Morphology
Uralic languages have rich morphology. The parts-of-speech used are mapped to UD following common linguistic practices. There is a number of language-specific features that arch over most of the Uralic languages but are not found in many others, e.g. IE languages.
These pages detail the best common practices we found so far, so suggested practices for new treebanks but especially if your language has examples that you’d think deviate from our descrptions, please describe this in your language-specific documentation and file a github issue.
Lemma field
Following the universal principle, lemma field should be filled with dictionary entry form, as is with existing Uralic treebanks. If no common practice exists within a language, singular nominatives for nominals and an infinitive or third person singular presen for verbs is suggested. For lexeme sets with limited inflection, e.g. adpositions with three case series, it is common to use the inflected form as lemma, especially if the etymological nominative is highly theoretical.
Parts-of-Speech
The common parts of speech are used as defined in Universal part of the standard without large changes: VERB, NOUN, PROPN, ADJ, ADV, ADP, SYM, PUNCT, INTJ and X should follow the universal guidelines. For determiners DET and auxiliaries AUX are not so common in Uralic grammars and have been described below, particles PART are used in UD in more limited form than in some Uralic grammars and are also detailed below.
Determiners? (DET)
Most Uralic languages do not have determiners (DET) at least not in the sense of articles (apart Hungarians and…), however, there are open questions whether to use a certain sub-set of pronouns etc., that modify nouns in agreement. Most traditional grammars would not talk about determiners in Uralic languages.
Examples
- [fi] se talo “the house”
Auxiliaries? (AUX)
Auxiliaries are not often used as a part-of-speech in traditional Uralic grammars, however, they are used in existing Uralic treebanks. It is suggested to use auxiliaries for copula verbs, verbs involved in temporal constructions like pluperfect and verbs that are used for habitive constructions. It is also possible to include all modal verbs into auxiliaries.
Examples
- [fi] olen tehnyt “ I have done”
- [fi] minulla on … “ I have a …
- [fi] täytyy tehdä “must do”
Particles? (PART)
Various Uralic grammars have used particle (PART) category as a left-over class for hard-to-classify, in some grammars and traditions this class has been subsumed by adverbs, and partially by interjections. In most Uralic treebanks we avoid particles, usually interjections or adverbs are more suitable categories.
Features
Uralic universal annotations make use of lexical, inflectional and layered features. Many of lexical and inflectional features follow Universal definitions closely, e.g. most sub-classes of parts of speech (lexical) and inflectional affixes mapping to features or layered features. Some inflectional affixes, such as discourse particle enclitics are hard to map to anything in Universal Dependencies scheme.
Most basic things like nominal cases and numbers follow Universal conventions. Tense and mood as well as aspect may require some language specific values not seen in other languages.
Possessive suffixes
Most Uralic languages use possessive suffix morphology to describe possession, rather than specific verbs. The feature to use with the possessive suffixes are:
- Number[psor] and Person[psor] for possessive suffixes marking possessor and
- Number[psed] and Person[psed] for possessive suffixes marking possessed quantities and references.
Values are same as with Number and Person in universal features.
Negation
Many uralic languages mark negation in verb forms with special suffixes and/or have a specific negation verb, that inflects like a regular verb. This is marked with Polarity feature and value Negative.
Non-finite verb forms
Many Uralic languages have large verbal paradigms with number of non-finite forms. The suggested analysis are to use feature [VerbForm] values Part, Inf, Ger, Sup with Tense, Case and others (e.g. as normal with nouns and adjectives when infinitives and participles act as deverbal nouns and adjectives respectively).