The Homeric Dependency Lexicon

Abstract

This paper presents the Homeric Dependency Lexicon (HoDeL), a new resource with a user-friendly interface facilitating the study of Homeric verbs and dependents. HoDeL was induced from the analytical layer of AGDT 2.0, extracting all dependents tagged as SBJ, OBJ, PNOM, and OCOMP with a set of SQL queries. The paper illustrates HoDeL functionalities and shows how they can be employed by researchers to answer specific research questions about the Homeric language. Introducing the uses of HoDeL offers the opportunity to reexamine some crucial, though frequently underestimated, methodological challenges concerning annotated corpora and resources derived from them that relate to the linguistic theories underlying annotations and error propagation. It is argued that the careful documentation of how linguistic resources were created, what data they contain, and how they can be queried through their dedicated interfaces is essential to lay the groundwork for users’ investigations.