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UD for Italian

Tokenization and Word Segmentation

• Words are delimited by whitespaces, with some exceptions reported below:
  • in Italian orthography, punctuation marks are usually attached to a neighboring word (typically the preceding one). They are tokenized as separate tokens with the only exception of abbreviations and numerical expressions (see below);
  • numerical expressions (including dates) are treated as single words and may contain punctuation: 1.1.1970, or 1/1/1970, 11:00, 2,5%, 2-3;
  • abbreviations are treated as single words and may contain punctuation, both word-internal (e.g. U.S.A.) and word-final (etc.);
  • multi-word tokens are used for the following cases: 1) prepositions combined with the definite article, e.g. nella “in the” (feminine), del “of the” (masculine); 2) clitic pronouns (both accusative and dative) appear as enclitics attached to the verb when used in imperative or non-finite moods, e.g. dammelo “give-to me-it”, fallo “do-it”, mangiandolo “eating-it”, leggerlo “to read-it”.

Morphology

Tags

• Italian uses all 17 universal tags.
• The use of PART is limited to possessive markers in English names: [en] ‘s. Examples: Wendy ‘s, McDonald ‘s.
• The tag AUX is used to mark the following cases:
  • the copular verb essere “be”, which in Italian is the only verb that can be a copula;
  • tense auxiliaries, used to form compound tenses represented by avere “to have” and essere “to be”;
  • passive auxiliaries, used to form passive verb forms represented by essere “to be” and venire lit. “to come”;
  • auxiliaries used for the progressive form, represented by stare followed by a gerund, e.g. sto arrivando “I am coming”;
  • modal verbs, e.g. potere “can”, dovere “must”, volere “want”.

  The language-specific part-of-speech tag is VM for modal verbs, VA for the auxiliary verbs and V for copulas.

• The tag DET is used for determiners that modify nouns or noun phrases and express the reference of the noun phrase in context. In Italian this tag is used for: articles, predeterminers (e.g. Tutti gli amici “All the friends”) and different types of adjectives playing the determiner function (i.e. possessive mio padre “my father”, demonstrative questo libro “this book”, interrogative , indefinite, exclamative, relative che libro “which book”). Like adjectives, Italian determiners typically agree with the noun they modify for gender and number, e.g. questo libro “this book” (masculin singular), i libri “the books” (masculin plural), la carta “the paper” (feminine singular).

  In Italian, usually a nominal allows for one DET modifier only, with the following exceptions:

  • predeterminers;
  • possessive adjectives, as in la mia macchina lit. “the my car”, la figlia mia lit. “the daughter my”.
• The tag PRON is used for words that substitute nouns or noun phrases, whose meaning is recoverable from the linguistic or extralinguistic context. Specializations of pronouns, corresponding to different language specific PoS, can be recovered by combining PoS information with the values of the PronType feature (see below).
• Verbal participles (both present and past) when used attributively are generally tagged as ADJ.

Features

• Nouns have inherent Gender (Masc or Fem) and inflect for Number (Sing or Plur).
• Verbs inflect for Mood (indicative, imperative, conditional, subjunctive); for Tense (past, present, future or imperfect). There are three types of nonfinite forms: infinitives, participles (present and past), and gerund VerbForm.
• Adjectives agree with nouns (in both attributive and predicate position) with respect to the features Gender and Number. In addition, many adjectives inflect for Degree (comparative and superlative).
• Adverbs inflect only for Degree.
• Pronouns, determiners, pronominal numerals (quantifiers) and pronominal adverbs may be further specified by the PronType feature. The boolean feature Reflex applies to reflexive pronouns. The value Clitic is used for marking clitic pronouns;
• Determiners agree with nouns in the same way as adjectives. They can be definite or indefinite Definite.

Syntax

In Italian, UD relations that can designate core arguments are nsubj, obj and iobj for nominal arguments, and ccomp, xcomp and csubj for clausal arguments. In particular:

• in Italian, core arguments always appear as bare nominals with no adposition;
• relative order of core arguments: although the linear order of elements in a sentence is not rigidly defined, Italian nsubj and obj relations show preferences about their position with respect to the governing verb. Italian is a SVO language, which means that nsubj typically occurs in pre-verbal position, while obj’s canonical position is usually post-verbal;
• nsubj agrees in number and person with the governing verb. Consider as an example the sentence Al balcone si affacciano donne anziane “old women overlook the balcony” where the nominal subject is represented as nsubj(affacciano, donne).
• the nsubj role is only applied to semantic arguments of a predicate. When there is an empty argument in a grammatical subject position (sometimes called a pleonastic or expletive), it is labeled as an expl subtype, i.e.:
  • expl:impers, marking the impersonal use of clitic pronouns (used as an undefined subject), e.g. Si può procedere “we can proceed” expl:impers(procedere, si);
  • expl:pass, marking passive constructions, e.g. domani si apre la mostra “tomorrow the exhibition opens” expl:pass(aprire,si);
• Italian is a pro-drop language, thus subjects can be omitted: the features of the subject can be inferred from the inflectional morphological features associated with the verb;
• iobj refers to the indirect object of a verb only when realized as a dative pronominal clitic complement. In Italian iobj only appears in the form of a clitic pronoun, as in dovranno cercarsi un lavoro “(they) will have to look for a job” with iobj(cercare,si). When the indirect object is realized as a prepositional phrase, it is labeled as obl (e.g. Dare a qualcuno qualcosa, “give something to someone”, obl(dare,qualcuno)).

