Polarity: polarity
| Values: | Neg | Pos |
Polarity is typically a feature of verbs,
adjectives, sometimes also adverbs and
nouns in languages that negate using bound
morphemes.
In languages that negate using a function word, Polarity is used to mark
that function word, unless it is a pro-form already marked with
PronType=Neg (see below).
Positive polarity (affirmativeness) is rarely, if at all, encoded using overt
morphology. The feature value Polarity=Pos is usually used to signal that a lemma
has negative forms but this particular form is not negative. Using the feature
in such cases is somewhat optional for words that can be negated but rarely are.
For instance, all Czech verbs and adjectives can be negated using the prefix
ne-. In theory, all nouns can be negated too, with the meaning “anything
except the entities denotable by the original noun”. However, negated nouns
are rare and it is not necessary to annotate every positive noun with
Polarity=Pos. Language-specific documentation should define under which
circumstances the positive polarity is annotated.
In English, verbs are negated using the particle not and adjectives are also negated using prefixes, although the process is less productive than in Czech (wise – unwise, probable – improbable).
Note that Polarity=Neg is not the same thing as
PronType=Neg. For pronouns and other pronominal parts of speech
there is no such binary opposition as for verbs and adjectives. (There
is no such thing as “affirmative pronoun”.)
The Polarity feature can be also used to distinguish response
interjections yes and no.
Pos: positive, affirmative
Examples
- [cs] přišel “he came”
- [cs] velký “big”
- [en] yes
Neg: negative
Examples
- [cs] nepřišel “he did not come”
- [cs] nevelký “not big”
- [en] not
- [en] no as in no, I don’t think so; but not as in we have no bananas
Polarity in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [el] [et] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gd] [gub] [hy] [pcm] [qpm] [ru] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urj]