17 Simple Analytic Mechanisms

Indice

This chapter describes a module for associating simple analyses and interpretations with text elements. We use the term analysis here to refer to any kind of semantic or syntactic interpretation which an encoder wishes to attach to all or part of a text. Examples discussed in this chapter include familiar linguistic categorizations (such as ‘clause’, ‘morpheme’, ‘part-of-speech’ etc.) and characterizations of narrative structure (such as ‘theme’, ‘reconciliation’ etc.). The mechanisms presented in this chapter are simpler but less powerful than those described in chapter 18 Feature Structures.

Section 17.1 Linguistic Segment Categories introduces a module for characterizing text segments according to the familiar linguistic categories of sentence or s-unit, clause, phrase, word, morpheme, and character. These elements represent special cases of the generic seg element described in section 16.3 Blocks, Segments, and Anchors.

Section 17.2 Global Attributes for Simple Analyses introduces an additional global attribute which allows passages of text to be associated with specialised elements representing their interpretation. These ‘interpretative’ elements (span and interp) are described in detail in section 17.3 Spans and Interpretations. They allow the encoder to specify an analysis as a series of names and associated values,64 each such pair being linked to one or more stretches of text, either directly, in the case of spans, or indirectly, in the case of interpretations.

Finally section 17.4 Linguistic Annotation revisits the topic of linguistic analysis, and illustrates how these interpretative mechanisms may be used to associate simple linguistic analysis with text segments.

17.1 Linguistic Segment Categories

In this section we introduce specialized linguistic segment category elements which may be used to represent the segmentation of a text into the traditional linguistic categories of sentence, clause, phrase, word, morpheme, and characters.
  • s (unità s) contiene la divisione del testo del tipo proposizione
  • cl (frase) rappresnta la frase grammaticale
  • phr (sintagma) rappresenta il sintagma grammaticale
  • w (parola) rappresenta la parola grammaticale (non necessariamente in modo ortografico).
    lemmaidentifica il lemma (la voce di un dizionario)
  • m (morfema) rappresenta il morfema grammaticale
    baseFormidentifica la forma base del morfema
  • c (carattere) rappresenta il carattere
As members of the att.segLike class, these elements all share the following attribute:
  • att.segLike assegna degli attributi agli elementi usati per una segmentazione arbitraria
    functioncaratterizza la funzione del segmento
They also share attributes from att.typed:
  • att.typed assegna degli attributi generici utilizzabili per qualsiasi classificazione e sottoclassificazione di elementi
    typecaratterizza l'elemento utilizzando una classificazione o tipologia funzionale
    subtypestabilisce, se necessario, una sottocategorizzazione dell'elemento

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.

The s element may be used simply to segment a text end-to-end into a series of non-overlapping segments, referred to here and elsewhere as s-units, or sentences.
<p>
 <s>Nineteen fifty-four, when I was eighteen years old,
   is held to be a crucial turning point in the history of
   the Afro-American — for the U.S.A. as a whole — the
   year segregation was outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court.</s>
 <s>It was also a crucial year for me because on June 18,
   1954, I began serving a sentence in state prison for
   possession of marijuana.</s>
</p>
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The s element is more restricted both in its content and its usage than the generic seg element. The seg unit may contain anything which can appear within a paragraph: thus it may be used to enclose members of the model.inter class (such as bibl or list) as well as other phrase elements; the s unit may only contain phrase-level elements or text. Also, unlike seg elements, s elements should not be nested within each other.65 The seg element is intended for use as a generic segmentation element, the specific function of which may be indicated by its type attribute; the other members of the class are more specialised. Thus, the s, cl, and phr elements may be thought of as equivalent to <seg type="s-unit">, <seg type="clause"> and <seg type="phrase">, respectively, but with the above-mentioned restrictions.
The s element may be further subdivided into clauses, marked with the cl element, as in the following example:
<p>
 <s>
  <cl>It was about the beginning of September, 1664,
  <cl>that I, among the rest of my neighbours,
       heard in ordinary discourse
   <cl>that the plague was returned again to Holland; </cl>
   </cl>
  </cl>
  <cl>for it had been very violent there, and particularly at
     Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, </cl>
  <cl>whither, <cl>they say,</cl> it was brought,
  <cl>some said</cl> from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods
  <cl>which were brought home by their Turkey fleet;</cl>
  </cl>
  <cl>others said it was brought from Candia;
     others from Cyprus. </cl>
 </s>
 <s>
  <cl>It mattered not <cl>from whence it came;</cl>
  </cl>
  <cl>but all agreed <cl>it was come into Holland again.</cl>
  </cl>
 </s>
</p>
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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.

