[matrix] Re: [rmrs] tense and mood info in rmrs

[Anette Frank]

Hi,
thanks to Lars, Dorothee and Melanie for their reactions!

I can see - and support - the concern for a common, cross-language 
representation
for tense and aspect, though it seems there is not yet a clear picture 
about what exactly
it should look like.
In my view, the best way to go forward towards this aim would be to come 
up with a
collection of definitional criteria for the different features used in 
the different grammars,
and gather reactions from the different language representatives, for 
continuous refinement.

Besides the aim of a fine-grained and cross-linguistically appropriate 
feature-set for tense
and aspect, we should, however, also consider the special concerns RMRS 
was designed for
- to allow compatible and informative semantic representations from 
shallow to deep parsers.
For a parsing component that does not have a very fine-grained lexicon 
or rule sets for the
determination of proper tense and aspect features, it will be impossible 
to deliver the
fine-grained tense and aspect representations that a deep grammar might 
be able to.

However, a more shallow parsing component might well be able to deliver 
precise
*morphological* tense and mood features that can be useful, as a 
coarse-grained representation,
for post-processing components, even though they do not allow for the 
very fine-gained
classifications.

It would therefore seem to me a viable solution to record morphological 
tense features in the
RMRS, alongside the semantic tense and aspect classes, in order to 
record basic tense
and mood distinctions from shallow parsers, where available. The 
alternative would be to throw
away this information altogether, which doesn't seem reasonable to me. 
Of course, also there,
one should see whether one could come up with a feature set that covers 
as many languages
as possible.

Best, Anette