Nouns

This section discusses the main ingredients of the ParGram grammars concerning nouns; here, the focus is on the different syntactic and semantic features (and their possible values) attributed to different noun types as part of the ParGram common feature declaration.

NTYPE

NTYPE registers the syntactic and semantic type of the noun (Butt et al., 1999b). All nouns in the ParGram grammars are encoded with an NTYPE feature. NTYPE is a complex feature that has as its value two other features, NSYN and NSEM, as shown in (1), taken from the ParGram common feature declaration file (common.features.lfg). The notation -> <<[...] specifies that the feature’s value is itself a feature.

(1) NTYPE: -> << [ NSEM NSYN ]. 

The division between NSYN and NSEM is intuitive in that NSYN describes the nominal properties that pertain to the noun’s syntax, and NSEM describes the noun’s semantic properties. These two features are in turn described in the following subsections.

NSYN

The NSYN feature specifies the syntactic type of the noun. The declaration of NSYN is given in (2). The distinction made by NSYN is basic in that it only distinguishes between common nouns, proper nouns, and pronouns. This broad distinction may be relevant for constraining some analyses in the grammars, but it is important to note that different types of common nouns may exhibit patterns quite different from one another (e.g., mass nouns vs. count nouns, etc.). This is also true of pronouns (e.g., reflexive pronouns vs. personal pronouns vs. possessive pronouns, etc.) as well as proper nouns (e.g., locations vs. person names vs. organization, etc.). Examples for English nouns which are annotated with NSYN common by the English grammar are given in (3a); different kinds of pronouns, showing up with NSYN pronoun, are in (3b); and nouns with NSYN proper are shown in (3c).

(2) NSYN: -> $ {common pronoun proper}.

(3) 
a.NTYPE NSYN common: all common nouns: table, coffee, love, destruction, mother
b.NTYPE NSYN pronoun: all pronouns: she, him, herself
c.NTYPE NSYN proper: all proper nouns: San Francisco, CSLI Publications, John

NSEM

The NSYN feature offers only a broad distinction in terms of syntactic type. ParGram grammar writers can further specify nouns using the NSEM feature. NSEM subsumes semantic features of nouns; these are usually features that are useful in constraining syntactic constructions, but they may just also pass information on to applications. (4) shows the feature declaration of NSEM. Again, as shown by the notation, the possible values for NSEM are themselves features: COMMON, NUMBER-TYPE, PROPER as well as TIME.

(4) NSEM: -> << [ COMMON NUMBER-TYPE PROPER TIME ].

NSEM COMMON

The NSEM COMMON feature distinguishes different kinds of common (non-proper) nouns. The feature is defined with the range of atomic values given in (5). Some examples of the different types of common nouns are given in (6).

(5) COMMON: -> $ { count gerund mass measure partitive }. 

(6) 
a.NTYPE NSEM COMMON count: all count nouns: table, war, mother
b.NTYPE NSEM COMMON gerund: gerund nouns derived from verbs: (her) doing (the exercise)
c.NTYPE NSEM COMMON mass: mass nouns: coffee, water 
d.NTYPE NSEM COMMON measure: measure nouns: (two) kilos, (ten) miles
e.NTYPE NSEM COMMON partitive: partitive nouns: all (of the animals), half (of the people)

NSEM PROPER

The NSEM PROPER feature distinguishes different kinds of proper nouns. These are subdivided because these details tend to be important for applications.

(7) PROPER: -> << [ PROPER-TYPE LOCATION-TYPE NAME-TYPE ].

NSEM PROPER PROPER-TYPE

The specific subtype of proper noun; the range of values is shown in (8).

(8) PROPER-TYPE: -> $ { addr_form location name organization title }.

NSEM PROPER LOCATION-TYPE

The subtype of location; currently, only city and country are assumed here in the common features file, but more may be added in the grammar as needed.

(9) LOCATION-TYPE: -> $ { city country }.

NSEM PROPER NAME-TYPE

Subtype of name; this currently has values for first name and last (family) name, but more may be added in the grammar as needed.

(10) NAME-TYPE: -> $ {first_name last_name }.

NSEM TIME

Subtype of time expression; some of these are proper nouns and some common. This division still needs work since many time expressions are not covered here; in addition, some phrases only get the TIME feature in time expressions (e.g. numbers in digital representations of time) while others get them whenever they occur (e.g. months of the year).

(11) TIME: -> $ { date day hour minute month season second week year}.