This is part of archived UD v1 documentation. See http://universaldependencies.org/ for the current version.
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POS tags

Open class words Closed class words Other
ADJ ADP PUNCT
ADV AUX SYM
INTJ CONJ X
NOUN DET
PROPN NUM
VERB PART
PRON
SCONJ

ADJ: adjective

Definition

Adjectives are words that typically modify nouns and specify their properties or attributes. They may also function as predicates, as in

Машина зеленая “The car is green.”

The ADJ tag is intended for ordinary adjectives only. See DET for determiners and NUM for cardinal numerals.

In accord with the UD approach, adjectival ordinal numerals (первый, седьмой, стопятидесятый)  are tagged as adjectives, although the traditional grammar classifies them as numerals. They behave like adjectives both morphologically and syntactically, with the exception that they cannot be compared and negated.

Most Russian adjectives inflect for ru-feat/Gender (большой – большое – большая) “big”, ru-feat/Number (большой – большие), ru-feat/Case (большой – большого – большому – большим – большом), ru-feat/Degree (большой – больше – наибольший) and Negation (большой – небольшой).

Examples

Border cases

Passive participles lie on the border between verbs and adjectives. Core participial forms (ending in consonant or short vowel) are tagged VERB. Long forms are participial adjectives and they are tagged ADJ. For example:

Only true participles (verbs) can be used to form the passive voice (but it may be sometimes difficult to distinguish from copula constructions, see AUX). On the other hand, the participial adjectives inflect for case and thus can modify nouns.

There is an analogy with some adjectives that preserved so called nominal (short) forms. And these adjectives are not derived from verbs. Example:

Here both groups are ADJ. The nominal forms are used in predication, the standard forms both in predication and to modify nouns.

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ADP: adposition

Definition

Russian has only prepositions but not postpositionsand and circumpositions. They occur before a complement noun phrase (noun, pronoun) and they form a single structure with the complement to express its grammatical and semantic relation to another unit within a clause.

Some prepositions take the form of fixed multiword expressions, e.g. по сравнению с “in comparison with”, в связи с “in connection with”. The component words are then still tagged according to their basic use (по is ADP, сравнению is NOUN, etc.) and their status as multiword expressions are accounted for in the syntactic annotation

Examples

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ADV: adverb

Definition

Adverbs are words that typically modify verbs for such categories as time, place, direction or manner. They may also modify adjectives and other adverbs, as in очень важно  “very significantly” or вероятно неправильно  “provably wrong”.

There is a closed subclass of pronominal adverbs that refer to circumstances in context, rather than naming them directly; similarly to pronouns, these can be categorized as interrogative, relative, demonstrative etc. Pronominal adverbs also get the ADV part-of-speech tag but they are differentiated by additional features.

Note that Russian transgressives (also called adverbial participles) are tagged VERB, not ADV.

Examples

edit ADV

AUX: auxiliary verb

Definition

The only truly auxiliary verb in Russian is быть “to be”. It accompanies the lexical verb of a verb phrase and expresses grammatical distinctions not carried by the lexical verb.

Examples

Russian modal verbs are not considered auxiliary and they are tagged VERB. Their behavior is only slightly different from other content verbs.

edit AUX

CONJ: coordinating conjunction

Definition

A coordinating conjunction is a word that links words or larger constituents without syntactically subordinating one to the other and expresses a semantic relationship between them.

For subordinating conjunctions, see SCONJ.

Examples

edit CONJ

DET: determiner

Definition

Determiners are words that modify nouns or noun phrases and express the reference of the noun phrase in context. That is, a determiner may indicate whether the noun is referring to a definite or indefinite element of a class, to a closer or more distant element, to an element belonging to a specified person or thing, to a particular number or quantity, etc.

An important point to note is that the traditional grammar of Russian does not define determiners as a separate word class. Russian does not have articles. Most determiners are traditionally called pronouns; that is, an UD-conformant annotation of Russian must distinguish between substantive pronouns (UD tag PRON) and attributive pronouns (UD tag DET).

