Difference between revisions of "Classroom:LING2208 - Annotating Norwegian Bokmål"

Revision as of 21:18, 16 February 2014

Jeg hoppet i havet simple past Jeg har hoppet i havet past perfect

problem: Simple past form is annotated in gloss tag as both PAST and PRET.

Agreement

The following phrase contains agreement between the noun kjøttbein and the adjectives fint and saftig:

Han så en slakterbutikk, og gikk raskt inn og stjal et fint, saftig kjøttbein fra hyllen. [[1]]

Both adjectives are tagged as being singular and neuter, which corresponds to the head of the NP in which they are embedded; et fint, saftig kjøttbein. Although kjøttbein is only tagged as neuter, its indefiniteness is given by the determiner et, which also agrees with the noun. --Are Ormberg 15:08, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

Clause Linkage

AGREEMENT

"Den innså sin egen dårskap for sent og gikk avsted sulten og trist men kanskje litt klokere" [[2]]

The pronoun "den" is an anaphor that picks up its antecedent "hunden", specified for the values "COMMON GENDER" for the feature GENDER, and the suffix "-en" which is specified for the value SINGULAR for the feature NUMBER, as well as 3RD PERSON for the feature PERSON. The values spreading from the pronoun "den" the reflective determiner "egen", as well as the adjectives "sulten" and "trist" are SINGULAR and COMMON GENDER. When it comes to the reflective pronoun "sin" these values, and the value 3RD PERSON are in agreement.

CLAUSE LINKAGE

"Den innså sin egen dårskap for sent og gikk avsted sulten og trist men kanskje litt klokere" [[3]]

The complex clause above consists of two simple clauses;

1: "Den innså sin egen dårskap for sent" 
2: "Den gikk avsted sulten og trist men kanskje litt klokere"

These two simple clauses are connected with the conjunction "and", which often is used to coordinate two or more clauses. In other words we are here dealing with an example of parataxis, in which the clauses are independent of each other (even though they share the same subject). A sign of this is the inflection of the verb contained in these clauses, and that the clauses are quite autonomous, as shown in the breakdown into separate clauses 1 and 2 above. However, they agree in tense (both are in the preterite) which suggests that they are linked temporally. From the semantic content it may seem that the clauses are linked causally, which would imply subordination, or hypotaxis: "Because <Den innså sin egen dårskap for sent>, <gikk den avsted sulten og trist men kanskje litt klokere>", but in my view this complex clause seems to be an example of coordination rather than subordination.

--Eirik Zahl 19:16, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Agreement

In the course of the story we find two cases of agreement that are different with respect to a single feature. It shows, quite neatly, how agreement works in norwegian and how it affects syntactical composition of Norwegian. In sentence 6 we find this noun phrase:

En annen hund - Another dog (eng)

In sentence 7, however, we find this noun phrase

Den andre hunden - The other dog (eng)

It should be relatively clear that the only difference between the two noun phrases is one of definiteness. In both cases the controller is the word hund, which means dog and is the head of the phrase. The noun phrase, accordingly, is the domain of agreement. The word hund in itself carries only the feature of masculine (MASC), and definiteness is impossible to determine through this word alone. However, an indefinite article has been chosen, namely en, and thus renders the noun indefinite. En becomes a target for the controller and agrees with the feature MASC. Therefore it carries the two features MASC and indefinite (INDEF). The adjective annen, which means other in English, is also a target for the controller and therefore has to agree in both the features MASC and INDEF.

This can be seen by comparing it to the other noun phrase in sentence 7. Here the word hund has gained the additional morpheme -en. This is the definite article in Norwegian, and so the word now holds two features in itself, namely MASC and DEF. An interesting point is that there is still a preceding article den which also marks definiteness, irrespective of the presence of the definite suffix. This is called double definiteness, and it surfaces when the noun is modified by an adjective. Regardless, this den is affected by the controller and gains the feature MASC. The adjective is also affected by the controller and gathers the features of MASC and DEF. Because of this, it changes form from annen to andre, which is a definite form of the word.

Clause Linkage