BLŚP – Lexical Base of Medieval Polish (until 1500): Inflection

Project factsheet

Partners

• Old Polish Language Laboratory, Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences (Kraków) – project host
• Linguistic Engineering Group, Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences – Witold Kieraś, Dorota Komosińska, Michał Rudolf
• Institute of Information Studies, Jagiellonian University

Project description

The aim of the project was to work out the inflectional characteristics of Polish vocabulary recorded in texts written before 1500. The project team analysed and interpreted the currently known Old Polish language monuments and identified and described the grammatical forms of the words attested in them. The collected and systematised information on the vocabulary of medieval Polish texts is intended to become a new material basis for the description of Old Polish inflection in a future historical grammar of Polish.

The dictionary-making tradition of Old Polish – the Słownik staropolski (Old Polish Dictionary, 1953–2002) with its supplements – treated inflection only selectively: forms were catalogued only for entries attested in at least four different forms, so about 80% of the entries have no catalogue of forms. The project therefore determined the forms of all words in the material of the dictionary and of the card-index annex collected by the Old Polish Language Laboratory, verified existing form catalogues against the latest text editions, and compared them with attestations from newly available sources.

The electronic Lexical Base of Medieval Polish (until 1500) is the first freely available Polish online resource of this kind, combining two linked components:

• the Dictionary, containing the grammatical interpretation of the vocabulary (part of speech, the catalogue of inflected forms attested in the sources, example quotations illustrating the use of each form), linked to the meaning explanations of the Słownik staropolski and its supplements; the Dictionary covers the lexical material of all texts in the dictionary’s canon of sources;
• the Corpus, containing selected continuous texts and translation glossaries in parallel transliteration and transcription, with metadata and morphosyntactic annotation.

Building the Corpus required a production version of a morphological analyser of medieval Polish containing the data of the lexical base (to support manual inflectional annotation), software for aligning the annotated transcriptions with the transliterated texts, and software enabling the annotation of the Old Polish corpus texts in the Anotatornia annotation tool.

Results

• The online lexical base: Dictionary and Corpus, which continue to be extended after the end of the project.
• Ewa Deptuchowa (ed.). 2024. Z badań nad staropolską fleksją [Studies in Old Polish inflection]. Prace Instytutu Języka Polskiego PAN 170. Kraków: Instytut Języka Polskiego PAN.

See also the related projects KORBA (corpus of 17th and 18th century Polish) and Chronofleks.