For verse texts, the overlapping of metrical and syntactic structure requires that special care be given to representing both using an element hierarchy. One simple approach is to split the syntactic phrases into fragments when they cross verse boundaries, reuniting them with the part attribute:
<div type="stanza">
 <l>
  <cl part="I">Tweedledum and Tweedledee</cl>
 </l>
 <l>
  <cl part="F">Agreed to have a battle;</cl>
 </l>
 <l>
  <cl part="I">For Tweedledum said <cl part="I">Tweedledee</cl>
  </cl>
 </l>
 <l>
  <cl part="F">
   <cl part="F">Had spoiled his nice new rattle.</cl>
  </cl>
 </l>
</div>
<div type="stanza">
 <l>
  <cl part="I">Just then flew down a monstrous crow,</cl>
 </l>
 <l>
  <cl part="F">As black as a tar barrel;</cl>
 </l>
 <l>
  <cl part="I">Which frightened both the heroes so,</cl>
 </l>
 <l>
  <cl part="F">
   <cl>They quite forgot their quarrel.</cl>
  </cl>
 </l>
</div>
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Another approach is to use the next and prev attributes defined in the additional module for linking (chapter 16 Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment):
<l>
 <cl next="#c5xml:id="c3part="I">For Tweedledum said
 <cl next="#c6xml:id="c4part="I">Tweedledee</cl>
 </cl>
</l>
<l>
 <cl prev="#c3xml:id="c5part="F">
  <cl prev="#c4xml:id="c6part="F">Had spoiled his nice new rattle.</cl>
 </cl>
</l>
Other methods are also possible; for discussion, see chapter 20 Non-hierarchical Structures.

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.

Using traditional terminology, these attributes provide a convenient way of specifying, for example, that the clause from whence it came is a relative clause modifying another, or that the phrase by the U.S. Supreme Court is a prepositional post-modifier:
<cl>It mattered not
<cl type="relativefunction="clause_modifier">from whence it came;</cl>
</cl>
<phr type="NP">the year segregation</phr>
<phr>was outlawed</phr>
<phr type="PPfunction="postmodifier-agent">by the U.S. Supreme Court.</phr>
Segmentation into clauses and phrases can, of course, be combined. Such detailed encodings as the following may require careful formatting if they are to be easily readable however.
<p>
 <s>
  <cl type="finite-declarativefunction="independent">
   <phr type="NPfunction="subject">Nineteen fifty-four,
   <cl type="finite-relative-declarativefunction="appositive">when <phr type="NPfunction="subject">I</phr>
     <phr type="VPfunction="predicate">was eighteen years old</phr>
    </cl>
   </phr>,
  <phr type="VPfunction="predicate">
    <phr type="Vfunction="verb-main">is held</phr>
    <phr type="NPfunction="complement">
     <cl type="nonfinitefunction="predicate-nom.">
      <phr type="Vfunction="copula">to be</phr>
      <phr type="NPfunction="predicate-nom.">a crucial turning point
      <phr type="PPfunction="postmodifier">in
       <phr type="NPfunction="prep.obj.">the history
        <phr type="PPfunction="postmodifier">of the Afro-American</phr>
        </phr>
       </phr>
             —
      <phr type="PPfunction="postmodifier-appositive">for
       <phr type="NPfunction="prep.obj.">the U.S.A.
        <phr type="PPfunction="postmodifier">as a whole</phr>
        </phr>
       </phr>
      </phr>
           —
     <phr type="NPfunction="appositive-predicate-nom.">the year
      <cl type="finite-relativefunction="adjectival">
        <phr type="NPfunction="subject">segregation</phr>
        <phr type="VPfunction="predicate">
         <phr type="Vfunction="verb-main">was outlawed</phr>
         <phr type="PPfunction="postmodifier">by the U.S. Supreme Court</phr>
        </phr>
       </cl>
      </phr>
     </cl>
    </phr>
   </phr>.</cl>
 </s>
 <s>
  <cl type="finite-declarativefunction="independent">
   <phr type="NPfunction="subject">It</phr>
   <phr type="VPfunction="predicate">
    <phr type="Vfunction="verb-main">was</phr>
       also
   <phr type="NPfunction="predicate-nom.">a crucial year for me</phr>
   </phr>
   <cl type="declarative-finitefunction="dependent-causative">because
   <phr type="PPfunction="sentence_adverb">on June 18, 1954</phr>,
   <phr type="NPfunction="subject">I</phr>
    <phr type="VPfunction="predicate">
     <phr type="Vfunction="verb-main">began serving</phr>
     <phr type="NPfunction="complement">a sentence in state prison
     <phr type="PPfunction="complement">for possession of marijuana</phr>
     </phr>
    </phr>
   </cl>
  </cl>
 </s>.
</p>

