Typecraft v2.5
Jump to: navigation, search

Classroom:LING2208 - Annotating Norwegian Nynorsk

Revision as of 19:31, 16 February 2014 by Nicklas Nilsen (Talk | contribs)

Agreement

sin (, si, sitt, sine) (determiner, possessive) is the reflexive possessive in Norwegian (both Bokmål and Nynorsk). It inflects in gender and number, although gender is oblique in plural.
Norwegian nouns have an inherent gender: feminine, masculine or neuter. They do not inflect in gender -- they have a static one that does not change.

Hunden hadde i sin grådigheit forveksla refleksjonen sin med ein annan hund med bein.
“The dog in its greed had mistaken his reflection for another dog with a bone.”
Hunden
hunden
dogSGDEF
NMASC
hadde
hadde
havePRET
V
i
i
in
PREP
sin
sin
REFLAGRMASC
PNposs
grådigheit
grådigheit
greed
NFEM
forveksla
forveksla
mixPRF
V
refleksjonen
refleksjonen
reflectionSGDEF
NMASC
sin
sin
REFLAGRMASC
PNposs
med
med
with
PREP
ein
ein
aINDEFMASCSGAGR
DET
annan
annan
different
DET
hund
hund
dog
NMASC
med
med
with
PREP
bein
bein
bone
NNEUT

Editor
This sentence has an auxiliary and a main verb. In between them is an adverbial phrase.
In the provided example, there are two occurrences of sin. Although they both look identical, they have different controllers.

The first occurence, «hunden hadde i sin», the controller is the noun hunden. It has the inherent feature NMASC, and it is singular definite. Gender and number is reflected in the possessive, where sin is the masculine singular. This is arguably a case of agreement, where the controller is the noun hunden, the target is sin, and the features are gender and number.
(the workings of the domains of anaphors to me feels a bit complicated, but as far as I can tell -- Domains can span from the beginning to the end of a sentence, as well as into subclauses).

The second occurence, «(...) forveksla refleksjonen sin», the controller is the noun refleksjonen. The agreement features are still gender and number.
An example to illustrate that it is in fact not hunden that is the controller, could be «(...) forveksla boka si». Boka (book) is a feminine noun, which is reflected in the inflection of the possessive.

Clause Linkage