Combining Neo-Structuralist and Cognitive Approaches to Semantics to Build Wordnets for Ancient Languages: Challenges and Perspectives

This paper addresses challenges encountered in constructing lexical databases, specifically WordNets, for three ancient Indo-European languages: Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. The difficulties partly arise from adapting concepts and methodologies designed for modern languages to the construction of lexical resources for ancient ones. A further significant challenge arises from the goal of creating WordNets that not only adhere to a neo-structuralist relational view of meaning but also integrate Cognitive Semantics concepts, aiming for a more realistic representation of meaning. This integration is crucial for facilitating studies in diachronic semantics and lexicology, and representing meaning in such a nuanced manner becomes paramount when constructing language resources for theoretical research, rather than for applied tasks, as is the case with lexical resources for ancient languages. The paper delves into these challenges through a case study focused on the TEMPERATURE conceptual domain in the three languages. It outlines difficulties in distinguishing prototypical and non-prototypical senses, literal and non-literal ones, and, within non-literal meanings, between metaphorical and metonymic ones. Solutions adopted to address these challenges are presented, highlighting the necessity of achieving maximum granularity in meaning representation while maintaining a sustainable workflow for annotators.