Annotation 2: Segments

1. Basis of the reconstruction

The smallest unit of tokenization in the OGR is the Segment (seg). The Segments are not intended to provide a phonetic transcription of the text but instead a consistent and phonemically-informed interpretation of the spelling, which in these early texts is broadly phonemic. The segmental annotation respects the following principles:

1. Each Segment is represented by at least one character in the text, i.e. there are no unwritten Segments.
2. There are no unpronounced characters, with the exception of those within digraphs and Latin initial h.
3. Each Segment is maximally underspecified. In all contexts in which a particular phonological feature is non-distinctive (e.g. obstruent voicing in word-final position), it is left underspecified in the annotation. This also applies where the precise phonetic value of a Segment is uncertain (e.g. in Latinate loanwords or proper names).
4. This notwithstanding, where phonological features are distinctive, this is reflected in the Segment annotation even if it is not shown in the spelling. E.g. the letter e in tonic syllables may be transcribed /e/, /ɛ/, or /æ/.
5. Although the phonemic symbols have a standard value (see below) the Segment annotation is not standardized across the corpus. The same word may be transcribed differently in different texts to reflect graphical and phonological differences.

More extensive documentation of the segmental annotation will be found in published scientific presentations of the corpus.

2. Symbols and features

Segment-level annotation is contained in three core tags:

• seg_plus and seg_minus: two comma-separated lists of alphabetically-ordered phonological features, which are specified as “+” or “-” respectively for the Segment. The more features included on these lists, the more specified the segment.
• seg_phoneme: a user-friendly symbol denoting a particular matrix of phonological features. IPA symbols are generally used with their standard value. Underspecified segments are represented by non-IPA symbols or capitals.

It is recommended to use the seg_plus and seg_minus tags when searching for classes of sounds rather than attempting to list possible seg_phonemes, e.g.

• Find all vowels and glides: seg_minus=/.*cons.*/
• Find all coda nasals: onc="C" _i_ seg_plus=/.*nas.*/
• Find all word-final obstruents: word _r_ seg_minus=/.*son.*/
• Find all word-final coronal stops: seg_plus=/.*CORONAL.*/ _=_ seg_minus=/.*cont,.*son,.*strident.*/ & word _r_ #1

In the TXM version of the corpus, Segment-level annotation is available through the word-level phon tag, which concatenates all the seg_phonemes in the word as a single string. The features in seg_plus and seg_minus are not available.

2.1 Vowels and glides

2.2 Consonants