Modeling Linguistic Phenomena in Gallo-Italic Dialects: The Linguistic Phenomena Ontology

Each lexical expression in a language has its own history. The elements of a language are the result of several linguistic processes and may originate from expressions of other languages. In this paper, we present an ontology designed to describe linguistic phenomena, in particular, those that have influenced the pronunciation or morphology of lexical elements over time. The ontology, called The Linguistic Phenomena Ontology, is applied to the study of some Gallo-Italic varieties spoken in Sicily (Italy), with a focus on the linguistic phenomena that have generated some lexical expressions in these languages by borrowing them from Sicilian. Furthermore, an operational description based on regular expressions is provided for many of these phenomena.