home edit page issue tracker

UD for Kurmanji

Tokenization and Word Segmentation

• In general, words are delimited by whitespace characters. Description of exceptions follows.
• According to typographical rules, many punctuation marks are attached to a neighboring word. We tokenize them as separate tokens (words), except the following cases:
  • The period marking an abbreviation: Dr. “doctor” is one token.
  • The apostrophe (or occasionally a hyphen) is not treated as punctuation when it occurs between a number and its morphological suffix, as in 15’ê, 1932’an.
• There is a small class of words that may contain spaces in writing.
• There are several closed classes of contractions that are treated as multi-word tokens and segmented to individual syntactic words. The most prominent type is a pronoun fused with the future auxiliary: ezê = ez + dê “I will”.

Morphology

Tags

• Kurmanji uses all 17 universal POS categories, including particles (PART). Only 2 word types are tagged PART: jî “also”, ma.
• Kurmanji has four auxiliaries; three of them inflect like verbs (and can act as full verbs depending on context), while dê is an uninflected particle:
  • The copula bûn “to be”.
  • The future tense marker dê.
  • The passive auxiliary hatin “to come” (it combines with an infinitive of the lexical verb).
  • The causative auxiliary dan “to give” (it combines with an infinitive of the lexical verb).
• Verbs with modal meaning are not considered auxiliary in Kurmanji.
• There are four main (de)verbal forms, distinguished by the UPOS tag and the value of the VerbForm feature:
  • Infinitive Inf, tagged VERB or AUX.
  • Finite verb Fin, tagged VERB or AUX.
  • Participle Part, tagged VERB or AUX.
  • Verbal noun, derived from the infinitive, tagged NOUN, currently without a VerbForm feature (it could be Vnoun in future).

Nominal Features

• Nominal words (NOUN, PROPN) have an inherent Gender feature with one of two values: Masc or Fem. The gender of the referent is reflected by PRON and DET.
• The two values of the Number feature are Sing and Plur. The following parts of speech inflect for number: NOUN, PROPN, PRON, DET, VERB, AUX, marginally NUM.
• Case has 4 possible values: Nom, Acc, Con, Voc. It occurs with the nominal words, i.e., NOUN, PROPN, PRON, ADJ, DET, NUM.

Degree and Polarity

• Degree applies to adjectives (ADJ) and has one of three possible values: Pos, Cmp, Sup. For example, zêde “a lot of”, zêdetir “more”, zêdetirîn “most”.
• Polarity has one value, Neg (while Pos is not marked explicitly), and applies primarily to verbs (VERB, AUX), determiners (DET) and adverbs (ADV).

Verbal Features

• Aspect is Perf (perfective) and Prog (progressive); it can be also unmarked.
• Finite verbs always have one of four values of Mood: Ind, Imp, Opt or Sub.
• Verbs in the indicative mood always have one of four values of Tense: Pqp, Past, Pres or Fut.
• Evident (evidentiality) has only one value, Nfh (non-first-hand).

Pronouns, Determiners, Quantifiers

• PronType is used with pronouns (PRON), determiners (DET) and adverbs (ADV).
• NumType is used with numerals (NUM – only Card).
• The Reflex feature marks reflexive pronouns (xwe).
• Person is a lexical feature of personal pronouns (PRON) and has three values, 1, 2 and 3. Person is not marked on other types of pronouns and on nouns, although they can be almost always interpreted as the 3rd person.
  • As a cross-reference to subject, person is also marked on finite verbs (VERB, AUX).

Syntax

Core Arguments, Oblique Arguments and Adjuncts

• Nominal subject (nsubj) is a noun phrase in the nominative case, without preposition.
• Objects may be bare noun phrases in accusative (oblique).

Non-verbal Clauses

• The copula verb bûn (be) is used in equational, attributional, locative, possessive and benefactory nonverbal clauses.

Treebanks

There is 1 Kurmanji UD treebank:

• Kurmanji-MG

© 2014–2024 Universal Dependencies contributors. Site powered by Annodoc and brat

.