About ForFun

ForFun is

• a simplified interface to PDTs,
• a tool primarily for linguists,
• a database of 175,000 Czech sentences,
• a source of information about syntax,
• a place where 2.2 million examples can be studied,
• a gateway to forms (for a given function),
• a gateway to functions (of a given form).

Purpose of ForFun

If the relation between form and function is of an importance for you, the purpose of the ForFun database is to serve you!

The form–function relation is a many-to-many relation. One surface form (let say a preposition po + locative case or an infinitive) can represent several linguistic functions (e.g. time expression or location). And vice versa, one function can be expressed by many (sometimes synonymous) forms.

Functions in ForFun

The list of functions was developed many years ago and we used it without a change. The name for a deep syntactic function of an element in a sentence in PDTs is a functor. There are several functors for causal modifications, four functors for spatial modifications, many functors for time modifications, and of course, five prominent functors for arguments. Their names (such as MEANS, COND, LOC, TWHEN or ACT) indicates their meanings, however the full list is useful.

Use ForFun

You can start by clicking through the ForFun yourself.

If you are interested in the relation from form to function, start with the left button above and choose any Czech form in the long list (1469 items). There are cases (denoted by #-mark and a number), prepositional cases, relative clauses with a specified conjunction, infinitive verbal phrases and many others. There are also some multiword forms (e.g. secondary prepositions) with an underscore instead of a space. By choosing one form, you obtain a new page with all functions the form can represent. There is one table for each functor used, most frequent functor being the first, with a frequency number specified for each of them. The table is then sorted by the word class of the governing node in a dependency syntax.

Otherwise click on the right button “From function to form” above. Then you can choose any of 66 functors used in PDTs to explore their realization in sentences. You obtain a new page with all forms representing the chosen functor. There is one table for each word class that can govern the functor in a dependency syntax. The most frequent word classes are at the top, their frequency is always provided. Inside the table there are all possible forms for the functor, again with their absolute frequency.

No matter from which side (form or function) you come to the table, there are many example sentences for the form–function relation. These sentences are further divided by their source treebank. (PDT consists of newspapers, PCEDT consists of translations from an English journal, PDTSC consists of spoken data and FAUST consists of text fragments from web.) The set of sentences for a given form, function, governing word class and source is called a 4‑combination.

There is a “show” button for each 4‑combination that shows at most ten examples on demand. If you need all examples (sometimes tens of thousands), click on the other “show all exam.” to get a new page. Each example can be removed from the view using an X-button at the right. The word of the studied form and representing the studied function is highlighted together with its auxiliary words if any. At the end of the sentence, the word is repeated and its lemmatized variant is added.

At the top of each page a set of buttons allows you to hide some 4‑combinations according to their source. Examples of usage:

• If you are not interested in spoken language, click on “hide PDTSC”.
• On the contrary, if you prefer to see examples from a spoken corpus only (but in the case that there is no occurrence of the given 4-combination in the spoken corpus at all, you put up with examples from the written corpora), click on “only PDTSC and missing forms”.
• If you are interested in examples used exclusively in translations from English, click on “only translation exclusive forms”.

You can jump from forms to functions anytime you click on a name of a functor. And vice versa, you can always click on a form to explore the form–function relation from the opposite side.

Cite ForFun

You can cite ForFun as a paper:

@iproceeding{MiBeForFun2018,
	title = {ForFun 1.0: Prague Database of Syntactic Forms and Functions
		-- An Invaluable Resource for Linguistic Research},
	author = {Marie Mikulov{\'{a}} and Eduard Bej{\v{c}}ek},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th International Conference
		on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)},
	publisher = {European Language Resources Association},
	address = {Paris, France},
	year = {2018},
	pages = {TBA},
}

or as a data:

@misc{MiBeForFun2017,
	title = {ForFun 1.0},
	author = {Marie Mikulov{\'{a}} and Eduard Bej{\v{c}}ek},
	publisher = {Charles University, Prague},
	address = {Prague, Czech Republic},
	month = {Dec},
	year = {2017},
}

You can also download the whole ForFun webpages via LINDAT Clarin repository.

You can read a longer description of the ForFun database.