Preliminary Recommendations

 

Person

The values proposed in the tables are pertinent to Portuguese. However, in order to cope with typical aspects of politeness reflected in verbal inflection, the GENELEX model built for the Portuguese language made a particular use of this attribute -- instead of a feature Person, a decomposition of this is used: Person-deixis and Person-conc. Since, in Portuguese, polite verb forms correspond to the 3rd person, these two features allow an enhanced specification of verbal wordforms where the value `person=3' could give rise to ambiguity (note that ambiguity may not be solved by context, because in Portuguese one can drop the NP subject.)

In the GENELEX application such verbal wordforms (e.g. `come' (`eats' or `eat')) are thus marked in two ways:

1. Polite verbal wordforms (as in `você come' (`you eat')) bear the combination of values `person-deixis=2' and `person-conc=3';
2. True `person=3' wordforms (as in `ele come' (`he eats')) bear the combination of values `person-deixis=3' and `person-conc=3'.