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.

The restriction on the content of the w element in particular requires that a certain care must be exercised when using it, especially in relation to the use of other tags that one may think of as word level, but which are in fact defined as phrase level. Consider the problem of segmenting an occurrence of the mentioned element as a word.
<mentioned>grandiloquent</mentioned>
The first of the following two encodings is legitimate; the second is not, since the mentioned element is not part of the content model of the w element:
<mentioned>
 <w>grandiloquent</w>
</mentioned>
<w><mentioned>grandiloquent</mentioned></w>
On the other hand, both of the following encodings are legitimate:
<mentioned>
 <phr>grandiloquent speech</phr>
</mentioned>
<phr>
 <mentioned>grandiloquent speech</mentioned>
</phr>
The first encoding describes the citing of a phrase. The second describes a phrase which consists of something mentioned.
The w and m elements carry additional attributes which may be of use in many indexing or analytic applications. The lemma attribute may be used to specify the lemma, that is the head- or base- form of an inflected verb or noun, for example:
<s xml:lang="la">
 <w lemma="timeo">timeo</w>
 <w lemma="danaii">Danaos</w>
 <w lemma="et">et</w>
 <w lemma="donum">dona</w>
 <w lemma="fero">ferentes</w>
</s>
Similarly, the baseForm attribute may be specified for the m element, to indicate the ‘base form’ of a transformed morpheme:
<w type="adjective">
 <m type="prefixbaseForm="con">com</m>
 <m type="root">fort</m>
 <m type="suffix">able</m>
</w>
The w, m, and c elements can be used together to give a fairly detailed low-level grammatical analysis of text. For example, consider the following segmentation of the English S-unit I didn't do it.
<w>I</w>
<w>
 <w>did</w>
 <m>n't</m>
</w>
<w>do</w>
<w>it</w>
<c>.</c>

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 Analyses

When the module described by this chapter is selected, an additional attribute is defined for all elements:
  • att.global.analytic assegna ulteriori attributi globali per associare specifiche analisi o interpretazioni alle adeguate porzioni di un testo
    ana (analisi) indica uno o più elementi che contengono interpretazioni dell'elemento specificato dall'attributo ana
The ana attribute may be specified for any element. Its effect is to associate the element with one or more others representing an analysis or interpretation of it. Its target should be one of the elements described in the section 17.3 Spans and Interpretations below, or some other interpretative element such as note, on which see section 3.8 Notes, Annotation, and Indexing or fs, on which see chapter 18 Feature Structures.

