Beygingarlýsing íslensks nútímamáls

Regluverk eða beygingar

Abstract

The topic of the article is the Database of Modern Icelandic Inflection (DMII), a collection of about 270 thousand paradigms with over 5.8 million inflectional forms. The DMII was created as a multipurpose resource, for use in language technology, lexicography, and as a reference tool for the general public online. In spite of a long tradition of morphological research, it was clear from the beginning that the necessary data for a productive rule system for Icelandic inflection was not available, in a manner that would produce all and only the appropriate inflectional forms. The result is therefore a database containing the full set of inflectional forms, with grammatical tags. The article contains a description of the creation of the DMII and it’s sources, initially almost completely lexicographic. The creation of the Tagged Icelandic Corpus (MÍM) has, for the first time, made an empirical study of Icelandic inflection possible, but comparison of the data from the DMII and MÍM shows that data scarcity makes it imperative to use both kinds of data for a thorough description of the inflectional system, due to the huge tag set in a very rich inflectional system.