Examples

edit DET

INTJ: interjection

Definition

An interjection is a word that is used most often as an exclamation or part of an exclamation. It typically expresses an emotional reaction, is not syntactically related to other accompanying expressions, and may include a combination of sounds not otherwise found in the language.

Examples

(Note that no direct translation of interjections is possible. The approximate translations below are for orientation purposes and they cannot serve to judge the part of speech from the English perspective.)

edit INTJ

NOUN: noun

Definition

Nouns are a part of speech typically denoting a person, place, thing, animal or idea.

The NOUN tag is intended for common nouns only. See PROPN for proper nouns and PRON for pronouns.

Russian nouns have the lexical feature ru-feat/Gender. Furthermore, the nouns inflect for ru-feat/Number and ru-feat/Case.

A verbal noun can be derived productively from almost every verb (e.g. есть  “to eat” → поедание  “eating”). While in other languages a corresponding form may be called gerund and tagged VERB, in Russian it is tagged NOUN. It has always the neuter gender and the full number-case inflectional paradigm.

Examples

edit NOUN

NUM: numeral

Definition

A numeral is a word, functioning most typically as a determiner, adjective or pronoun, that expresses a number and a relation to the number, such as quantity, sequence, frequency or fraction.

Note that cardinal numerals are covered by NUM whether they are used as determiners or not (as in Windows 7) and whether they are expressed as words (четыре), digits (4) or Roman numerals (IV).

Russian grammar distinguishes several subclasses of pronominal numerals (quantifiers): interrogative and relative (сколько  “how many”); demonstrative (столько  “this many”); indefinite (несколько  “several”). These words behave similarly to (most) cardinal numbers, e.g. they require that the counted noun phrase be in Genitive. They are not similar to adjectives (unlike their English counterparts).

In addition, several types of (non-pronominal) numerals, such as ordinal numerals and multiplicative numerals, are tagged ADJ or ADV, based on their syntactic and morphological behavior.

Examples

Counterexamples

Border cases

edit NUM

PART: particle

Definition

Particles are function words that must be associated with another word or phrase to impart meaning and that do not satisfy definitions of other universal parts of speech (e.g. adpositions, coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions or auxiliary verbs). Particles may encode grammatical categories such as negation, mood, tense etc. Russian particles are not inflected.

Note that response words such as да  “yes”, нет  “no”, etc. are considered particles in the PDT tagset but they should be retagged as interjections under the UD standard.

Examples

edit PART

PRON: pronoun

Definition

Pronouns are words that substitute for nouns or noun phrases, whose meaning is recoverable from the linguistic or extralinguistic context.

Pronouns under this definition function like nouns. Note that Russian grammar traditionally extends the term pronoun to words that substitute for adjectives. Such words are not tagged PRON under our universal scheme. They are tagged as determiners in order to annotate the same thing same way across languages.

For instance, ‘это  “this” is traditionally called pronoun in Russian grammar, regardless of context (the notion of determiners does not exist in Russian grammar). To make the annotation parallel across languages, it should be now tagged PRON in Я видел это вчера.  “I saw this yesterday.” and DET in Я видел эту машину вчера.  “I saw this car yesterday.”

Examples

edit PRON

PROPN: proper noun

Definition

A proper noun is a noun that is the name of a specific individual, place, or object. Russian proper nouns are always written starting with an uppercase letter.

Single-word named entities should be tagged PROPN though they originate from a common noun (Грязь) (village) or an adjective (Белая) (river). Even if they were originally adjectives and inflect according to adjectival paradigms, they behave syntactically as nouns. For instance, Белая  (a river in Bashkortostan) is originally feminine form of the adjective белый  “warm” but as a geographical name, it is a noun. It denotes a concrete location (rather than a property of somebody/something) and its feminine gender is fixed (while adjectives have forms in all three genders).

Note that adjectives derived from geographical names (русский, английский  “Russian, English”) are written in lowercase and are not tagged PROPN.

Personal names are typically treated as a sequence of proper nouns (one or more given names and one or more surnames). If the name contains prepositions, conjunctions or articles (foreign names), these are tagged as ADP, CONJ and DET, respectively.