17.3 Spans and Interpretations

The simplest mechanisms for attaching analytic notes in some structured vocabulary to particular passages of text are provided by the span and interp elements, and their associated grouping elements spanGrp and interpGrp.
  • span associa direttamente l'annotazione interpretativa ad una prozione di testo
  • spanGrp (gruppo di porzioni) raggruppa i marcatori di porzione
  • interp (interpretazione) riassume una specifica annotazione interpretativa che può essere associata ad una porzione di testo
  • interpGrp (gruppo di interpretazioni) raggruppa un insieme di interpretazioni accomunate per responsabilità o tipo
These elements are all members of the class att.interpLike, and thus share the following attributes:
  • att.interpLike assegna degli attributi agli elementi che rappresentano un'analisi o un'interpretazione formali
    resp (responsabile) indica il responsabile dell'interpretazione
    typeindica quale sia il fenomeno osservato nella porzione di testo in questione
    inst (casi) indica esempi di analisi o interpretazione rappresentati dall'elemento corrente
The type attribute of the span and interp elements may be used to indicate that the annotations are of specific types, for example thematic or structural. The annotation itself is supplied as the content of the span or interp element. In the case of the span element, the span of text being annotated is indicated by values of the from and to attributes, the value of each being a pointer. If the optional to attribute is omitted, the span consists just of the element pointed at by the obligatory from attribute. In the case of interp (see below), the span is indicated by a pointer from a link element or some similar mechanism. The resp attribute indicates the annotator responsible for this annotation. Here is an example of the span element.
<p xml:id="MaQp1s2p114">
 <s xml:id="MaQp1s2p114s1">There was certainly a definite point at which the
   thing began.</s>
 <s xml:id="MaQp1s2p114s2">It was not; then it was suddenly inescapable,
   and nothing could have frightened it away.</s>
 <s xml:id="MaQp1s2p114s3">There was a slow integration, during which she,
   and the little animals, and the moving grasses, and the sun-warmed
   trees, and the slopes of shivering silvery mealies, and the great
   dome of blue light overhead, and the stones of earth under her feet,
   became one, shuddering together in a dissolution of dancing
   atoms.</s>
 <s xml:id="MaQp1s2p114s4">She felt the rivers under the ground forcing
   themselves painfully along her veins, swelling them out in an
   unbearable pressure; her flesh was the earth, and suffered growth
   like a ferment; and her eyes stared, fixed like the eye of the
   sun.</s>
 <s xml:id="MaQp1s2p114s5">Not for one second longer (if the terms for time
   apply) could she have borne it; but then, with a sudden movement
   forwards and out, the whole process stopped; and <emph rend="italic">that</emph> was <soCalled rend="dquo">the
     moment</soCalled> which it was impossible to remember
   afterwards.</s>
 <span from="#MaQp1s2p114s3to="#MaQp1s2p114s5">the moment</span>
 <s xml:id="MaQp1s2p114s6">For during that space of time (which was
   timeless) she understood quite finally her smallness, the
   unimportance of humanity.</s>
</p>
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The span element may, as in this example, be placed in the text near the textual span it is associated with. Alternatively, it may be placed elsewhere in the same or a different document. Where several span or interp elements share the same attributes, for example having the same responsibility or type, it may be convenient to group them within a spanGrp or interpGrp element as follows:
<spanGrp resp="#DTL">
 <span from="#MaQp1s2p114s3to="#MaQp1s2p114s5">the moment</span>
<!-- other spans identified by DTL here -->
</spanGrp>
Spans may also be used to represent structural divisions within a narrative, particularly when these do not coincide with the structure implied by the element structure. Consider the following narrative:

