Department of Linguistics

This paper sheds light on the internal structure and semantic properties of the <N1, N2> phrasal compounds in Modern Greek. The crucial question is whether phrasal compounds form transparent syntactic structures or show symptoms of lexicalization. In order to check the empirical evidence, we conducted a speech production experiment and an experiment on the intuition of acceptability. Assuming that the second noun has predicative function, we address the question whether this noun in phrasal compounds shares the same functional properties with predicate nominals. In particular, we examine the possibility and the range of functions of pluralization of the predicative noun (N2). The crucial findings are that the availability of plural formation depends on lexical characteristics of the predicative noun and that the transparency in the functions of pluralization decreases in phrasal compounds. Based on this evidence, we claim that Modern Greek phrasal compounds undergo lexicalization with regard to the transparency of their semantic representations.

We report on preliminary methodological issues related to the development of a Greek lexical resource based on the theory of frame semantics and supported by corpus evidence. Although our approach is primarily lexicographic, we also address a treebank annotation goal. We are aiming to produce an initial network of Greek words and frame-semantic descriptions that will reliably contribute to the multilingual dimension of the
frame semantics framework.

This study deals with research made on cross-linguistic colour categorization and naming based on the hypothesis raised in Berlin and Kay (1969) about an almost universal pattern in the selection of colours that receive abstract names in each language. In order to reveal the overall palette of basic colour terms within the Greek language as well as the level of agreement among speakers, we have conducted two experiments. The mechanism of compound formation using basic colours is further tested against the principle of the Right-hand Head Rule as proposed in Williams (1981). The results of our empirical research show, on the one hand, that Greek speakers&#39; intuition agrees with the universality claim for the basic colour terms, but on the other hand compounding involving two colour constituents rejects the RHR by shifting the head to the left.

Web 2.0 has become a very useful information resource nowadays, as
people are strongly inclined to express online their opinion in social media, blogs and review sites. Sentiment analysis aims at classifying documents as positive or negative according to their overall expressed sentiment. In this paper, we create a sentiment classifier applying Support Vector Machines on hotel reviews written in Modern Greek. Using a unigram language model, we compare two different
methodologies and the emerging results look very promising.

In this paper, the process of designing an annotated Greek Corpus of Aphasic Discourse (GREECAD) is presented. Given that resources
of this kind are quite limited, a major aim of the GREECAD was to provide a set of specifications which could serve as a methodological
basis for the development of other relevant corpora, and, therefore, to contribute to the future research in this area. The GREECAD was
developed with the following requirements: a) to include a rather homogeneous sample of Greek as spoken by individuals with aphasia;
b) to document speech samples with rich metadata, which include demographic information, as well as detailed information on the
patients’ medical record and neuropsychological evaluation; c) to provide annotated speech samples, which encode information at the
micro-linguistic (words, POS, grammatical errors, clause types, etc.) and discourse level (narrative structure elements, main events,
evaluation devices, etc.). In terms of the design of the GREECAD, the basic requirements regarding data collection, metadata,
transcription, and annotation procedures were set. The discourse samples were transcribed and annotated with the ELAN tool. To ensure
accurate and consistent annotation, a Transcription and Annotation Guide was compiled, which includes detailed guidelines regarding all
aspects of the transcription and annotation procedure.