Russian (and other Slavic) multi-word named entities have internal syntactic structure, which is preserved in the annotation. The headword is always noun and there may be other nouns involved. They will be tagged either PROPN or NOUN and possible ambiguities must be resolved individually. Modifying adjectives are never tagged PROPN. Even if an adjective is the first word of a multi-word name, and thus it starts with an uppercase letter, it is still tagged ADJ. Similarly, function words in named entities retain their normal tags. These rules are less strict for foreign named entities where the original part of speech is hidden for a Russian speaker.

Examples

edit PROPN

PUNCT: punctuation

Definition

Punctuation marks are non-alphabetical characters and character groups used to delimit linguistic units in printed text.

Punctuation is not taken to include logograms such as $, %, and §, which are instead tagged as SYM.

Examples

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SCONJ: subordinating conjunction

Definition

A subordinating conjunction is a conjunction that links constructions by making one of them a constituent of the other. The subordinating conjunction typically marks the incorporated constituent which has the status of a (subordinate) clause.

For coordinating conjunctions, see CONJ.

Examples

edit SCONJ

SYM: symbol

Definition

A symbol is a word-like entity that differs from ordinary words by form, function, or both.

Many symbols are or contain special non-alphanumeric characters, similarly to punctuation. What makes them different from punctuation is that they can be substituted by normal words. This involves all currency symbols, e.g. $ 75 is identical to seventy-five dollars.

Mathematical operators form another group of symbols.

Another group of symbols is emoticons and emoji.

Strings that consists entirely of alphanumeric characters are not symbols but they may be proper nouns: 130XE, DC10; others may be tagged PROPN (rather than SYM) even if they contain special characters: DC-10. Similarly, abbreviations for single words are not symbols but are assigned the part of speech of the full form. For example, Mr. (mister), kg (kilogram), km (kilometr), dr (doktor) should be tagged nouns. Acronyms for proper names such as OSN and NATO should be tagged as proper nouns.

Characters used as bullets in itemized lists (•, ‣) are not symbols, they are punctuation.

Examples

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VERB: verb

Definition

A verb is a member of the syntactic class of words that typically signal events and actions, can constitute a minimal predicate in a clause, and govern the number and types of other constituents which may occur in the clause.

Note that the VERB tag covers main verbs (content verbs), modal verbs and copulas but it does not cover auxiliary verbs, for which there is the AUX tag. (Russian modal verbs are not considered auxiliary.) See the description of AUX for more information on the borderline between VERB and AUX.

Czech verbs can take the following morphological forms:

There are participial forms that are tagged as adjectives (ADJ) rather than verbs. See below for examples.

A verbal noun can be derived productively from almost every verb (e.g. есть  “to eat” → поедание  “eating”). While in other languages a corresponding form may be called gerund and tagged VERB, in Russian it is tagged NOUN. It has always the neuter ru-feat/Gender and it inflects for ru-feat/Number and ru-feat/Case.

Examples

Border cases

There are passive participles as verb forms (VERB) and participial adjectives (ADJ). For example:

Their meaning is almost identical but the usage slightly varies. Both groups can be used in nominal predication with copula. Only true participles (verbs) can be used to form the passive voice (but it may be sometimes difficult to distinguish from copula constructions, see AUX). On the other hand, the participial adjectives inflect for case and thus can modify nouns.

There is an analogy with some adjectives that preserved so called nominal (short) forms. And these adjectives are not derived from verbs. Example:

Here both groups are ADJ. The nominal forms are used in predication, the standard forms both in predication and to modify nouns.

edit VERB

X: other

Definition

The tag X is used for words that for some reason cannot be assigned a real part-of-speech category.

A special usage of X is for cases of code-switching where it is not possible (or meaningful) to analyze the intervening language grammatically (and where the dependency relation foreign is typically used in the syntactic analysis). This rarely applies to the PDT data where many foreign words are tagged with their original part of speech.

Even if foreign words are tagged X, this usage does not extend to ordinary loan words which should be assigned a normal part-of-speech. For example, in Он надел килт  “He put on kilt”, килт is an ordinary NOUN.

Examples

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