Sigmund, the son of Volsung, was a king in Frankish country. Sinfiotli was the eldest of his sons, the second was Helgi, the third Hamund. Borghild, Sigmund's wife, had a brother named — But Sinfiotli, her stepson, and — both wooed the same woman and Sinfiotli killed him over it.66 And when he came home, Borghild asked him to go away, but Sigmund offered her weregild, and she was obliged to accept it. At the funeral feast Borghild was serving beer. She took poison, a big drinking horn full, and brought it to Sinfiotli. When Sinfiotli looked into the horn, he saw that poison was in it, and said to Sigmund ‘This drink is cloudy, old man.’ Sigmund took the horn and drank it off. It is said that Sigmund was hardy and that poison did him no harm, inside or out. And all his sons could tolerate poison on their skin. Borghild brought another horn to Sinfiotli, and asked him to drink, and everything happened as before. And a third time she brought him a horn, and reproachful words as well, if he didn't drink from it. He spoke again to Sigmund as before. He said ‘Filter it through your mustache, son!’ Sinfiotli drank it off and at once fell dead.

Sigmund carried him a long way in his arms and came to a long, narrow fjord, and there was a small boat there and a man in it. He offered to ferry Sigmund over the fjord. But when Sigmund carried the body out to the boat, it was fully laden. The man said Sigmund should go around the fjord inland. The man pushed the boat out and then suddenly vanished.

King Sigmund lived a long time in Denmark in the kingdom of Borghild, after he married her. Then he went south to Frankish lands, to the kingdom he had there. Then he married Hiordis, the daughter of King Eylimi. Their son was Sigurd. King Sigmund fell in a battle with the sons of Hunding. And then Hiordis married Alf, the son of King Hialprec. Sigurd grew up there as a boy.

Sigmund and all his sons were tall and outstanding in their strength, their growth, their intelligence, and their accomplishments. But Sigurd was the most outstanding of all, and everyone who knows about the old days says he was the most outstanding of men and the noblest of all the warrior kings.

A structural analysis of this text, dividing it into narrative units in a pattern shared with other texts from the same literature, might look like this:
<p xml:id="P1">
 <s xml:id="S1">Sigmund ... was a king in Frankish country.</s>
 <s xml:id="S2">Sinfiotli was the eldest of his sons.</s>
 <s xml:id="S3">Borghild, Sigmund's wife, had a brother ...</s>
 <s xml:id="S4A">But Sinfiotli ... wooed the same woman</s>
 <s xml:id="S4B">and Sinfiotli killed him over it.</s>
 <s xml:id="S5">And when he came home, ... she was obliged to accept it.</s>
 <s xml:id="S6">At the funeral feast Borghild was serving beer.</s>
 <s xml:id="S7">She took poison ... and brought it to Sinfiotli.</s>
 <s xml:id="S17">Sinfiotli drank it off and at once fell dead.</s>
 <anchor xml:id="EOS17"/>
</p>
<p xml:id="P2">Sigmund carried him a long way in his arms ... </p>
<p xml:id="P3">King Sigmund lived a long time in Denmark ... </p>
<p xml:id="P4">Sigmund and all his sons were tall ... </p>
<spanGrp resp="#TMAtype="narrative-structure">
 <span from="#S1to="#S3">introduction</span>
 <span from="#S4A">conflict</span>
 <span from="#S4B">climax</span>
 <span from="#S5to="#S17">revenge</span>
 <span from="#EOS17">reconciliation</span>
 <span from="#P2to="#P4">aftermath</span>
</spanGrp>
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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.

