Dr. Lukas Denk publishes paper to Workshop on American Indigenous Languages (WAIL)

Lukas Denk recently published a proceeding paper to WAIL - Workshop on American Indigenous Languages following a presentation given at University of California — Santa Barbara in May.

 

In this paper, Denk reviews previous approaches to the glossing of Diné Bizaad (Navajo), noting the inconsistencies that stem from impracticalities of the Navajo verbal template, historical source material, and a lack of analyzed corpora. To address these issues, Denk introduces the Navajo Corpus of Historical Narratives and presents the innovative glossing strategy that was implemented for this corpus. 

 

This strategy prioritizes surface over underlying structure, reduces the number of morph categories, and provides maximal information for form and meaning, making it especially beneficial for annotators and those unfamiliar with Dene conventions. The Navajo Corpus of Historical Narratives is yet to be made public. It contains over 10.000 morphologically annotated Navajo words from historical narratives published in the 1950's by Robert W. Young and William Morgan. 

 

Denk is working together with Assistant Professor Melvatha Chee from University of New Mexico on a book submission to the Open Text Collections by Language Science Press.