Preliminary Recommendations

 

The application phase

As can be appreciated, the common proposal corresponds, as far as possible, to the union of the analysed schemes. For each category, an application of the common proposal to a large number of European languages has been carried out. Examples from the specific language are given for each attribute value, and, when necessary, criteria for the application of a feature are described.

Description of the tables used in the applications

Category by category, the specifications proposed were tested on real corpora and lexicons in a large number of European languages.

In these language-specific sections, each morphosyntactic feature pertinent to a category in a specific language is represented in the form of a table: the attribute name is presented in bold characters, the values are listed in italics and examples are provided, together with the information on the corresponding tag in a language-specific lexicon encoding scheme or corpus tagset (if available). Furthermore:

• If a language does not have some values for a given attribute, the cell of the example (and of the tag) is left empty.
• If the attribute has, in a particular language, more values than in the proposed common system, any extra value is inserted in the second part of the table (with the note l-spec to the left).
• If, in a particular language, some features are not at all applicable, this will be dealt with in the Comments section; the feature will not be represented as a table.

We give, in table 3, an example of such a table, i.e. the feature Number for Nouns in the Italian section. For the semantics of the value invariant, the reader is referred to the relevant discussion.

 

Attribute Value It. example It. tag

Number singular (il) libro S/ms

plural (i) libri S/mp

l-spec invariant (la/le) attivitá S/fn