Western Abenaki/Disambiguator
Contents
Initial Ambiguity
The First Council Fire
Coverage: 293 tokens, or 12.62%
Ambiguity: 1.14
Masta
Coverage: 175 tokens, or 3.42%
Ambiguity: 1.10
Kimzowi Awikhigan
Coverage: 221 tokens, or 9.50%
Ambiguity: 1.21
Disambiguation Rule
Our rule disambiguated between two possible verb forms: the first person plural (inclusive or exclusive) with a definite animate object vs a definite inanimate object. See tags below:
mil<v><pri><tv><aa><s_pl1_excl><o_3sg_def_nn> ↔ n'milȣnana
vs
mil<v><pri><tv><aa><s_pl1_excl><o_3sg_def_aa> ↔ n'milȣnana
This distinction was accomplished by analyzing the tag of the following noun, typically the object. Animate nouns receive the animate verb form tags and inanimate nouns receive the inanimate tags.
Final Ambiguity
The First Council Fire
Ambiguity: 1.14
Masta
Ambiguity: 1.10
Kimzowi Awikhigan
Ambiguity: 1.21
Examples
If we take the example above, this would be the difference between giving us all someone and giving us all something, which can be a very important semantic difference. The same ambiguity is seen in other tenses, such as the plural 2nd and plural 3rd.
Notes
Because Western Abenaki is a particularly synthetic and agglutinative language, especially when it comes to its verbs, it is difficult to find useful examples of this rule successfully disambiguating meaning. This is compounded by the small size of our corpora and non-standard orthography between them. This is why (at their current scale), our ambiguity numbers do not change. Nevertheless, we still feel it is a useful disambiguation to make, as this distinction is not made so clearly in English.
