Difference between revisions of "In-depth annotation of multi-verb constructions in Èdó"

Revision as of 13:57, 27 March 2009

INTRODUCTION

Type craft is a tool for annotation and sharing natural language paradigms online. The main purpose of annotation is to describe the meaning and grammatical structure of languages. Type craft features the following tiers arranged in the following order: 1. Latinsed orthography 2. A tier for morhological analysis 3. A tier for meaning 4. A tier for glossing of morphological features 5. A tier for part of speech information.

Also type craft provides global tags that allows for classification of data along different mophological, syntactic and semantic criteria. In my analysis I have used the following default global tags: construction kernel, situation and aspect, additional predicates, Illocution and polarity

In the following I discuss first general features of Èdó language and then multi-verb constructions in Èdó.

Èdó language: some basic facts

Èdó is a tone language with an SVO structure. There are two basic tones in Èdó: high (  ) and low ( ). Nominal heads bear constant tones while verbal heads bear relative tones. By relative tones, I mean grammatically and lexically constrained tonal realization. Tones in Èdó have contrastive functions and may serve to distinguish meaning in minimal contrastive forms as depicted in the following examples (Agheyisi 1990:18):

In addition to the two basic tones above, Èdó language has two other tones that are derived. The falling tone and the downstepped high tone. The falling tone is derived when a high tone precedes a low tone as in Ódò [ódô] Potash and Áwà [áwâ] hour in the examples above. In Èdó due to the open syllable pattern of the language when two vowels occur adjacent across word boundaries contraction takes place and tone spreading and tone simplification processes apply. The downstepped high tone is derived when a word ending with a high tone bearing syllable combines with a noun with an initial low tone bearing syllable across word boundaries. In summary, the downstepped high tone is created through the processes of vowel assimilation and contraction (Agheyisi 1990)/vowel elision (Omozuwa 1993), tone spreading and tone simplification. The following example illustrates this:

/òwá/ 'house'+ / èbé / 'book' [òwá!bé]

In annotating Èdó data, the following glosses have been incorporated into the set of glossing tags to account for tonal features in the language.

Glossing tag Tag description

H high tone

!H downstep high

L low tone