Part of speech. Pronouns, determiners, predeterminers and articles are roofed by nouns and adjectives, and distinguished by values of other features.

Detailed part of speech. Subject to change - more value groups will probably be made separate features, e.g. verbtype.

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).

Subclasses of numerals. See also prontype (interrogative and indefinite numerals set it), numform and numvalue.

Is a number expressed by a word or by digits? Depending on tokenization and tagging scheme, this feature may be orthogonal to the distinction between cardinals and ordinals.

Low-value numerals display special behavior in some languages (e.g. Czech). This feature helps distinguish them. See also accommodability.

Note that this feature has not been approved so far, as it only occurs rarely in the old version of the Polish corpus, and it is not clear what exactly it encodes.

In Polish, special behavior of numerals (cf. numvalue) cannot be predicted from the value of the number. So unlike the tagset for Czech, Polish IPI PAN tagset (version 1 only; it disappeared from version 2) takes a different approach and encodes “accommodability”. The key question is: Does the numeral agree in case with the counted noun, or does it govern the noun and force it to genitive plural?

Příklady rec: trzech wileńskich i dwóch warszawskich; wyszło wielu znakomitych uczonych, pobierało dwunastu studentów, pięciu mych współpracowników; dziewięciu profesorów opowiedziało się

Příklady congr: obaj byli indywidualnościami; wszyci trzej prowadzili; dwaj synowie: Czesław; obaj synowie studiowali; czterej profesorowie głosowali

Řada výskytů číslovek nemá (ani v té verzi 1) vyznačenu ani jednu hodnotu, např.: o kilku artykułach, przedstawił trzy swoje dzieła, wystąpił z sześcioma prelekcjami, z których trzy zostały…

Subclasses of adverbs. See also prontype (pronominal adverbs set it).

Punctuation type.

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?

A word's morphological paradigm may behave like a different part of speech than the word is assigned to. For example, Slovak noun vstupné “admission (fee)” behaves syntactically as noun, is tagged as noun, but it originates from an adjective and retains adjectival paradigm. The paradigm feature of the sk::snk tagset maps to this Interset feature.

Is this a possessive adjective or pronoun?

Is this a reflexive pronoun?

See also the prontype feature.
In Arabic, definiteness is also called the state.
http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/definiteness.html
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_constructus
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/padt/PADT_1.0/docs/papers/2004-nemlar-padt.pdf

Possgender is possessor's gender.

The distinction of human vs. nonhuman occurs in Polish grammar, e.g. the word “który” (which):

Pluralia tantum is a special case of plural, occurring e.g. in Czech. It applies to words that do not have singular forms. They use grammatical plural regardless of semantic number. Czech example: nůžky “scissors”: Papír rozstříhejte nůžkami. “Use scissors to cut the paper to pieces.” (semantic singular) vs. Koupil jsem si dvoje nůžky. “I bought two pairs of scissors.” (semantic plural)

Collective or mass or singularia tantum is a special case of singular. It applies to words that use grammatical singular to describe sets of objects, i.e. semantic plural. Although in theory they might be able to form plural, in practice it would be rarely semantically plausible. Sometimes, the plural form exists and means “several sorts of”. Czech example: lidstvo “mankind”.

Possnumber is possessor's number.

It applies e.g. to possessive pronouns and it can be different from their grammatical number, which is governed by agreement with the modified (possessed) noun phrase. Czech example: můj pes “my dog” (grammatical singular, possessor singular), mí psi “my dogs” (grammatical plural, possessor singular), náš pes “our dog” (grammatical singular, possessor plural), naši psi “our dogs” (grammatical plural, possessor plural).

Possednumber is the possessee's (possessed, owned noun phrase's) number.

