Constructing a Romanian Electronic Dictionary.

Some Remarks on the Noun

and Adjective Inflection System

 

Andrei Filip (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

Andrei.Filip@campus.uab.es

 

Abstract   

         

In this paper we concentrate upon the description of the noun and adjective inflectional system and its implementation in the Intex/NooJ system for the Romanian module of the electronic dictionary of LexSem (The Autonomous University of Barcelona).

Our first part of the speech focuses on the noun inflection system. We had to take into consideration four main factors when conceiving our graphs: the genre, the number, the case and finally whether they are inflected with the definite article or not. It is necessary to mention here that in Romanian, unlike in other Romance languages, the definite article is enclitic and thus it is an inflectional form of the noun. The genre issue lead us to a first classification where we discriminate between the masculine, the feminine and the neuter. These classes are further divided into ten different types for the masculine nouns, fourteen subclasses for the feminine and seven for the neuter according to the way they form the plural. Finally, the inflection system for each of the five cases in Romanian was added to our graphs.

On the other hand, as far as the adjective inflection system is regarded we had to take into account both the genre and number as well as the inflection for the five cases, namely the Nominative, the Accusative, The Genitive, the Dative and the Vocative. We need to specify that in case determiners precede the nouns they take over their inflectional system. Thus we need further subdivisions of the graphs so as to describe these particular instances.