To encode the first example above using interp, it is necessary to create a text element which contains — or corresponds to — the third, fourth, and fifth orthographic sentences (S-units) in the paragraph. This can be done either with the seg element, described in 16.3 Blocks, Segments, and Anchors, or the join element, described in 16.7 Aggregation. The resulting element can then be associated with the interp element using the ana attribute described in section 17.2 Global Attributes for Simple Analyses. We illustrate using the seg element.
<p xml:id="MarQp1s2p114">
 <s xml:id="MarQp1s2p114s1">There was certainly a definite point ... </s>
 <s xml:id="MarQp1s2p114s2">It was not; then it was suddenly inescapable ... </s>
 <seg xml:id="MarQp1s2p114s3-5ana="#moment">
  <s xml:id="MarQp1s2p114s3">There was a slow integration ... </s>
  <s xml:id="MarQp1s2p114s4">She felt the rivers under the ground ... </s>
  <s xml:id="MarQp1s2p114s5">Not for one second longer ... </s>
 </seg>
 <s xml:id="MarQp1s2p114s6">For during that space of time ... </s>
</p>
<interp xml:id="moment">the moment</interp>
The second example above can be recoded using interp and interpGrp tags in a similar manner. The interpretation itself can be expressed in an interpGrp element, which would replace the spanGrp in the example shown above:
<interpGrp resp="#TMAtype="structuralUnit">
 <interp xml:id="INTRO">introduction</interp>
 <interp xml:id="CONFLICT">conflict</interp>
 <interp xml:id="CLIMAX">climax</interp>
 <interp xml:id="REVENGE">revenge</interp>
 <interp xml:id="RECONCIL">reconciliation</interp>
 <interp xml:id="AFTERM">aftermath</interp>
</interpGrp>
Any of these interp elements may be linked to the text either by means of the ana attribute, or by means of link elements. Using the ana attribute (on seg elements introduced specifically for this purpose), the text would be encoded as follows:
<p xml:id="PP1">
 <seg xml:id="SS1-SS3ana="#INTRO">
  <s xml:id="SS1">Sigmund ... was a king in Frankish country.</s>
  <s xml:id="SS2">Sinfiotli was the eldest of his sons.</s>
  <s xml:id="SS3">Borghild, Sigmund's wife, had a brother ... </s>
 </seg>
 <s xml:id="SS4Aana="#CONFLICT">But Sinfiotli ... wooed the same woman</s>
 <s xml:id="SS4Bana="#CLIMAX">and Sinfiotli killed him over it.</s>
 <seg xml:id="SS5-SS17ana="#REVENGE">
  <s xml:id="SS5">And when he came home, ... she was obliged to accept it.</s>
  <s xml:id="SS6">At the funeral feast Borghild was serving beer.</s>
  <s xml:id="SS17">Sinfiotli drank it off and at once fell dead.</s>
 </seg>
</p>
<anchor xml:id="NIL1ana="#RECONCIL"/>
<p xml:id="PP2">Sigmund carried him a long way in his arms ... </p>
<p xml:id="PP3">King Sigmund lived a long time in Denmark ... </p>
<p xml:id="PP4">Sigmund and all his sons were tall ... </p>
<join xml:id="PP2-PP4targets="#PP2 #PP3 #PP4ana="#AFTERM"/>
The linkage may also be accomplished using a linkGrp element, whose content is a set of link elements which point to each interpretive element and its corresponding text unit. This method does not require the use of the ana attribute on the text units.
<linkGrp targFunc="interpretation text">
 <link targets="#INTRO #SS1-SS3"/>
 <link targets="#CONFLICT #SS4A"/>
 <link targets="#CLIMAX #SS4B"/>
 <link targets="#REVENGE #SS5-SS17"/>
 <link targets="#RECONCIL #NIL1"/>
 <link targets="#AFTERM #PP2-PP4"/>
</linkGrp>

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 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.

As one example of such types of analysis, consider the following sentence, taken from the Lancaster/IBM Treebank Project (Leech and Garside (1991)).

The victim's friends told police that Kruger drove into the quarry and never surfaced.

