Part of speech.

Detailed part of speech.

This is a new (September 2007) feature applied first to the Bulgarian CoNLL tag set. It takes over the pronoun classification that has been so far kept in the definiteness feature. See the brainstorming section for further details on lexical and morphological definiteness.

Although it reads as “pronoun type” (and we use the word “pronoun” for simplicity), it is also applied to words that are usually not considered pronouns, such as interrogative/indefinite adverbs (where, there, when, then, how, why).

Punctuation class.

Distinguishes between initial and final form of pairwise punctuation (brackets, quotation marks). Note that “initial” and “final” are better terms than “left” and “right”. The latter would be confusing in languages writing from right to left, like Arabic.

Does the pronoun or numeral behave syntactically as a noun, adjective, or adverb?

Is this a possessive adjective or pronoun?

Is this a reflexive pronoun?

Distinguishes also negative pronouns like “nothing.”

Distinguishes also determinative (“this”) and indefinite (“some”) pronouns.

Distinguishes subject and object forms of pronouns in, e.g., Swedish.

Value Description
subj subject
obj object

Possgender is possessor's gender.

Possnumber is possessor's number.

Degree of comparison.

Value Description
norm non-comparative, first degree (we hesitate to call it “positive”, since negative properties can be compared, too)
comp comparative, second degree
sup superlative, third degree
abs absolute superlative

There are tag sets (e.g. Bulgarian CoNLL) that classify verbs as intransitive or transitive. It turns out that a Bulgarian verb can have set both features type=aux && trans=t. That is why we cannot mix transitivity and auxiliarity in subpos.

Finer classification of tenses, may not be available in all languages. (And in many languages, these tenses are built using auxiliaries, rather than special morphemes.) Having these separated from the main past-present-future distinction allows that drivers need not check for aorist/imperfect, if they know just one past tense.

Note that, unfortunately, imperfect tense is not always the same as past tense + imperfective aspect. For instance, in Bulgarian, there is lexical aspect, inherent in verb meaning, and grammatical aspect, which does not necessarily always match the lexical one. In main clauses, imperfective verbs can have imperfect tense and perfective verbs have perfect tense. However, both rules can be violated in embedded clauses. Aorist is aspect-neutral and can freely appear with both imperfective and perfective verbs.

Is this an abbreviation?

Is this a part of a hyphenated compound?

Allows for distinguishing between word forms that otherwise would share values of all features.

The tagset feature identifies the source tag set driver. Value should be identical to the name of the driver that filled the feature values. Works together with the “other” feature.

Feature “other”
Any value or reference to array or hash is allowed. Serves to preserve information if the decoding driver happens to be the one who did the encoding. No other driver should expect anything meaningful here.
Only information that cannot be stored in other features should be stored here.
The apparently easiest approach — to store the complete original tag — would not work if the user needs to change feature values between decode() and encode().