[
1] The languages explicitly
considered in this first pass at the list are Danish, Dutch, English,
French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish: that is,
Russian and the languages of the European Community. Other languages
are expected to be included in later revisions, refinements, or
supplements. A listing of features for Japanese and Korean is in
preparation.
[
2] For example, the values for the
case feature includes both
nominative and
subjective, which may be thought of as alternate names
for the same value.
[
3] The name
category was
felt by the working group to be
more appropriate than
word-class.
[
4] The feature
components would
normally be specified only if the feature
form has the
value
phrase,
compound or
portmanteau. This method of marking portmanteaux was
suggested by Geoffrey Sampson, and supersedes the method described in
the first draft of this working paper.[
5] The
source-class feature
provides for the marking of feature structures for a second word class
(e.g. for the verbal features of a participle, when the outer feature
structure is for an adjective) and takes any feature structure as its
value.
[
6]
The values
1 inclusive and
1 exclusive are
not included, as they are not relevant to the languages under
consideration. Geoffrey Sampson raised the question of the adequacy
of these values for marking the range of Portuguese second-person
forms including
tu,
você,
o
senhor and
Vocência. One
possibility would be to mark the first
2.familiar, the
second
2, and the third and fourth
2.polite. The markup being developed for Japanese and
Korean politeness distinctions would be adequate to distinguish
among all four of these cases.
[
7] The value
prepositional
is needed for Russian, and may also be used to mark the special
pronominal forms in Portuguese that are governed by prepositions, such
as
mim.
[
8] The value
neuter is to be used for
distinctive neuter gender as in German and Dutch. Common gender,
which is sometimes referred to as neuter gender in grammars of Romance
languages, can be marked
any, if only the values
feminine and
masculine are explicitly
declared; or
common, if that value is also explicitly
declared.
[
9] The values
near-speaker and
near-hearer are needed for representing the distinctions
among Portuguese demonstratives and locative adverbs, such as
aqui ‘
here by me’,
aí ‘
there by you’ and
ali ‘
there away from us’. The
first could be tagged
near-speaker, the second
near-hearer and the third
distal.
[
10] The Romance
languages, especially, have a large number of affixes that can be
classified as
diminutive or
augmentative.
Portuguese, for example, has at least four diminutive affixes and
three augmentative ones. Many words derived with these affixes are
understood as terms of endearment, i.e. as
caritatives,
or of insult, i.e.
pejoratives. We decided to include
the feature
affect as it is formally marked in these and
other European languages, but not with values indicating endearment or
insult, since the latter cannot be said to be morphologically marked
in any consistent way. A particularly nice illustration is provided
by Italian, in which the diminutive suffix
uccia results in a word understood as a term of
endearment when it is added to names of persons, e.g.
Mariuccia ‘
dear Mary’; but in a
word understood as a term of insult when it is added to common nouns,
e.g.
casuccia ‘
wretched
house’.
[
11] To mark the
contrast between Danish
ind versus
inde, English
in versus
into, etc.
[
12] For cases such as French
femme-ci,
femme-là etc.
[
13] Correlates with
initial-capital feature feature in some
languages.
[
14] The
referential value is for marking the
Dutch form
die ‘
he, she, it,
they’, which perhaps can be better analyzed as an invariant
(for number, gender and case) demonstrative pronoun.
[
15] The
feature
declension indicates which declensional pattern
is found in a occurrence, where more than one is possible, for example
the
strong versus
weak patterns found in
German prenominal adjectives depending on the associated determiner
elements, or the Russian
long versus
short
declension of predicative adjectives. It is not intended to be used
to distinguish patterns of inflection to which lexical items are
idiosyncratically assigned, like the difference between first and
second declensions in traditional Latin grammar. Like other
information fixed for the lemma, a feature like
declension-class can be supplied by the analyst as an
addition to this list.
[
16] Other terms in common use for some of the values of the
tense feature are:
past-definite for
past;
past-aorist for
aorist;
present-perfect for
perfect;
past-perfect and
past-anterior for
pluperfect; and
conditional for
future-perfect.
[
17] Certain “complex tenses” such as
pluperfect can alternatively be rendered as combinations
of simple
tense and
aspect specifications.
For example, the effect of the assignment tense = pluperfect could be
rendered by the two assignments tense = past and aspect = perfective.
Moreover, if
aorist is considered as a value for
aspect instead of as a value for
tense, then
additional complex tenses could similarly be analyzed as combinations.
For example, the assignment tense = future-aorist would be equivalent
to the two assigments tense=future and aspect=aorist.
[
18] We limit the use of the value
conditional to
the feature
mood, to indicate possibility, obligation,
etc. To indicate a future time prior to some other time in the future,
we use the value
future-perfect rather than
conditional for the feature
tense.
[
19] The assignment verb-form = present-participle may
alternately be represented by the two assignments verb-form =
participle and tense = present. The
personal-infinitive
in Portuguese may be distinguished from the
impersonal-infinitive by the presence of the
agreement feature.
[
20] Use the feature
object if the function of
the incorporated pronoun (as direct or indirect object) is not known
or not specified.
[
21] The
oblique feature is given simple, rather than complex,
values on the assumption that there is no need to encode more
structure for such incorporated elements as French
y and
en at the level of
sophistication involved in creating the grammatical feature starter
set.
[
22] The feature
reflexive is provided as a simple alternative to the use
of the
p-incorporation feature for the marking of
grammatically reflexive verbs.
[
23]
No special treatment is proposed for compound adverbs made up of a
deictic adverb and a preposition, such as German
dabei,
darauf;
Dutch
erin; English
herein,
thereby;
etc.
[
24] Some of these values have been added because of their
use in standard grammars, e.g.
quantity in Spanish and
contrast in Danish. However, not all of them are
morphologically marked, so strictly speaking those should not have
been included in this set.