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UD for Basque

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 normally tokenize them as separate tokens (words); exceptions include hyphenated compounds such as bat-batean “suddenly”, which are kept as a single token.
• There are no multiword tokens and no words with spaces. For more details, see tokenization.

Morphology

Tags

This is an overview only. For more detailed discussion and examples, see the list of Basque POS tags and Basque features.

• All 17 universal POS categories, including particles (PART), are relevant for Basque. However, the current data does not distinguish coordinating and subordinating conjunctions. All conjunctions are tagged CCONJ and the SCONJ tag is not used at present.
• Only a relatively small subset of Basque verbs have the full morphological paradigm. Some of them can be used as auxiliaries (AUX) to provide finite features to the other verbs. A typical sentence thus contains a lexical verb in a non-finite form (participle), accompanied by one or more auxiliaries. With non-verbal predicates, one of the auxiliaries acts as a copula.
  • izan (“to be”) (example forms da, zen, izan, dira, ziren, izango, dela, den)
  • egon (“to be, to stay”) (example forms dago, zegoen, daude, egon, dagoela, zeuden, egongo, dagoen)
  • ukan (example forms du, dute, dugu, zuen, dut, ditu, duen, duela)
  • *edun (the lemma is reconstructed but not attested; example forms zuen, du, dute, zuten, ditu, zituen, zion, dituzte)
  • *edin (the lemma is reconstructed but not attested; example forms daiteke, dadin, daitezke, daitezkeen, daitekeela, liteke, baliteke, litekeena)
  • *ezan (the lemma is reconstructed but not attested; example forms dezake, dezagun, dezan, itzazu, ezazu, ditzakete, dezakete, dezakeen)
  • ari (uninflected)
• There are three main (de)verbal forms, distinguished by the value of the VerbForm feature:
  • Participle Part, tagged VERB or AUX, is also the citation form (lemma) of the verb.
  • Infinitive Inf, tagged VERB or AUX.
  • Finite verb Fin, tagged VERB or AUX.

Nominal Features

• Nouns (NOUN) have an inherent Animacy feature with one of two values: Anim and Inan.
  • Some finite verb forms (VERB, AUX) inflect for Animacy because they must agree with nouns.
  • Occasionally the animates are further split to the masculine and feminine Gender, but in most situations, gender is not grammatically relevant.
• The two main values of the Number feature are Sing and Plur. The following parts of speech inflect for number: NOUN, PROPN, PRON, ADJ, DET, VERB, AUX (finite, participles and converbs), marginally NUM.
• Definiteness (Definite) is marked morphologically on nouns and other nominal words. Only the definite forms distinguish Number.
• Case has 15 possible values: Abs, Erg, Gen, Dat, Ins, Par, Loc, Lat, Abl, Ine, All, Ben, Cau, Com, Ess. It occurs with the nominal words, i.e., NOUN, PROPN, PRON, ADJ, DET, NUM. It normally marked at the end of a noun phrase, that is, if a noun is post-modified by an adjective, the case suffix and the feature will appear on the adjective but not on the noun.

Degree and Polarity

• Degree applies to adjectives (ADJ) and has one of three possible values: Cmp, Sup, Abs.
• Polarity has two values, Pos and Neg. The most frequent is Polarity=Neg with the negative particle ez (“not”). However, the feature also occurs with some verbs and auxiliaries.

Verbal Features

• Aspect has four possible values: imperfective (Imp), perfective (Perf), progressive (Prog), prospective (Prosp). Perfective and prospective are two different forms of participles (izan vs. izango), while the progressive denotes a subset of the finite forms.
  • There is no tense feature. Basque clauses express aspect rather than tense; although there is a correlation, perfective forms are likely to be used in past contexts, prospective in future contexts.
• Finite verbs always have one of five values of Mood: Ind, Imp, Cnd, Sub, Pot.
• There are morphologically marked causative verbs, which is annotated as the Voice feature (Voice=Cau). The default form is left unannotated, i.e., Voice=Act is not used. There is no passive form.
• Layered features are used to cross-reference features of core arguments of the verb:
  • Person[abs], Number[abs] and Polite[abs] express the person, number and politeness of the absolutive argument (subject of intransitive verbs, object of transitive verbs).
  • Person[erg], Number[erg], Gender[erg] and Polite[erg] express the person, number, gender and politeness of the ergative argument (subject of transitive and some intransitive verbs).
  • Person[dat], Number[dat], Gender[dat] and Polite[dat] express the person, number, gender and politeness of the dative argument (subject of some verbs and object of some other verbs).

Pronouns, Determiners, Quantifiers

• PronType is used with pronouns (PRON) and adverbs (ADV). Currently it only distinguishes personal pronouns and interrogatives.
• NumType is used with numerals (NUM, NumType=Card) and adjectives (ADJ, NumType=Ord).
• Person is a lexical feature of personal pronouns (PRON) and has three values, 1, 2 and 3.
  • As a cross-reference to core arguments, person is also marked on finite verbs (VERB, AUX). However, layered features are used there to distinguish which argument is being referenced.

Syntax

This is an overview only. For more detailed discussion and examples, see the list of Basque relations.

Core Arguments, Oblique Arguments and Adjuncts

• Nominal subject (nsubj) is a noun phrase in the absolutive, ergative or dative case, without preposition.
  • Intransitive predicates typically have absolutive subjects, but some of them have ergative or dative subjects.
  • For transitive predicates that take ergative and absolutive/dative, the ergative argument is the subject.
  • For transitive predicates that take dative and absolutive, the dative argument is the subject.
  • A finite subordinate clause may serve as the subject and is labeled csubj.
• For transitive predicates, the other argument (the one that is not subject according to the above rules) is the direct object (obj).
• Ditransitive predicates take three arguments (ergative, dative, and absolutive). Here the dative argument is labeled as indirect object (iobj).

Relations Overview

• The only subtype currently used in the Basque treebank (since UD 2.11) is nsubj:outer for outer subjects in non-verbal clauses where the non-verbal predicate is a nested clause.
• The following relation types are not used in Basque at all: clf, dislocated, expl

Treebanks

There is 1 Basque UD treebank:

• Basque-BDT

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