P5: Linee guida per la codifica e l'interscambio del testo elettronico

17.1 Linguistic Segment CategoriesTEI: Linguistic Segment Categories¶

These elements are also all members of the model.segLike class, which is a subclass of model.phrase. They may thus appear anywhere that text is permitted within a document, when the module defined by this chapter is included in a schema.

Clauses may be further divided into phr elements in the same way. A text may be segmented directly into clauses, or into phrases, with no need to include segmentation at a higher level as well.

The type attribute on linguistic segment categories can be used to provide additional interpretative information about the category. The function attribute on the cl and phr elements can be used to provide additional information about the function of the category. Legal values for these two attributes are not defined by these Guidelines, but should be documented in the segmentation element of the encodingDesc element within the document's header. A general approach to the encoding of linguistic categories for parts of a text is discussed in section 17.4 Linguistic Annotation below.

This style of markup may introduce spurious new lines and blanks into the text. If the original layout is important, it should be explicitly encoded, using such facilities as the lb element, the global rend or rendition attributes, etc.

The w, m, and c elements are also identical in meaning to the seg element with a type attribute of ‘w’, ‘m’, or ‘c’, and may occur wherever seg is permitted to occur. However, they have more restricted content models than does seg: for example, the w element should only contain w, m, and c elements, or plain text; the m element should contain only c elements or plain text; the c element should contain only plain text, most often only a single character or a sequence of graphemes to be treated as a single character. Consequently, while these more specific elements can be translated directly into typed seg elements, the reverse is not necessarily the case.

This segmentation, crude as it is, succeeds in representing the idea that did occurs as a word inside the word didn't. A further advantage of segmenting the text down to this level is that it becomes relatively simple to associate each such segment with a more detailed formal analysis. This matter is taken up in detail in section 17.4 Linguistic Annotation.

17.2 Global Attributes for Simple AnalysesTEI: Global Attributes for Simple Analyses¶

17.3 Spans and InterpretationsTEI: Spans and Interpretations¶

Note the use of an empty anchor element to provide a target for the ‘reconciliation’ unit which is normally part of the narrative pattern but which is not realized in the text shown.

The same analysis may be expressed with the interp element instead of the span element; this element provide attributes for recording an interpretive category and its value, as well as the identity of the interpreter, but does not itself indicate which passage of text is being interpreted; the same interpretive structures can thus be associated with many passages of the text. The association between text passages and interp elements must be made either by pointing from the text to the interp element with the ana attribute defined in section 17.2 Global Attributes for Simple Analyses, or by pointing at both text and interpretation from a link element, as described in chapter 16 Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment.

One obvious advantage of using interp rather than span elements for the Sigmund text is that the interp elements can be reused for marking up other texts in the same document, whereas the span elements cannot. Another is that the interp element can be used to provide interpretations for discontinuous text elements (represented by join elements). On the other hand, the use of interp elements may require the creation of special text elements not otherwise needed (e.g. the seg and the join in the revised encoding of the text), whereas the use of span elements does not.

17.4 Linguistic AnnotationTEI: Linguistic Annotation¶

By linguistic annotation we mean here any annotation determined by an analysis of linguistic features of the text, excluding as borderline cases both the formal structural properties of the text (e.g. its division into chapters or paragraphs) and descriptive information about its context (the circumstances of its production, its genre or medium). The structural properties of any TEI-conformant text should be represented using the structural elements discussed elsewhere in this chapter and in chapters 3 Elements Available in All TEI Documents, 4 Default Text Structure, and the various chapters of Part III. The contextual properties of a TEI text are fully documented in the TEI Header, which is discussed in chapter 2 The TEI Header, and in section 15.2 Contextual Information.

Other forms of linguistic annotation may be applied at a number of levels in a text. A code (such as a word-class or part-of-speech code) may be associated with each word or token, or with groups of such tokens, which may be continuous, discontinuous, or nested. A code may also be associated with relationships (such as cohesion) perceived as existing between distinct parts of a text. The codes themselves may stand for discrete and non-decomposable categories, or they may represent highly articulated bundles of textual features. Their function may be to place the annotated part of the text somewhere within a narrowly linguistic or discoursal domain of analysis, or within a more general semantic field, or any combination drawn from these and other domains.

The manner by which such annotations are generated and attached to the text may be entirely automatic, entirely manual or a mixture. The ease and accuracy with which analysis may be automated may vary with the level at which the annotation is attached. The method employed should be documented in the interpretation element within the encoding description of the TEI Header, as described in section 2.3.3 The Editorial Practices Declaration. Where different parts of a language corpus have used different annotation methods, the decls attribute may be used to indicate the fact, as further discussed in section 15.3 Associating Contextual Information with a Text.

Each linguistic segment so far discussed has been well-behaved with respect to the basic document hierarchy, having only a single parent. Moreover, the segmentation has been complete, in that each part of the text is accounted for by some segment at each level of analysis, without discontinuities or overlap. This state of affairs does not of course apply in all types of analysis, and these Guidelines provide a number of mechanisms to support the representation of discontinuities or multiple analyses. A brief overview of these facilities is provided in chapter 20 Non-hierarchical Structures; also see 16 Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment. These mechanisms all depend to a greater or lesser degree on the use of pointing elements of various kinds.