During an annotation project of 60 000 Afrikaans tokens by CTexT (North-West University), the developers had to answer difficult questions with regard to the annotation of the participle specifically. One of the main reasons for this difficulty is that the different sources that offer descriptions of the participle in Afrikaans are conflicting in such descriptions and, depending on which source is consulted, would provide different annotations.
In order to clarify the uncertainty of how the participle in Afrikaans should be annotated, the available literature was surveyed to determine the exact nature of the participle in Afrikaans. The descriptions of the participle in Afrikaans were further situated in the context of how participles are described in English and Dutch. The conclusion that was reached is that the participle form of the verb in Afrikaans should be distinguished from the periphrastic construction form of the verb that appears in the past and the passive constructions.
Furthermore, this study determined to what extent a cognitive usage-based descriptive framework could contribute towards a better understanding of the participle in Afrikaans. The first conclusion that was reached is that a characterisation of the participle within this framework enables one to make conceptual sense of the morphological structure of the participle. The study shows how the morphological structure of the participle is responsible for the fact that the verbal character of the participle stays intact while the participle functions as another word class. Another conclusion that was reached regarding the characterisation of the past and passive constructions from a cognitive usage-based descriptive framework is that the framework makes it possible to distinguish conceptually between the periphrastic form of the verb and the participle form of the verb.
Lastly, the study determined to what extent new insights into the participle in Afrikaans could lead to alternative lemmatisation and part-of-speech-tagging of participles in the NCHLT-corpus. The conclusion that was reached is that participles are primarily lemmatised satisfactorily. Proposals that are made in order to improve the lemmatisation protocol, include: (i) distinguishing in the protocol between periphrastic forms of the verb and the participle form of the verb; (ii) repeating the guideline for the lemmatisation of compound verbs that was provided for verb lemmatisation under the lemmatisation guidelines for participles; (iii) adding more lexicalised adjectives to the existing list in the protocol; and (iv) suggesting a guideline that would allow one to consistently distinguish between participles that could function as adverbs as well as participles that could function as prepositions.
The conclusion that was reached after the analysis of the part-of-speech protocol is that the part-of-speech tag set in Afrikaans does not allow for the specific attributes and values of participles to be taken into account. Participles in the Afrikaans tag set are tagged strictly according to the function of the word. Although such an approach is very practical, it results in a linguistically poorer part-of-speech tag that ignores the verbal character of the participle. An alternative strategy is therefore suggested for the part-of-speech tagging of participles in which the attributes and values of the verb tag are adapted. / MA (Linguistics and Literary Theory), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NWUBOLOKA1/oai:dspace.nwu.ac.za:10394/13940 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Butler, Anna Petronella |
| Source Sets | North-West University |
| Language | other |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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