Eckhard Bick - VISL

Inflexion tags combine with word classes as follows (* means 'lexeme category'):
word gender num- case person tense mood morph. can
class
ber
marked derive
N +* + +
PROP +* +* capitalisation
+
SPEC +* +*
DET + +
PERS + + + +
ADJ + + +
ADV (-mente) (+)
V + + + + +
V PCP + + -ad-/-id- +
NUM
PRP
KS
KC
+ +*
IN (!)
EC hyphen
As can be seen from the above, it is possible to distinguish and define most classes
by their word form and lexeme categories alone, e.g. the difference between nouns
and adjectives would be, that in the former gender is a lexeme category, and in the
latter it is not. Using these criteria alone, though, would leave PROP and SPEC in
one class, as well as DET, ADJ and the subclass of V PCP. Further differentiation is
possible by morphological markers and derivation paradigms: PROP is capitalised,
SPEC is not. V PCP is marked 'ad'/'id' (on verbal roots), and DET can not be used as
a derivational root.
Finally, only KS/KC, PRP, IN, and EC cannot be defined morphologically or
paradigmatically, jointly forming a kind of (closed?) particle class. Conjunctions and
prepositions are syntactically defined constituent “junctors” with much in common,
and might be seen as subclasses of the same morphological class (for a discussion of
conjunctional treatment of prepositions, see Bick, 1999). 56
The EC class of affixes can be defined as a class of hyphenated bound
morphemes (without inflexion categories) disjunct with all other PoS categories. The
main reason for introducing the EC word class at all (and not as ordinary prefixes)
was consistency with regard to the word boundary concept used elsewhere in the
preprocessor and morphological analyser, defining a word as a text string limited by
56 If it wasn't for the blanks surrounding them, prepositions might even be regarded not as words, but as structural
morphemes attached to semantically heavier words, for example, as "case markers" for nouns.
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