In Hungarian, possession can be marked on the possessor or on the possessed. It is possible, though rare, that a noun has three distinct number features: its own grammatical number, number of its possessor and number of its possession. Examples from the Multext-East Hungarian lexicon:

• könnyedén (SSS)
  • könny = a tear (singular)
  • könnyed = your tear (singular owner)
  • könnyedé = (possession) of your tear (singular possession)
  • könnyedén = (on the possession) of your tear (superessive case)
• ellenfeleié (PSS)
  • ellenfél = an opponent (singular)
  • ellenfele = his/her/its opponent (singular owner)
  • ellenfelei = his/her/its opponents (core plural, singular owner)
  • ellenfeleié = (possession) of his/her/its opponents (singular possession)
• életeké (SPS)
  • él = point (singular)
  • élek = points (plural)
  • élén = his/her/its point (singular owner)
  • élünk = our point (plural owner)
  • életeké = (possession) of our point (singular possession)
• tárgyalópartnereinkét (PPS)
  • tárgyalópartner = negotiator (singular)
  • tárgyalópartnerei = his/her/its negotiators (plural, singular owner)
  • tárgyalópartnereinkét = (possession) of our negotiators (plural, plural owner, singular possession, accusative case)

Words marked for plural possessions are very rare, though. Note that in the following example from Multext-East, Columbus is marked for plural possession, but not for his own owner.

• Kolumbuszéinál
  • Kolumbusz = Columbus (singular)
  • Kolumbuszéi = (possessions) of Columbus (plural possession)
  • Kolumbuszéinál = (at the possessions) of Columbus (adessive case)

• Fine grained locative cases (Uralic languages)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammatical_cases
http://www.hungarianreference.com/Nouns/-n-superessive.aspx

Ten příklad s knihou u partitivu máš blbě, ne? “Saanko lainata kirjaa?” je “Můžu si půjčit knihu?”, “tu knihu” by bylo “kirjan”, ne? — stepanek 30.10.2009 12:45

Copak já vím? Finsky neumím. Je to převzaté z anglické Wikipedie. — zeman 31.10.2009 16:29

Personal pronouns in some languages have different forms depending on whether they are objects of prepositions or not. For instance, Czech “on” (he) without prepositions has the forms jemu/DAT, jeho/ACC, jím/INS, while with a preposition it is němu/DAT, něho/ACC, ním/INS. Similarly, Portuguese pronouns in prepositional oblique case take forms different from oblique pronouns serving as direct objects of verbs: eu/NOM (I), me/ACC (give me that), mim/PREP-ACC (come to me).

Default empty value means that the word form is neutral w.r.t. a prepositional head.

Degree of comparison.

Possgender is possessor's person, marked e.g. in Hungarian.

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.

Note: In Interset 1.0, there were two separate features, tense and subtense, the latter consisting of the values aor, imp, nar and pqp. We used to avoid hierarchical feature values (e.g. aorist implies past; but many languages will only know past and their drivers will not check for the aor value). Hierarchical ordering of feature values is now normal and there are algorithms to exploit the hierarchy when a feature has to be replaced by another value, thus these two features have been merged.

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.

See Wikipedia for a list of possible aspects.

Documentation of the METU Sabanci treebank classifies causative as voice (page 26). Note that this is a feature of verbs. There are languages that have also the causative case of nouns.

Is this an abbreviation?

Is this a part of a hyphenated compound?

Is this a reduplicative or echo word? Such words occur in Hindi. In Hyderabad Dependency Treebank they get their own part-of-speech tags RDP and ECH, respectively. We do not want to treat them as separate parts of speech because they could be assigned a POS independent of their RDP or ECH status (same as the word that they echo). We may want to merge this feature in future with hyph into a new feature called compound.

For more details see Rupert Snell and Simon Weightman: Teach Yourself Hindi, Section 16.4 and 16.5, pages 210 – 211.

Indicates bad spelling, grammatical error etc. Does not say how the correct form looks like. Must be separated from the style feature because there can be typo in archaic as well as colloquial form.

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. (The recommended format is same as in the use statement, without the tagset:: prefix, e.g. “de::stts”. 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 — will not work if the user needs to change feature values between decode() and encode().