In-depth annotation of multi-verb constructions in Èdó

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 Èdó language and then multi-verb constructions in Èdó.

Èdó language: some basic facts Èdó is a tone language with an SVO structure. There are two basic tones in Èdó: 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 Èdó have contrastive functions and serves to distinguish meaning in minimal contrastive forms as depicted in the following examples (Agheyisi 1990:18):