Lemmatising Old English on a relational database

This work contributes to the research in the linguistic analysis of Old English with corpus-based lexical databases. In the specific area of Old English, which presents numerous morphological variations and lacks a written standard, a lemmatised corpus is necessary. Thus, the aim of this work is to lemmatise part of the verbal lexicon of Old English, combining aspects of Morphology, Lexicography and Corpus Analysis. The scope is restricted to the most morphologically complex verbal classes of Old English, including irregular verbs and reduplicative verbs, which comprise preterite-present, anomalous, contracted and strong VII verbs. This aim requires, firstly, the selection and management of the sources of data and verification of results; and secondly, the design and sequencing of the steps of the lemmatisation tasks. This research also raises the issue of the automatisation of the process of lemmatisation of Old English verbs, on which little previous literature has been found. In conclusion, this work offers an inventory of inflectional forms and lemmas of the verbs under analysis. On the applied side, this work presents different procedures of automatic and manual lemmatisation that can be applied to the fields of Lexicography and Corpus Linguistics.