Dependency analysis of clitic pronouns

• Clitics are a subtype of the class of personal pronouns, differing from tonic personal pronouns in many respects. While tonic personal and clitic pronouns are rather uniform in their functional and referential characteristics, they are clearly differentiated on the morphological and syntactic levels. In Italian, the dependency relations used to annotate clitics are obj, iobj (see above), expl, expl:impers (see above) and expl:pass. In particular:
  • Whenever possible, clitic pronouns are assigned a label that reflects their grammatical function. For this reason, if the pronoun appears in a reflexive construction of a transitive or intransitive active verb, then it’s treated as dobj or iobj (see above). The dobj relation is used to mark real reflexive constructions where the clitic pronoun is a direct object of the verb, e.g. la bambina si lava “the girl washes herself” dobj(lavare,si);
  • clitics can also be used to mark passive and impersonal constructions: see the relation subtypes expl:pass and expl:impers, exemplified above;
  • expl is used for expletive or pleonastic nominals (nominal core arguments of a predicate but which do not themselves satisfy any of the semantic roles of the predicate), as in pronominal verbs where clitics do not have a semantic role, such as rompersi “break” or vergognarsi “feel ashamed”.

Copula

• The only copular verb for Italian is the verb essere “to be”. It is used in equational, attributional, locative, possessive and benefactory nonverbal clauses, as detailed below.

  • Equation
    Loro sono amici “they are friends”
    cop(amici,sono)
    nsubj(amici,loro)
  • Attribution
    I cinque sarebbero tutti immigrati clandestini “The five would all be illegal immigrants”
    cop(immigrati,sarebbero)
    nsubj(immigrati,cinque)
  • Location
    Anna è a Roma “Anna is in Rome”
    cop(Roma,è)
    nsubj(Roma,Anna)
    case(Roma,in)
  • Possession
    La scultura è del pachistano Hamad Butt “The sculpture is by the Pakistani Hamad Butt”
    cop(pachistano,è)
    nsubj(pachistano,scultura)
    case(pachistano,di)
  • Benefactory
    Il libro è per Anna “The book is for Anna”
    cop(Anna,è)
    nsubj(Anna,libro)
    case(Anna,per)
• There are cases where the verb essere is not marked as copula, thus becoming the main verb of the clause. This analysis is generally adopted in the following cases:
  • presentational or existential constructions E.g. Vi sono migliaia di casi di questo genere “there are thousands of cases of this type”
    expl(sono,Vi)
    nsubj(sono,migliaia)
    root(ROOT,sono)
  • when the argument of the verb essere is a subordinate clause E.g. La verità è che la spesa sanitaria sta esplodendo “the truth is that that health spending is exploding”
    nsubj(è,verità)
    root(ROOT,è)
    ccomp(è,esplodendo)
• The following subtypes are used in Italian:
  • acl:relcl for relative clauses
  • aux:pass for passive auxiliaries
  • csubj:pass for clausal subjects of passive verbs
  • det:poss possessive determiner
  • det:predet appears in front of another determiner
  • discourse:emo emoticons/emojis and other pictographic elements
  • expl:impers for impersonal clitics
  • expl:pass for reflexive clitics in reflexive passives
  • flat:foreign for non-first words in quoted foreign phrases
  • flat:name for proper names
  • nsubj:pass for nominal subjects of passive verbs
  • obl:agent for agents of passive verbs
  • parataxis:appos appositive sentences
  • parataxis:discourse semantically-void sentences used as discourse markers
  • parataxis:hashtag hashtags that are not syntactically integrated into the sentence
  • parataxis:insert parenthetical clauses that cannot be considered independent from the governing predicate
  • parataxis:nsubj paratactic sentences with an implicit nsubj role with respect to the governing predicate
  • parataxis:obj the paratactic sentence is an object (often used with direct speech)
  • vocative:mention Twitter @-mentions, when they are not syntactically integrated into the sentence

Treebanks

There are five Italian UD treebanks:

• ISDT
• PARTUT
• POSTWITA
• PUD
• VIT

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