are presented, highlighting the necessity of achieving maximum granularity in meaning representation while maintaining a sustainable workflow for annotators.

The Sanskrit WordNet is a resource currently under development, whose core was induced from a Vedic text sample semantically annotated by means of an ontology mapped on the Princeton WordNet synsets. Building on a previous case study on Ancient Greek (Zanchi et al. 2021), we show how sentence frames can be extracted from morphosyntactically parsed corpora by linking an existing dependency treebank of Vedic Sanskrit to verbal synsets in the Sanskrit WordNet. Our case study focuses on two verbs of asking, yāc- and prach-, featuring a high degree of variability in sentence frames. Treebanks enhanced with WordNet-based semantic information revealed to be of crucial help in motivating sentence frame alternations.

This paper shows how WordNets can be employed in tandem with morpho-syntactically annotated corpora to study poetic formulas. Pairing the lexico-semantic information of the Sanskrit WordNet with morpho-syntactic annotation from the Vedic Treebank, we perform a pilot study of formulas including SPEECH verbs in the RigVeda, the most ancient text of the. Sanskrit literature.

The rhetoric strategy of hedging serves to attenuate speech acts and their semantic content, as in English ‘kind of’ or ‘somehow’. While hedging has recently met with increasing interest in linguistic research, most studies deal with modern languages, preferably English, and take a synchronic approach. This paper complements this research by tracing the diachronic syntactic flexibilization of the Vedic Sanskrit particle iva from a marker of comparison (‘like’) to a full-fledged adaptor. We discuss the outcomes of a diachronic Bayesian framework applied to iva constructions in a Universal Dependencies treebank, and supplement these results with a qualitative discussion of relevant text passages.

Indo-European preverbs are uninflected morphemes attaching to verbs and modifying their meaning. In Early Vedic and Homeric Greek, these morphemes held ambiguous morphosyntactic status raising issues for syntactic annotation. This paper focuses on the annotation of preverbs in so-called “absolute” position in two Universal Dependencies treebanks. This issue is related to the broader topic of how to annotate ellipsis in Universal Dependencies. After discussing some of the current annotations, we propose a new scheme that better accounts for the variety of absolute constructions.

This paper presents the work in progress toward the creation of a family of WordNets for Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin. Building on previous attempts in the field, we elaborate these efforts bridging together WordNet relational semantics with theories of meaning from Cognitive Linguistics. We discuss some of the innovations we have introduced to the WordNet architecture, to better capture the polysemy of words, as well as Indo-European language family-specific features. We conclude the paper framing our work within the larger picture of resources available for ancient languages and showing that WordNet-backed search tools have the potential to re-define the kinds of questions that can be asked of ancient language corpora.