Preliminary Recommendations

Case

There seems to be a discrepancy concerning this feature: Case does not appear in the GENELEX and AlethDic models amongst the features for Nouns, owing to their monolingual French-based orientation.

As already discussed in NERC (see Monachini & Östling (1992b)), the values proposed under Case are not mutually disjunctive: rather, some of them overlap (see Introductory part 2.3). Given this overlapping, the following points have to be made:

• The values can never appear all together in one language, but have to be associated with a list of permitted values for that particular language.
• The significance of a value has to be seen in relation to the other values of the same language.

The relationship between the values, as far as it can be derived from their use in the analysed tagsets, is illustrated in the following tree:

It must be stressed that each language system will use its own pertinent set of values.

Oblique, discussed here as a value of the feature Case, is not pertinent to the category Noun; it is a value marked for Pronouns.