Our discussion focuses on the way that this sentence might be analysed using the CLAWS system developed at the University of Lancaster but exactly the same principles may be applied to a wide variety of other systems.67 Output from the system consists of a segmented and tokenized version of the text, in which word class codes have been associated with each token. CLAWS offers outputs in a variety of non-XML and XML formats: for example, the simplest format for the sample sentence would be:
The_AT0 victim_NN1 's_POS friends_NN2 told_VVD police_NN2 that_CJT Kruger_NP0 drove_VVD into_PRP the_AT0 quarry_NN1 and_CJC never_AV0 surfaced_VVD
This may be easily transformed into an equivalent TEI XML representation:
<s>
 <w ana="#AT0">The </w>
 <w ana="#NN1">victim</w>
 <w ana="#POS">'s</w>
 <w ana="#NN2">friends </w>
 <w ana="#VVD">told </w>
 <w ana="#NN2">police </w>
 <w ana="#CJT">that </w>
 <w ana="#NP0">Kruger </w>
 <w ana="#VVD">drove </w>
 <w ana="#PRP">into </w>
 <w ana="#AT0">the </w>
 <w ana="#NN1">quarry </w>
 <w ana="#CJC">and </w>
 <w ana="#AV0">never </w>
 <w ana="#VVD">surfaced</w>
</s>
Although the names used for the attribute values here may have some significance for the human reader (AT0 for article, NN1 for singular noun, NN2 for plural noun, etc.) they are arbitrary codes, used in this case as pointers to other elements which define their significance more precisely. If the codes are considered to be atomic, then the interp element described in section 17.3 Spans and Interpretations might be used to supply brief definitions in the header:
<interpGrp type="POS">
 <interp xml:id="AT0">Definite article</interp>
 <interp xml:id="AV0">Adverb</interp>
 <interp xml:id="CJC">Conjunction</interp>
 <interp xml:id="CJT">Relative that</interp>
 <interp xml:id="NN1">Noun singular</interp>
 <interp xml:id="NN2">Noun plural</interp>
 <interp xml:id="NP0">Proper noun</interp>
 <interp xml:id="POS">Genitive marker</interp>
 <interp xml:id="PRP">Preposition</interp>
 <interp xml:id="VVD">Verb past tense</interp>
</interpGrp>
If the codes are considered to be compositional (for example that NN1 and NN2 have something in common, namely their noun-ness, which they do not share with, say, VVD), then this compositionality may be most clearly expressed using a mechanism based on the fs element defined in chapter 18 Feature Structures.
This approach requires the text to be fully segmented, using the linguistic segment elements described in section 17.1 Linguistic Segment Categories, so that the scope of the ana attribute used to point to each interpretation is clearly defined. A further analysis into phrase and clause elements can be superimposed on the word and morpheme tagging in the preceding illustration. For example, CLAWS provides the following constituent analysis of the sample sentence (the word class codes have been deleted):
[N [G The victim's G] friends N] [V told [N police N] [Fn that [N Krueger N] [V [V& drove [P into [N the quarry N]P]V&] and [V+ never surfaced V+]V]Fn]V]
Treating the labels on the brackets as phrase or clause interpretations, this analysis of the structure of the example sentence can be combined with the word class analysis and represented as follows (the symbol V& representing the first part of a coordinate phrase, has been replaced by V1, and V+, representing the second part, has been replaced by V2).
<s type="sentence">
 <phr ana="#n">
  <phr ana="#gn">
   <w ana="#AT0">The</w>
   <w ana="#NN1">victim</w>
   <m ana="#POS">'s</m>
  </phr>
  <w ana="#NN2">friends</w>
 </phr>
 <phr ana="#v">
  <w ana="#VVD">told</w>
  <phr ana="#n">
   <w ana="#NN2">police</w>
  </phr>
  <cl ana="#fn">
   <w ana="#CJT">that</w>
   <phr ana="#n">
    <w ana="#NP0">Krueger</w>
   </phr>
   <phr ana="#v">
    <phr ana="#v1">
     <w ana="#VVD">drove</w>
     <phr ana="#pr">
      <w ana="#PRP">into</w>
      <phr ana="#n">
       <w ana="#AT0">the</w>
       <w ana="#NN1">quarry</w>
      </phr>
     </phr>
    </phr>
    <w ana="#CJC">and</w>
    <phr ana="#v2">
     <w ana="#AV0">never</w>
     <w ana="#VVD">surfaced</w>
    </phr>
   </phr>
  </cl>
 </phr>
 <c ana="#pun">.</c>
</s>
This approach requires the definition of further interp (or fs) elements to provide targets for the pointers used to represent the constituent analysis:
<interpGrp type="constituentFunction">
 <interp xml:id="v2">coordinate continuation</interp>
 <interp xml:id="v">verbal</interp>
 <interp xml:id="n">nominal</interp>
 <interp xml:id="gn">genitive</interp>
 <interp xml:id="fn">finite clause</interp>
 <interp xml:id="pr">prepositional</interp>
 <interp xml:id="v1">coordinate start</interp>
</interpGrp>
Alternatively, a ‘stand-off’ representation for these analyses might be created using the linkGrp element. In this case, each linguistic segment must be supplied with its own xml:id attribute:
<s>
 <w xml:id="word-1">The</w>
 <w xml:id="word-2">victim</w>
 <w xml:id="word-3">'s</w>
 <w xml:id="word-4">friends</w>
 <w xml:id="word-5">told</w>
 <w xml:id="word-6">police</w>
 <w xml:id="word-7">that</w>
 <w xml:id="word-8">Kruger</w>
 <w xml:id="word-9">drove</w>
 <w xml:id="word10">into</w>
 <w xml:id="word11">the</w>
 <w xml:id="word12">quarry</w>
 <w xml:id="word13">and</w>
 <w xml:id="word14">never</w>
 <w xml:id="word15">surfaced</w>
</s>
Each segment-interpretation pair may now be represented by means of a link element inside an appropriate linkGrp element:
<linkGrp type="POS-annotation">
 <link targets="#word-1 #AT0"/>
 <link targets="#word-2 #NN1"/>
 <link targets="#word-3 #POS"/>
 <link targets="#word-4 #NN2"/>
 <link targets="#word-5 #VVD"/>
 <link targets="#word-6 #NN2"/>
<!--... -->
</linkGrp>

