Difference between revisions of "NP-POS"

Revision as of 05:58, 9 February 2010

NP-POS is the phrase-level tag for genitive NPs which occur within other NPs. It does *not* occur at the IP level of structure.

All genitive nouns which occur within another NP, e.g. possessors, project an "NP-POS", whether or not they are single words. This is consistent with the standard of the York Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE) and the PPCME2 with respect to postnominal possessors, though those corpora differ from ours w.r.t. prenominal possessors. In the Icelandic corpus, prenominal possessors also project their own "NP-POS", consistent with the conventions in Caitlin Light's corpus of Early New High German.

Since the distinction between genitives of possession and other genitive constructions is not always clear in Icelandic, we do not try to distinguish the two: all genitive NPs occurring within another NP are labelled NP-POS, whether or not they are truly possessive. For NP complements of N which have other case-marking, see NP-COM.

So, for clause level genitive NPs:

(NP-OBJ (N-...G..) )

And for genitives within another NP:

(NP-POS (N-...G..) )

In both cases, genitive Case is indicated on the word-level dash-tag.

At the IP level, NPs are tagged for their grammatical relation, e.g. NP-SBJ, NP-OB1, not for their Case, so "NP-GEN" does not occur in the corpus.

Note applying to Determiners, Adjectives, Nominals: we have adopted, across the board, a policy of tagging Case on the word-level, but not on the phrase level (grammatical relations are tagged on the phrase level). So if you are searching for Subject, Object, etc., search for the phrase labels, but if you search for Case, you'll have to indicate the appropriate word-level tag.

Genitive/possessive structures can also be recursive, of course. According to the general policy, we try to minimize the amount of structure that individual words project where possible, even though genitive nouns within another NP always project at least one NP-POS. Thus, in the case of recursive genitive structures, there is a top-level NP-POS, which immediately dominates a genitive noun and another NP-POS (i.e., the embedded NP-POS and genitive noun are sisters), and so on, as in the following example:

(NP-VOC (N-MSNIC dalur-dalur)
	(NP-POS (N-FSGIC fósturjarðar-fósturjörð)
		(NP-POS (PRO-QFSG minnar-minn))))

Note that there will be some possessive pronouns which are not genitive, but still project an NP-POS for the sake of parallelism, as in the example below:

( (IP-MAT (CONJ og-og)
	  (NP-SBJ *con*)
	  (HVD-IA3SD hafði-hafa)
	  (ADVP (ADV mest-meira))
	  (NP-OB1 (NS-NPAIC mök-mök))
	  (PP (P-A við-við)
	      (NP (NP-POS (PRO-QMPA sína-sinn))
		  (NS-MPAIC sveitunga-sveitungi)))
	  (. .-.)))