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Krio Corpus

Revision as of 18:20, 6 September 2016 by Anna Struck (Talk | contribs)

Krio
Spoken in Sierra Leone
Total speakers 500 000 native speakers
Language family English Creole
  • Atlantic
    • Krio
Writing system Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-1 None
ISO 639-2
ISO 639-3 kri
Linguasphere


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

Krio Gloss and Pos Tags
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




  1. Dorothee Beermann (2016) Features and Domains. Presentation at the SLE Conference in Naples, Sep 2016. The presentation can be found at: [[
  2. The original resource has been created by Beatrice Owusua Nyampong, a native speaker of Krio.
  3. 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.