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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Hi Andrew and Stefan. I work with Eva
and now it is my turn to write. First thanks for your help. <br>
Your answers has given us some ideas that we explain below. What
we don't really know is the potential pitfalls the implementation
we suggest would have for its processing via CQP. Below we'll try
to explain why we would want to do it like we are proposing. <br>
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<pre wrap="">But this would break the alignment between the two attributes, if one has two tokens and the other only a single token, wouldn't it?
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">
I was thinking of this kind of arrangement:
apressurada apressuradamientre
mientre {some kind of ditto mark or just __NULL__}
.... so that subsequent tokens on the two attributes stay in sync.
OR, going the other way
apressuradamientre apressurada mientre
I'm quite open to alternatives, though the XML way strikes me as liable to cause trouble.</pre>
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<br>
OK, first the reason Andrew's suggestion in (a) below, even though
it is less likely to cause problems, would be a bit less desirable
is that by having something like the following we would miss the
fact that the two words for all intents and purposes work as a
single unit. To give you an idea, this is exactly the same as if in
the same texts you would find strings like "hurriedly" and "hurried
ly". So, by default we want these multi-word expressions to be found
as a single unit any time a user searches for an adverb or for the
lemma 'apresuradamente'.<br>
<br>
(a)<br>
<pre wrap="">apressurada apressuradamientre
mientre {some kind of ditto mark or just __NULL__}</pre>
<br>
Andrew's suggestion in (b) below would overcome this problem but
then we don't really know how it could be implemented in CQP. What
we usually have in our tagged corpora are entries with 3 columns: 1)
the form, 2) the lemma and 3) the POS tag. So (b) would be
problematic because there is apparently no way to say that the lemma
is in fact 'apresuradamente' and that "apressurada mientre" is a
multi-word instance/form of that lemma. Furthermore, for reasons
that have to do with the kind of research potential users of this
corpus are likely to do, it would be ideal to consider the two parts
of the multi-word expression also as two independent words, each one
with its lemma and its part of speech. This is so because, in this
particular example of adverbs with -mente, in the early stages of
the change that resulted in the creation of the current manner
adverbs, the strings with the two forms could have been ambiguous
between a single adverb (the interpretation we want to be the
default interpretation when doing a normal search) and two
independent words: one an adjective and the other a noun. So,
'apresurada' (which means 'hurried') is not a really good example
for this development but in the earlier stages of this change, the
string "fuerte mientre" (lit. "strong mind") could literally have
meant "with a strong mind" (I think the origins of adverbs with -ly
in English is similar) as well as "strongly". So we would like for
these expressions to be also searchable as two separate items each
one with its lemma and its POS in case a particular researcher was
interested in studying this phenomenon. For the majority of
researchers, though, the fact that the expression is written in two
separate words would not matter. For this reason, we would like the
default assumption in CQP was that there is a single word.<br>
<br>
(b)<br>
<pre wrap="">apressuradamientre apressurada mientre</pre>
<br>
Now, what Stefan proposed made us think of the following
possibility: <br>
<br>
<X><br>
word="apresurada mientre" lemma="apresuradamente" pos="ADV"<br>
<wp word="apresurada" lemma="apresurada"
pos="ADJ"></wp><br>
<wp word="mientre" lemma="mente" pos="N"></wp><br>
</X><br>
<br>
We choose the label <X> for lack of a better one but the idea
is that by default CQP interpreted <X>....</X> as it
interprets entries for any single word. Then we would have an extra
p-attribute available <wp> (the users would know this) for
cases where a user was interested in doing stuff (just finding the
specific forms and their POS tag or doing some quantitative analysis
with the different parts) with the differentiated parts of the
expression. <br>
<br>
Being able to do this is extremely important for diachronic corpora
but it would have advantages for all kinds of corpora since all of
them contain multi-word expressions where you might need their
components to be processed independently at some point. So, in our
corpora we have trouble not only with these types of expressions but
also with many others like the following:<br>
<br>
"compte Guifré de Montblanc" This is a proper name literally
composed by the words count + Wilfred + of + Montblanc<br>
<br>
In the texts you find independent instances of 'Guifré', 'compte' or
'Montblanc'. What is most important is to be able to tag the whole
string as a noun. To do this is kind of trivial because you could
artificially create single strings of the type
'compte_Guifré_de_Montblanc' at the pre-processing stage and add
them to the dictionary as proper nouns. But then imagine that some
user is interested in studying the variation in the types of
prepositional phrases that occur within proper nouns, the place
names used in proper nouns of people or some such legitimate
research goal. <br>
<br>
Having created a single word obscures all this information that
could be valuable for some. There are many more examples. Another
typical one are subordinating conjunctions formed by more than one
word (e.g. "Puis que" literally "since that"), etc. etc. If you
give them to the tagger as independent words the resulting sentence
structure is grammatically weird because the two words are really
working as one (just like 'since') so it is better to tag them as a
single subordinating conjunction. Again, though, people interested
in doing research on how these combinations of functional words
evolved would loose all the information if you tag them only as a
single expression. I'm sure modern languages have lots of cases like
this.<br>
<br>
You see what I mean? This is part of a more general problem with
linguistic annotation of corpora but it poses very specific
challenges for CWB/CQP which we would like to overcome if possible.<br>
<br>
JM<br>
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