Treebanking in the world of Thucydides. Linguistic annotation for the Hellespont Project

The Hellespont project (DAI, Tufts University) aims to structure the text of a passage from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides (1.89-118), in order to highlight events, persons and peoples that populate the world of the author and connect the different digital sources available for their study. Event annotation in the text in particular requires an in-depth linguistic analysis of morphology, syntax and semantics. However, the available resources for Ancient Greek do not provide adequate standards to support the encoding of semantic and pragmatic phenomena in Ancient Greek texts. In this paper, we discuss the motivation of the project and how we adapted the so called tectogrammatical annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank to identify the events and describe their structure. The linguistic notion of valency, which is central to tectogrammatical sentence representation, proves very useful for this analysis of Ancient Greek.