Tokenization
Dealing With Portmanteau Tags
There are two modes of annotation: using portmanteau dependency tags, and pure universal dependencies.
Portmanteau token tags and their functions
For portmanteau tags, tokens which carry a fused portmanteau POS tag receive the function associated with the lexical or argument bearing component. For example, the fused form ⲉⲕϣⲁⲛ ‘if-you-if’, which is tokenized as one token with the POS tag ACOND_PPERS, is both an auxiliary and a subject pronoun. Since the subject is an argument, it receives the label nsubj, rather than the function word label aux.
Alternatively, if the intended application of the annotation project supports sub-tokenization, the CoNLL-U format could be used as follows, specifying subtokens/supertokens for fused units:
| 1-2 | ⲉⲕϣⲁⲛ | _ | _ | _ | _ | _ | _ | _ |
| 1 | ⲉⲣϣⲁⲛ | _ | ACOND | _ | _ | 3 | aux | _ |
| 2 | ⲕ | _ | PPERS | _ | _ | 3 | nsubj | _ |
| 3 | ⲥⲱⲧⲙ | _ | V | _ | _ | 0 | root | _ |
However in practice, the Coptic Treebank uses super tokens to express bound groups, so we prefer the following analysis:
| 1-2 | ⲉⲕϣⲁⲛⲥⲱⲧⲙ | _ | _ | _ | _ | _ | _ | _ |
| 1 | ⲉⲕϣⲁⲛ | _ | ACOND_PPERS | _ | _ | 2 | nsubj | _ |
| 2 | ⲥⲱⲧⲙ | _ | PPERS | _ | _ | 0 | root | _ |
This is the type of analysis found in the Coptic Scriptorium treebank.