Infinitives

[Andreas_Joswig]

I was using the glossing assistant these days, and no matter how hard I
looked, I did not find any provision for infinitives. Have I overlooked
it in some hidden corner? Or is it by design that infinitives are not
included in the feature sets? Is it assumed that they are derivational,
changing a verb to a noun? If so, how should I deal with infinitives in
FLEx? It would be nice to assign a feature set to an infinitve form.
What do I need to do?

Andreas Joswig

[Eric & Susanne Johnson]

I'm sure this has been discussed before and I wasn't paying attention;
would some mind catching me up?

It looks like FLEx is not yet set up to help analyze syntax, but is
there anyway that I can create a line for syntactic roles to the
interlinearization so that I can mark structures as I interlinearize and
find sentences later to use as examples? (Our language has very little
morphology, so word order is very important for the syntax.)

Thanks,

Eric

[Andy Black]

On 10/8/2008 5:21 AM, Andreas_Joswig wrote:

I was using the glossing assistant these days, and no matter how hard I 
looked, I did not find any provision for infinitives. Have I overlooked 
it in some hidden corner? 

No, it is not there.

Or is it by design that infinitives are not 
included in the feature sets? 

No, not really.  I'm sure that there are other missing items that at least some languages will use. 

Any volunteers to expand it?

Is it assumed that they are derivational, 
changing a verb to a noun? 

That is certainly one possibility.

The key question, of course, is how infinitives behave in your language.  Obviously, there must be an infinitive affix of some sort or you would not be looking in the glossing assistant.

If so, how should I deal with infinitives in 
FLEx? It would be nice to assign a feature set to an infinitve form. 
What do I need to do?
  

I'd suggest the following:

1. Figure out what the feature set consists of
2. Add these features to the feature system (Grammar / Features)
3. Make sure that the category to which the affix attaches has these features included in the Inflectable Features field.
   
4. Determine whether the affix is derivational or inflectional (possibly considering the issues given by Bickford 1998 as summarized in section 2.1.5 "Derivation versus Inflection" in the conceptual introduction to parsing document).
   
5. If you choose to model it as inflectional
1. Figure out what slot in what template it goes in and add the slot if need be.
   
2. In Lexicon / Lexicon Edit, set the "Inflection Features" field to use the features (you may have to "Show Hidden Fields" in order to see this field).
6. If you choose to model it as derivational
1. In Grammar / Category Edit, make sure that the "to category" has the appropriate inflectable features.
   
2. In Lexicon / Lexicon Edit, set the "From Inflection Features" field to use the features (you may have to "Show Hidden Fields" in order to see this field), if appropriate.
   
3. Also set the "To Inflection Features" field, if appropriate.
   

Hope this helps,

--Andy

    Andreas Joswig