LINGUIST List 9.1770

Fri Dec 11 1998

Sum: Morphosyntactic Features

Editor for this issue: Scott Fults <scottlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Mike_Maxwell, Another summary: Morphosyntactic Features

In LINGUIST List 9.1599 and 9.1644, I summarized the responses I had
received concerning research into possible universals in
morphosyntactic features (similar to the research that has been done
on universals in phonetic features).

Since the last summary, a few more responses have come in, which I
summarize below. Thanks to Brian Ulicny (bulicnylhs.com), Priscilla
McCoy (pmccoysocrates.berkeley.edu), and Joerg Keller
(Joerg.Kellersign-lang.uni-hamburg.de).

- ----------------------------
For a more applied, less theoretical perspective...
The EAGLES (Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering
Standards, an initiative of the European Commission (EC)... [has]
tried to adopt a system of morphosyntactic features that would cover
all of the European languages. The homepage for the project is:

http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/EAGLES96/home.html

Two documents of particular interest would be:

Recommendations for the morphosyntactic annotation of corpora
http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/EAGLES96/annotate/annotate.html
ftp://ftp.ilc.pi.cnr.it/pub/eagles/corpora/annotate.ps.gz

Synopsis and comparison of morphosyntactic phenomena encoded in lexicons
and corpora.
 A common proposal and applications to european languages.
http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/EAGLES96/morphsyn/morphsyn.html
ftp://ftp.ilc.pi.cnr.it/pub/eagles/lexicons/morphsyn.ps.gz

- -----------------------------------
Victor Friedman "Grammatical Categories of the Macedonian Indicative."

Works on languages of the Caucasus: K. Tuite, D. Holisky,
A. Harris, V. Friedman, H Aronson.

- -------------------------------------
Work by Jackendoff on the mapping of spatial features into morphosyntax, and
Joerg Keller's webpage at http://linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/dissfly.cgi?keller on
this same topic. Joerg also suggested that work on sign languages might be
important to establishing the universality of proposed features.

 Mike Maxwell
 Mike_Maxwellsil.org
 Summer Institute of Linguistics