1. Subjecthood and annotation: The cases of French and Wolof
- Author
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Bondéelle, Olivier, Kahane, Sylvain, Centre d'Etudes des Relations et Contacts Linguistiques et Littéraires - UR UPJV 4283 (CERCLL), Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV), Modèles, Dynamiques, Corpus (MoDyCo), Université Paris Nanterre (UPN)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), M.C. de Marneffe, M. de Lhoneux, J. Nivre, and S. Schuster
- Subjects
Syntactic construction ,Annotation de corpus ,French ,Subject ,Corpus annotation ,Sujet ,Construction syntaxique ,[SHS.LANGUE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Linguistics ,[SHS.ANTHRO-SE]Humanities and Social Sciences/Social Anthropology and ethnology ,[SHS.MUSEO]Humanities and Social Sciences/Cultural heritage and museology ,Wolof ,Français - Abstract
International audience; This article considers the annotation of subjects in UD treebanks. The identification of the subjectposes a particular problem in Wolof, due to pronominal indices whose status as a pronoun or apronominal affix is uncertain. In the UD treebank available for Wolof (Dione, 2019), these have beenannotated depending on the construction either as true subjects, or as morphosyntactic features agreeingwith the verb. The study of this corpus of 40 000 words allows us to show that the problem is indeeddifficult to solve, especially since Wolof has a rich system of auxiliaries and several basic constructionswith different properties. Before addressing the case of Wolof, we will present the simpler, but partlycomparable, case of French, where subject clitics also tend to behave like affixes, and subjecthood canmove from the preverbal to the detached position. We will also make a several annotationrecommendations that would avoid overwriting information regarding subjecthood.
- Published
- 2020