Krio Corpus
Contents
Krio Corpus
A Krio narrative
Currently, there is a public text from the Corpus, which shows an example of a typical Krio short story. The english translation is listed parallell to the Krio story and makes it easier to look at the differences made in, for example, the Speech-Event time and the marking of tenses.
https://typecraft.org/tc2wiki/A_Krio_narrative
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 its grammatical features. We then imported these features into the narrative domain which imposes its own set of features. This leads to a new relationship between feature sets.
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
The annotations in Krio have been made in consideration to a tense, modailty and aspect features system. Each category contains four 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 functions as a light verb and 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 tags | |
|---|---|
| Tag | Word |
| FUT | future tense |
| PRF | perfect tense |
| PAST | past tense |
| DEF | definitive |
| EXCL | exclusive |
| NEG | negation |
| INDEF | indefinitive |
| FOC | focus |
| SBJ | subject |
| OBJ | object |
| DIR | direction |
| PL | plural |
| HAB | habitual aspect |
| CONT | continuous aspect |
| INCEP | inceptive aspect |
| DIR | direction |
| LOC | location |
| PURP | purpose clause |
| REDP | reduplication |
| CMPL | complement |
| POSS | possessive |
| POS tags | |
|---|---|
| Tag | Word |
| N | noun |
| V | verb |
| PN | pronoun |
| PUN | punctuation |
| DET | determiner |
| Vpre | preverb |
| Vmod | modal verb |
| Vlght | light verb |
| V1 | first serial verb |
| V2 | second serial verb |
| V3 | third serial verb |
| PRT | particle |
| ADJ | adjective |
| PREP | preposition |
| ADV | adverb |
| CONJ | conjunction |
| CONJC | connect. conjunction |
| CONJS | sub. conjunction |
| PNrel | relative pronoun |
| PNposs | possessive pronoun |
| NPname | personal name |
| COP | copular |
| NUM | numeral |
| DEM | demonstrative |
| COMP | comparative |
| Np | personal name |
| ADVplc | placement adverb |
| ADVtemp | temporal adverb |
| PNrefl | reflexive pronoun |
| PREPdir | directional preposition |
| ORD | ordering |
| INTRJCT | interjection |
| QUANT | quantifier |
| PNdem | demonstrative pronoun |
| Wh | Question word |
- ↑ As quoted by Professor Dorothee Beermann at the Conference in Naple, June 2016
- ↑ 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.