In Search of the Flocks: How to Perform Onomasiological Queries in an Ancient Greek Corpus?

Alek Keersmaekers, Toon Van Hal

Abstract:

This paper explores the possibilities of onomasiologically querying corpus data of Ancient Greek. The significance of the
onomasiological approach has been highlighted in recent studies, yet the possibilities of performing ‘word-finding’ investigations into
corpus data have not been dealt with in depth. The case study chosen focuses on collective nouns denoting animate groups (such as
flocks of people, herds of cattle). By relying on a large automatically annotated corpus of Ancient Greek and on token-based vector
information, a longlist of collective nouns was compiled through morpho-syntactic extraction and successive clustering procedures.
After reducing this longlist to a shortlist, the results obtained are evaluated. In general, we find that πλῆθος can be considered to be the
default collective noun of both humans and animals, becoming especially prominent during the Hellenistic period. In addition, specific
tendencies in the use of collective nouns are discerned for specific semantic classes (e.g. gods and insects) and over time. Throughout
the paper, special attention is paid to methodological issues related to onomasiologically searching.