Automatic Analysis of Appreciative Morphology: The Case of Paronomasia in Colombian Spanish

Abstract

Paronomasia is defined as the substitution of one lexical item for another, based on partial homophony. While this phenomenon has been the subject of several studies focused on stylistic aspects [1, 2] - and, to a lesser extent, those of grammar [3] - computational linguistics approaches are practically nonexistent. Previous barriers include difficulties in automatically assigning correct labels (both semantic and morphological) due to ambiguity in these expressions. To this end, this paper analyzes a group of Colombian Spanish nouns and their corresponding paronomastic variants from the Generative Lexicon Theory [4, 5] (GLT) with a view toward computational modelling and automatic recognition by means of NooJ [6]. The methodology consists of the following steps: (i) selection of a list of Colombian Spanish nouns included in Varela’s work [7]; (ii) creation of semantic structures (SS) according to GLT; and (iii) elaboration of productive morphological and constrained syntactic grammars [8]. The resources are tested on a set of sentences, yielding promising results to further investigate the automatic analysis of paronomasia from this perspective.