Krio Corpus
| Krio | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in | Sierra Leone | |
| Total speakers | 500 000 native speakers | |
| Language family | English Creole
| |
| Writing system | Latin | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | – | |
| ISO 639-3 | kri | |
| Linguasphere | ||
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Contents
A Krio narrative
Currently, we explore one of our oral narratives with respect to time anchoring and event chains. The narrative can be found here, as parallel Krio -English text.
About the project
The objective of our study is to model the Krio TMA system using a written Krio corpus. We have studied the system in terms of the grammatical features that are present in our corpus. For our study of the Krio narrative we have imported these features into the narrative domain which imposes its own set of features. This leads to a new relationship between feature sets which we aim to describe.
Our theoretical aim is to present a domain analysis of features in order to model them according to the requirements introduced by the domain.
Our practical aim is to use the model to achieve a more realistic description of the Krio TMA system in terms of its features and the use of its exponents. [1]
About the Corpus
The Krio Corpus consists of 33 short stories and transcribed narrations and a total of 937 phrases (8299 words). For all phrases in the corpus that have been annotated, it is layered in a systematical fashion of three analytical tiers, a meaning tier and a Gloss and POS tier. [2][3]
The Tense, Modality, Aspect features
Our Krio corpus has received in-depth morpho-syntactic annotions. In order to describe the Krio TMA features we have made use of the following tags:
- Tense
- Past
- Past Perfect
- Perfect
- Future
- Modality
- Dynamic
- Epistemic
- Deontic
- Conditional
- Aspect
- Continuous
- Inceptive
- Completive
- Habitual
The verbal tense system has a particular ordering that can be expressed as a formula:
past [0...1] ⊰ MODAL [0...1] ⊰ TNS-perf [0...1] ⊰ ASP [0...2] ROOT ⊱ASP-compl [0...1]
Particularities
- The perfect tense
The Krio perfect is formed using dɔn which is derived from the Krio verb dɔn 'finish'. As a tense marker the verb occurs in a preverbal or pre-copular position. In a post verbal position dɔn marks the completive aspect.
- The future tense
The Krio future marker is the preverb gò which is derived from the Krio verb go. The Krio future refers to a time after the time in focus.
- Modality
Kin marks as a preverb habitual aspect; as a modal verb it expresses dynamic modality (ability), as well as epistemic modality. It also naturally occurs in conditional construction, communicating contingent possibility.
Annotation profiles
| Gloss Tag | Description | Pos Tag | Description |
| FUT | future tense | N | noun |
| PRF | perfect tense | NPname | personal name |
| PAST | past tense | Np | personal name |
| DEF | definitive | PN | pronoun |
| EXCL | exclusive | PNrel | relative pronoun |
| NEG | negation | PNrefl | reflexive pronoun |
| INDEF | indefinitive | PNposs | possessive pronoun |
| FOC | focus | PNdem | dem. pronoun |
| SBJ | subject | V | verb |
| OBJ | object | Vpre | preverb |
| DIR | direction | Vmod | modal verb |
| PL | plural | Vlght | light verb |
| HAB | habitual aspect | V1 | first serial verb |
| CONT | continuous aspect | V2 | second serial verb |
| INCEP | inceptive aspect | V3 | third serial verb |
| DIR | direction | CONJ | conjunction |
| LOC | location | CONJC | connect. conjunction |
| PURP | purpose clause | CONJS | sub. conjunction |
| REDP | reduplication | PUN | punctuation |
| CMPL | complement | DET | determiner |
| POSS | possessive | PRT | particle |
| ADJ | adjective | ||
| PREP | preposition | ||
| COMP | comparative | ||
| COP | copular | ||
| NUM | numeral | ||
| DEM | demonstrative | ||
| ADV | adverb | ||
| ADVplc | placement adverb | ||
| ADVtemp | temporal adverb | ||
| PREPdir | directional preposition | ||
| ORD | ordering | ||
| INTRJCT | interjection | ||
| QUANT | quantifier | ||
| Wh | Question word |
- ↑ Dorothee Beermann (2016) Features and Domains. Presentation at the SLE Conference in Naples, Sep 2016. The presentation can be found at: [[
- ↑ The original resource has been created by Beatrice Owusua Nyampong, a native speaker of Krio.
- ↑ Preserving the resource, we added new layers of annotation reflecting the Kri TMA system in the light of the analysis presented here: SLE2016 workshop on features.