infixation

ELAN
1

Hello!

We are a group of linguists from Purdue University (Indiana, USA) and we are working on Sumu-Mayangna, a language belonging to the Central-American Misumalpan group.
One of the features of this language is that it has infixation: whenever a noun or a verb needs to be inflected, the affix falls after the prosodic foot (e.g. walabis ‘children’, walaNIbis ‘children (infl.)’).
While working with ELAN we have had problems to annotate such terms. Using the stereotypes currently available (Time Subdivision, Symbolic Subdivision, Included In, and Symbolic Association), what would be the best way to annotate the information without splitting the stems while indicating that the morphemes are infixes?

Thank you very much in advance for your help!

Ricard Vinas

2

In case of the ‘walanibis’ example, something like this:

word: walanibis
morph: wala ni bis
pos: ? infix ?

Where ‘word’ probably is a Symbolic Subdivision of a ‘text’ or ‘utterance’ tier, ‘morph’ a Symbolic Subdivision of the ‘word’ tier and ‘pos’ a Symbolic Association to ‘morph’.

There is no way in ELAN to associate information with just a part of an annotation without doing the subdivision first.

Han

-MPI-