UD for Mbyá Guaraní 
This is a brief overview of the UD annotation for Mbyá Guaraní. A full set of annotation guidelines can be downloaded at gpythomas.com/Mbya_Treebank_Guidelines.pdf and will be incorporated into the UD Mbya_Guarani documentation in the next release.
These guidelines are very much a work in progress. They are meant to adapt Dooley’s (2015) analysis of Mbyá to the UD framework:
- Dooley, Robert A. (2015). Léxico Guarani, Dialeto Mbyá – com informações úteis para o ensino médio, a aprendizagem e a pesquisa lingüística Brasília, Brazil: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Tokenization and Word Segmentation
-
In general, words are delimited by white spaces or punctuation, Whitespaces or punctuation may appear in some abbreviations or numeric expressions.
-
In order to capture interactions between syntax and morphology, clause level nominalizers (including the suffix -a) and adverbializers (including the switch reference markers vy and ramo) have been represented as syntactic words.
-
Glottal stops are represented by the apostrophe, which can therefore be part of a word. Reduplicated units are joined to their host by a hyphen.
Morphology
Tags
- Mbyá uses all 17 Universal POS categories:
| Open class words | Closed class words | Other |
|---|---|---|
| ADJ | ADP | PUNCT |
| ADV | AUX | SYM |
| INTJ | CCONJ | X |
| NOUN | DET | |
| PROPN | NUM | |
| VERB | PART | |
| PRON | ||
| SCONJ |
- The language specific tagset (XPOS) is mapped to universal POS categories as follows:
| XPOS | UPOS | XPOSDescription |
|---|---|---|
| aspprt | PART | aspect particle |
| coordconn | CCONJ/ADV | coordinating conjunction |
| dem | ADV/DET/PRON | demonstrative |
| discprt | PART | discourse particle |
| focprt | PART | focus particle |
| for | X | foreign token (not code-switching or loan) |
| illocprt | PART | illocutionary particle |
| inact | ADJ/ADV/NOUN/VERB | intransitive verb: inactive |
| indfpro | PRON | indefinite pronoun |
| interj | INTJ | interjection |
| interrog | PRON | interrogative pro-form |
| intermod | ADV | interrogative modifier |
| interpron | PRON | interrogative pronoun |
| intprt | PART | interrogative particle |
| mod | ADJ/ADV | modifier |
| modprt | PART | modal particle |
| n | NOUN | noun |
| n:pred | VERB | nominal predicate |
| negprt | PART | negative particle |
| nmlzer | SCONJ | nominalizer |
| nprop | PROPN | proper noun |
| num | NUM | numeral |
| onom | INTJ | onomatopeia |
| post | ADP/SCONJ | postposition |
| pro | PRON | personal pronoun |
| prov | VERB | pro-verb |
| ptcp | ADJ/VERB | participle |
| punct | PUNCT | punctuation |
| qprt | PART | quantificational particle |
| quant | ADV/DET/PRON | quantifier |
| quantprt | PART | quantificational particle |
| rel | SCONJ | relativizer |
| subordconn | SCONJ | subordinating conjunction |
| temprt | PART | temporal particle |
| univpro | PRON | universal pronoun |
| v | AUX/VERB | verb |
| vd | VERB | ditransitive verb |
| vd:a | VERB | indirect transitive verb: active |
| vd:i | VERB | indirect transitive verb: inactive |
| vi | ADJ/VERB/AUX | intransitive verb |
| vi:a | ADJ/VERB | intransitive verb: active |
| vpos | VERB | postposed verb |
| vs | VERB | serial verb |
| vt | VERB | transitive verb |
Features
-
Verbs are inflected for person, number and clusivity:
-
Verbs have a subcategorization feature Subcat with four possible values:
Ditr(ansitive),Intr(ansitive),Indir(ect) andTran(sitive). -
Verbs have a VerbForm feature with five possible values:
Fin(ite),Inf(inite),Part(iciple),Post(posed verb),Prov(erb),Ser(ial),Vnoun(verbal noun). -
Verbs have an optional Mood feature with three possible values:
Des(iderative),Ind(icative),Imp(erative). -
Verbs have an optional Polarity feature with one possible value,
Neg. -
Nouns can be used as predicates without copula, and inflect for person, number and clusivity like inactive intransitive verbs. They have Person, Number and Clusitivity features.
-
Pronouns have a PronType feature with seven possible values:
Add,Dem,Ind,Int,Neg,Prs,Tot.- The feature value
PronType=Addhas been added for additive pronouns that are unspecified for definiteness (e.g. amboae, ‘another’ or ‘the other’)
- The feature value
Syntax
Core Arguments, Oblique Arguments and Adjuncts
-
Subjects are noun phrases without postpositions that are the sole cross-referenced argument of intransitive verbs, or the argument of transitive verbs that is cross-referenced with an active agreement marker.
-
Objects are noun phrases without postpositions that are cross-referenced on transitive verbs with inactive agreement markers. They may be followed by a differential object marker.
-
Postpositional noun phrases are considered oblique.
Non-verbal Clauses
- Mbyá Guaraní is an omnipredicative language. Nouns and other non-verbal open word classes can be used predicatively without copula. In certain environments, non-verbal predicates are introduced by the copula iko.
Language Specific Syntactic Relations
- There are 6 relation subtypes in UD Mbya_Guarani:
| Relation | Description |
|---|---|
| advmod:sentcon | Adverbial modifier used as sentence initial discourse connective |
| dep:mod | Modifier underspecified for the syntactic category of its head |
| compound:svc | Used for a variety of complex predicates, notably serial verb and postposed verb constructions |
| dislocated:cleft | Used for cleft constructions that lack a copula |
| obl:sentcon | Nominal modifier used as a sentence initial discourse connective |
| parataxis:rep | Used to relate a reported speech form to a verb of speech report analyzed as its head |
Treebanks
There are 2 Mbyá Guaraní treebanks: