UD for Buryat 
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. In most cases we tokenize them as separate tokens (words). The exception is hyphenated compounds such as монгол-буряадуудай / mongol-burjaaduudaj “Mongol-Buryat” (one token).
- There are no fused multi-word tokens, nor words with spaces.
Morphology
Tags
- All 17 universal POS categories are relevant for Buryat, although the current data does not contain any instance of X.
- At present, 177 lemma types are tagged PART.
- Buryat has the following auxiliary verbs (AUX):
- бай (bay) “to be” is the copula.
- боло (bolo) “to become” is used in periphrastic future and other tenses; it also functions as a pseudo-copula (but is not annotated as copula in UD).
- шада (šada) “can, be able” is a modal auxiliary.
- There are four main types of verbal forms, distinguished by the value of the VerbForm feature
(all of them are tagged VERB or AUX, not as other derived categories):
- Finite verb
Fincan act as a predicate of a main clause without an auxiliary; it inflects for the Person of the subject. - Converb (verbal adverb)
Convfunctions as a predicate in a dependent adverbial clause. The literature distinguishes several types of converbs in Buryat; unlike in Indo-European languages, they do not necessarily share their subject with the matrix clause. We useVerbForm=Convfor the conditional converbs (“if doing X, the matrix clause happens”), ending in -бал, -бол, -бэл. - Infinitive
Inf. The non-finite form ending in -жа, -жо, -жэ normally has to be accompanied by an auxiliary; together they can form a predicate of a main or a dependent clause. This makes the form different from verbal adverbs and thus worth a separate label. Calling them infinitives is in line with what Washington and Tyers (2019) propose for Turkic languages; note that in earlier releases of the Buryat treebank, these forms were labeledCoverb(see also #747). Some authors (e.g., Skribnik 2011) label them as imperfective converbs. - Gerund
Geris used for various other forms that are classified as types of converbs in the literature. Gerunds may function as predicates in main clauses (without an auxiliary, and with an overt subject).- бүтээ / bütee “create” → бүтээхэеэ / büteexeyee “willing to create” (intention)
- Finite verb
Nominal Features
- Case has 6 possible values:
Nom,Gen,Dat,Acc,Abl,Com. It occurs with the nominal words, i.e., NOUN, PROPN, PRON, ADJ, NUM. - Number: only plural is annotated with
Number=Plur, while singular is unmarked. However, both numbers are annotated for finite verbs (cross-reference of the subject).
Syntax
- Nominal subject is normally in the nominative case. It triggers agreement on the finite verb and it determines the use of the reflexive marker in the clause, if any.
- Direct object may be in the accusative but it is often in the nominative form, too. The unmarked stem (nominative) implies an unspecified unfocused object.
- The dominant and unmarked word order is subject-object-verb (SOV).
- The verb бай / bay “be” can be used as a copula.
- If combined with a nominal in the comitative case, its meaning is possessively existential, corresponding to English “have”: Хүзүүбшэ улан үнгэтэй байгаа. / Xüzüübše ulan üngetey baygaa. lit. “neck red fox.with is” = “The red fox has a neck.”
- Buryat uses the following language-specific dependency relation subtypes:
- advmod:neg for negative particles
In Buryat, possessive existential sentences (e.g., “I have a book”) are non-verbal: “To me (dative), [there is] a book.” The owner is in the dative case and is analyzed as the predicate; the possessed thing is the subject.
Мааттида шэнэ түмэр морин . \n Maattida šene tümer morin . \n to.Maatti new iron horse .
nsubj(Мааттида, морин)
amod(морин, шэнэ)
compound(морин, түмэр)
punct(Мааттида, .-5)
“Maatti has a new car.”
Treebanks
There is one Buryat UD treebank:
References
- Elena Skribnik. 2011. Buryat. In: The Mongolic Languages. Routledge
- Jonathan North Washington, Francis M. Tyers. 2019. Delineating Turkic non-finite verb forms by syntactic function. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 4. 132–146