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.

The mechanisms proposed in this chapter may also be used to encode analyses of an entirely different kind, for example discourse function. Here is an application of the span technique to record details of a sales transaction in a spoken text.
<u xml:id="u1">Can I have ten oranges and a kilo of bananas please?</u>
<u xml:id="u2">Yes, anything else?</u>
<u xml:id="u3">No thanks.</u>
<u xml:id="u4">That'll be dollar forty.</u>
<u xml:id="u5">Two dollars</u>
<u xml:id="u6">Sixty, eighty, two dollars. Thank you.</u>
<spanGrp type="transactions">
 <span from="#u1">sale request</span>
 <span from="#u2to="#u3">sale compliance</span>
 <span from="#u4">sale</span>
 <span from="#u5">purchase</span>
 <span from="#u6">purchase closure</span>
</spanGrp>
bibliography
For further discussion of the u (utterance) element and other elements recommended for transcriptions of spoken language, see chapter 8 Transcriptions of Speech.

17.5 Module for Analysis and Interpretation

The module described in this chapter makes available the following components:
Modulo analysis: Semplici meccanismi di analisi
The selection and combination of modules to form a TEI schema is described in 1.2 Defining a TEI Schema.

Argomenti « 16 Linking, Segmentation, and Alignment » 18 Feature Structures

Note
64.
Or, as they are widely known, attribute-value pairs; this term should not be confused, however, with SGML or XML attributes and their values, which are similar in concept but distinct in their formal definitions.
65.
Neither this constraint, nor the requirement that the whole of the text be segmented by s elements is enforced by the current TEI schemas; such constraints may however be introduced in a later version of these Guidelines.
66.
The rule marks spaces left for the missing name in the manuscript.
67.
For the word-class tagging method used by CLAWS see Marshall (1983); For an overview of the system see Garside et al. (1991). The example sentence was processed using an online version of the CLAWS tagger at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/ucrel/claws/trial.html

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