Tagsets

Morphological Tags

MTAAC has adapted a set of 92 morphological tags (28 nominal tags, 57 finite verbal tags, 7 non-finite verbal tags) from the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerial Royal Inscriptions Project (ETCSRI), with modifications. For the full list of these tags, please visit the following ETCSRI URL:

http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/etcsri/parsing/index.html

The following nine morphological tags deviate from that found at ETCSRI and are specific to the MTAAC project:

	ETCSRI	MTAAC
Finite Verbal Stem	STEM	V
Finite Plural Stem	STEM-PL	V.PL
Finite Reduplicated Stem	STEM-RDP	V.RDP
Non-finite Verbal Stem Abolsute	STEM.ABS	NF.V.ABS
Non-finite Verbal Stem Preterite	STEM.SUB	NF.V.PT
Non-finite Verbal Stem Present-Future	STEM.PF	NF.V.F
Non-Finite Plural Stem	STEM-PL	NF.V.PL
Non-Finite Reduplicated Stem	STEM-RDP	NF.V.RDP
Non-Finite Present-Future Stem	STEM-PF	NF.V.PF

Named Entities

ORACC: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/languages/propernouns/index.html

ETCSL: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/edition2/etcslhelp.php#propernouns

Named Entities
ORACC		ETCSL
DN	Divine Name	DN	divine name
EN	Ethnos Name	EN	ethnic name
GN	Geographical Name*	GN	geographical name
MN	Month Name	MN	month name
ON**	Object Name	ON**	other name
PN	Personal Name	PN	personal name
RN	Royal Name	RN	royal name
SN	Settlement Name	SN	settlement name
TN	Temple Name	TN	temple name
WN	Watercourse Name	WN	watercourse name
AN	Agricultural (locus) Name
CN	Celestial Name
FN	Field Name
LN	Line Name (ancestral clan)
QN	Quarter Name (city area)
YN	Year Name

• Lands and other geographical entities without their own tag.
  ** Note the different usages of the ON tag.

Part of Speech (POS) tags

ORACC: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/languages/akkadian/index.html (scroll down to half the page)

ETCSL: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/edition2/etcslhelp.php#pos

UD: http://universaldependencies.org/docs/en/pos/all.html

Penn: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/penn_treebank_pos.html

ORACC		ETCSL		UD		Penn Treebank POS
AJ	adjective (including statives)	AJ	adjective	ADJ	adjective	JJ	Adjective	7
						JJR	Adjective, comparative	8
						JJS	Adjective, superlative	9
AV	adverb	AV	adverb	ADV		RB	Adverb	20
						RBR	Adverb, comparative	21
						RBS	Adverb, superlative	22
NU	number	NU	numeral	NUM	Numeral	CD	Cardinal number	2
CNJ	conjunction	C	conjunction	CONJ	coordinating conjunction	CC	Coordinating conjunction	1
DET	determinative pronoun	PD	pronoun/determiner	DET	determiner	DT	Determiner	3
						EX	Existential there	4
						FW	Foreign word	5
J	interjection	I	interjection	INTJ	interjection	UH	interjection	26
						LS	List item marker	10
						NNS	Noun, plural	13
N	noun (including statives)	N	noun	NOUN	Noun	NN	Noun, singular or mass	12
				PART	particle	PRT	particle	(chunk tags)
						PRP	Personal pronoun	18
						POS	Possessive ending	17
PP	possessive pronoun					PRP$	Possessive pronoun	19
						WP$	Possessive wh-pronoun	35
						PDT	Predeterminer	16
				SCONJ	subordinating conjunction	IN	Preposition or subordinating conjunction	6
						NNPS	Proper noun, plural	15
				PROPN	Proper noun	NNP	Proper noun, singular	14
				SYM	symbol	SYM	Symbol	24
						TO	to	25
						VBZ	Verb, 3rd person singular present	32
V	verb (including infinitives, marked with EPOS ‘N and gerundive GW)	V	verb	VERB	Verb	VB	Verb, base form	27
						VBG	Verb, gerund or present participle	29
						VBP	Verb, non-3rd person singular present	31
						VBN	Verb, past participle	30
						VBD	Verb, past tense	28
						WRB	Wh-adverb	36
						WDT	Wh-determiner	33
						WP	Wh-pronoun	34
		ADP	adposition
		AUX	auxiliary verb
IP	independent/anaphoric pronoun
DP	demonstrative pronoun
MOD	modal, negative, or conditional particle					MD	Modal	11
PRP	preposition
QP	interrogative pronoun
RP	reflexive/reciprocal pronoun
REL	relative pronoun
SBJ	subjunction
XP	indefinite pronoun
		NEG	negator
				PUNCT	punctuation
				X	Other

Morphological tags

Morphological tags — comparative chart

Morphology chart under development

The ablative’s function of distributive is not distinguished in the two sets.

ETCSL Morphological tags

The ETCSL morphological tags mostly give a normalization that can then be treated with rules to disambiguate meaning. Exception is made for the verbal bases which are explicitly identified (aspect, plural, etc).

• Creating Tools for Morphological Analysis of Sumerian (link to the pdf)

Some examples:

POS	form	normalized
N	kur-kur-ra-gin7	L,ak.gin
N	cag4-gada-la2-be2-e-ne	L,bi.ene
V	L,ani.ak	hul2-la-ni-a
V	mu.ra.I.n:L	e-ri-in-bar-re-ec
V	ga.V.n.ci:L	ga-an-ci-gen
V	ha.ba.NI.n:L	ha-ba-ni-in-dug4

The tags seem only to appear on words that display affixes (the absolutive is not marked).

For a full description of the morphological annotation system, see the ETCSRI website.

The ETCSRI morphological tagging is very explicit and consists of three different attributes:

1. The morpheme column based on logical table of possible suites of morphemes
2. The usage of the morphemes
3. The normalized form of the text

Attributes 2 and 3 are used in our CoNLL-U annotation in a hybrid attribute, eg:

iri-kug-ga-ka-ni

Original

N1=Irikug.N5=ak.N3=ani.N5=ø
N1=NAME.N5=GEN.N3=3-SG-H-POSS.N5=ABS
Irikug.ak.ani.ø

MTAAC modified version

Iriku=NAME.ak=GEN.ani=3-SG-H-POSS.ø=ABS

Missing affixes are added in the morphology, eg. nin-a-ni becomes

 N1=nin.N3=ani.N5=ra
N1=STEM.N3=3-SG-H-POSS.N5=DAT-H
nin.ani.ra

or

nin=STEM.ani=3-SG-H-POSS.ra=DAT

The morphological tags are explicit and give information not only about the morpheme at hand but hint at the construction of the whole verbal chain. Eg:

morpheme	tag	meaning
enden	1-PL-A	first person plural agent suffix
enden	1-PL-S	first person plural subject suffix (df)
enden	1-PL	first person plural suffix in plural transitive preterite verbal forms

Or they give indications about subtleties in meaning:

morpheme	tag	meaning
e	DAT-NH	non-human dative case-marker
e	L3-NH	non-human locative3 case-marker

Émilie Pagé-Perron