The type hierarchy tables

The EAGLES word classes are defined by category. Each class is subdivided according to additional properties, expressed in terms of features (attributes) and their values. This subclassification leads to a hierarchical organization which is displayed in tables like the one (for nouns) taken up below, in table 1.

The table has two columns,

• left: containing the relevant features;
• right: containing the values relevant for each feature.

The right hand column is itself structured and represents the hierarchy.

 

Feature Values

pos noun

type com prop

declin no adject --

numb sg, pl sg, pl sg, pl,*

case nom, gen, dat, acc nom, gen, dat, acc nom, gen, dat, acc,*

gend masc,fem,neut,* masc,fem,neut,* masc,fem,neut,*

infl -- weak, strg, mix --

STTS: NN:+.+.+.* NN:+.+.+.+ NE:+.+.+

Example: NN:Masc.Nom.Sg.* NN:Masc.Nom.Sg.Sw NE:Fem.Gen.Sg

Haus (der) Beamte Annes

 

The tables are composed of three layers. These are (from top to bottom) the following:

1. hierarchy-defining features;
2. non-hierarchical morphosyntactic features;
3. mapping from ELM-DE onto the STTS corpus tagset, and example.

The (1) define the subclasses of the category class, e.g. ``proper nouns'', adjectivally-inflecting common nouns'' and ``normal common nouns''. This layer can be represented in the form of a tree.

The (2) cannot be structured in a hierarchy; they can be cross-combined, and any combination is possible. In this layer, the value '--' indicates non-applicability of the feature to the whole terminal class, a * value indicates that there might be individual wordforms in the terminal class which the given value does not apply to.

The (3) is given, in the bottom layer, to show the correspondence between the application-neutral specification of ELM-DE and the STTS corpus tagset. Moreover, an example word form is given for each subclass.