As discussed in Calzolari & Monachini (to appear), the morphosyntax area was among the first in which EAGLES concentrated its efforts, because it is a more mature area, where a lot of work has already been done, and many systems, approaches and data exist for many languages: this constitutes a solid platform for making reasonable and acceptable proposals for standards. The work previously undertaken in the NERC project (Monachini & Östling, 1992a; Monachini & Östling, 1992b; Calzolari et al., 1995), proved that this field is an area that is open to agreement on common specifications. The tagsets already existing for many languages and the encoding practices for many computational lexicons constitute the necessary basis of accumulated experience.
Moreover, morphosyntactic annotation constitutes the basic level of linguistic description in natural language processing and is usually considered a prerequisite for further and more complex kinds of analysis. Almost all systems and applications require this level of linguistic description. In this area, therefore, standard conventions are welcomed not only by a large number of users in all sectors of LE, but also by many in the literary and humanities fields.
The objective of the present document is to propose a common core set of morphosyntactic distinctions to be encoded in lexicons of the European languages.