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Gegenstand der Arbeit sind verschiedene Aspekte der Morphosyntax und Tonologie im Buli, einer in Ghana (Upper East Region nahe der Grenze zu Burkina Faso) gesprochenen Gursprache des Niger-Kongo-Phylums, die bisher nur unzureichend beschrieben wurde. Die grammatische Beschreibung gibt einen umfangreichen Einblick in das sprachliche System des Buli und umfasst Kapitel zu den folgenden Themen: Phonologie, Nominalklassensystem, Pronominalsystem, Komplexe Nominalphrasen und nominale Syntagmen, Verbsystem. Dies geschieht in erster Linie anhand des in Wiaga gesprochenen Buli, wird aber durch die Bezugnahme auf andere Dialekte sowie auf verwandte Gursprachen ergänzt, beispielsweise hinsichtlich der Bewertung tonaler Divergenzen in Nominalklassensuffixen oder in Assoziativkonstruktionen. Die autosegmental angelegte Tonstudie verfolgt keine theoretischen Ziele, sondern hat sich unmittelbar aus dem Bedarf einer adäquaten Beschreibung der synchronen Sprache ergeben, in der Ton sowohl in lexikalischer als auch in grammatischer Hinsicht ganz zentrale Aufgaben übernimmt. Dabei wurden neben regelmäßigen Ton–Sandhi-Erscheinungen (Tieftonausbreitung) auch interessante Phänomene an den Schnittstellen der Phonologie zur Syntax und zur Semantik-Pragmatik vorgefunden, z.B. die tonale Kongruenz bestimmter Verbformen mit der Diskursrolle des Subjekts (+/- Diskurspartizipant, d.h. 1./2. Person vs. 3. Person) oder das Vorkommen eines Grenztons an äußerungsfinalen Morphemen, zu denen auch die Klassensuffixe indefiniter Substantive und enklitische Objektpronomen am Verb gehören. Im Rahmen der morphosyntaktischen Analysen wurde unter anderem ein aus typologischer Sicht spannender nominaler Kompositionstyp identifiziert, der sich neben seinen strukturellen Eigenschaften auch durch eine spezifische possessive Semantik auszeichnet und vermutlich an der Entwicklung von attributiven (qualifizierenden) Adjektiven und eines von zwei Zahlwörtern für ‘eins’ beteiligt war. / This work deals with different aspects of the morphosyntax and tonology in Buli, a Gur language of the Niger-Congo-Phylum, which is spoken in Ghana (Upper East Region near the border to Burkina Faso) and has so far been described insufficiently. The grammatical description provides an extensive insight into the linguistic system of Buli and contains chapters concerning the following topics: phonology, noun class system, pronominal system, complex noun phrases and nominal syntagmata, and verb system. It is primarily based on the Buli variant spoken in Wiaga and supplemented by reference to other dialects as well as to related Gur languages, for instance with regard to tonal divergencies in noun class suffixes and in associative constructions. Following an autosegmental model, the tonal study does not aim at theoretic enhancement, but results directly from the need of an adequate description of the synchronic language in which tone plays an important role in lexicon and grammar. Besides regular Tone-Sandhi (Low tone spreading), interesting phenomena at the phonology/syntax interface as well as at the phonology/semantics-pragmatics interface were observed – e.g. some verb forms displaying tonal agreement with the discourse role of the subject (+/- discourse participant, i.e. 1st / 2nd vs. 3rd person) or the appearance of a boundary tone on utterance-final morphemes, including the noun class suffixes of indefinite nouns and the enclitic object pronouns at the verb. In the course of the morphosyntactic analysis, a typologically remarkable nominal compound type was identified that is distinguished by structural features as well as by specific possessive semantics and can be assumed to be involved in the development of attributive (qualifying) adjectives and one of two numerals with the meaning ‘one’.

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Review

The field of statistical machine translation has made tremendous progress due to the rise of statistical methods, making it possible to obtain a translation system automatically from a bilingual collection of text. Some approaches do not even need any kind of linguistic annotation, and can infer translation rules from raw, unannotated data. However, most state-of-the art systems do linguistic structure little justice, and moreover many approaches that have been put forward use ad-hoc formalisms and algorithms. This inevitably leads to duplication of effort, and a separation between theoretical researchers and practitioners. In order to remedy the lack of motivation and rigor, the contributions of this dissertation are threefold: 1. After laying out the historical background and context, as well as the mathematical and linguistic foundations, a rigorous algebraic model of machine translation is put forward. We use regular tree grammars and bimorphisms as the backbone, introducing a modular architecture that allows different input and output formalisms. 2. The challenges of implementing this bimorphism-based model in a machine translation toolkit are then described, explaining in detail the algorithms used for the core components. 3. Finally, experiments where the toolkit is applied on real-world data and used for diagnostic purposes are described. We discuss how we use exact decoding to reason about search errors and model errors in a popular machine translation toolkit, and we compare output formalisms of different generative capacity.