Eckhard Bick - VISL

2.2.4.5 Abbreviations and sentence boundary markers
PALMORF treats abbreviations more like a morphological feature than a word class:
the tag is added to other - inflexionally defined - word classes. Logically,
abbreviations mirror the inflexion categories (like gender and number) of their host
classes:
(1)
PROP F S VARIG (the national air carrier), ARENA (a party), Sudene
(Superintendência do Desenvolvimento do Nordeste, a regional
development institution), Mercosul (The South American Common
Market)
PROP M S AM (Amazonas, a federal state)
PROP F P EUA or E.U.A. ('USA')
N M S AI5 ("Ato Institucional 5", a decree), c.-el (coronel, a title)
N F S Aids, aids, SIDA (3 variants of 'Aids')
N M P bps (bauds per second)
ADJ M/F S/P bras. (brasileiro, 'Brazilian', underspecified for number/gender)
ADV c/c (conta corrente, 'a conto'), S.E. ('southeast')
An argument in favour of not regarding abbreviations as a separate word class is the
fact that abbreviations tend to evolve into full words over time. For this there are
both semantic indicators (people don't know any more what the abbreviation stands
for, analytically, like in VARIG) and formal indicators, like productive derivation
(cp. the discussion of 'petebista' in 2.2.4.3) and lower case transformation of in-word
capitals (Sudene). In the last case, the word will "feel" like a proper noun, the
abbreviation status being based only on etymology. Finally, on a morphosyntactic
level, it would seem counter-intuitive to relegate distinctions like "adjectivity" or
"adverbiality" to secondary tags, and assign one homogeneous word class tag (for
example, ABBR or ABBR) to words with a functional distribution of
such diversity.
Abbreviations built from noun phrases may go all the way from a traditional
capitalised abbreviation (SIDA), over the "name stage" (Aids, upper case) to a
"common noun stage" (aids, lower case). The distinction between names and nouns
is thus very fuzzy for abbreviations 34 , and this fuzziness is visible in the tagger's
lexicon, too. Where abbreviation noun phrases do not contain proper nouns, and not
denote people, groups of people, institutions, parties or countries (entities that can
function as human agents syntactically), I have assigned N rather than PROP class.
34 The lexeme category test for number (otherwise used to distinguish between N and PROP), feels somewhat awkward
in this case, too, since it would apply to an NP rather than a word (the prototypical inflexion bearer). AI5 (Acto
Institucional 5) as a whole cannot, of course, be pluralized, but acto (its head) or even the unnumbered 'acto
institucional' can.
- 51 -