Databases for comparative syntactic research

TL;DR

This paper surveys 21 linguistic databases for syntactic variation, categorizing them by data units and design principles, and discusses their features, advantages, limitations, and future needs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive classification and analysis of existing syntactic databases, highlighting design principles and guiding future database development.

Findings

Databases are categorized by data units and design principles.

Three primary design principles identified: monocategorization, multicategorization, structural decomposition.

All surveyed databases can be effectively classified along these dimensions.

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a steep increase in linguistic databases capturing syntactic variation. We survey and describe 21 publicly available morpho-syntactic databases, focusing on such properties as data structure, user interface, documentation, formats, and overall user friendliness. We demonstrate that all the surveyed databases can be fruitfully categorized along two dimensions: units of description and the design principle. Units of description refer to the type of the data the database represents (languages, constructions, or expressions). The design principles capture the internal logic of the database. We identify three primary design principles, which vary in their descriptive power, granularity, and complexity: monocategorization, multicategorization, and structural decomposition. We describe how these design principles are implemented in concrete databases and discuss their advantages and limitations. Finally, we outline essential desiderata for future modern databases in linguistics.