A morphosyntactic tag set for Southern Bantu within a Construction Grammar Approach

Abstract

Creating a morphosyntactic tag set for the various word categories of the Southern Bantu languages within the traditional descriptive framework seems to be a fairly straightforward task. Depending on the granularity of the tags, this task essentially involves the labeling of the set of morphological slots that comprises the morphological structure of each word category. Recent re-analyses of the nature and structure of words in the Southern Bantu languages showed that the traditional view of these word structures as a single-level sequence of morphological slots without any additional structure, is an oversimplification. Rather, Southern Bantu word categories seem to belong to various structural types. Some of these structural types involve multi-level morphological configurations with relational dependencies between certain discontinuous morphemes. Even more remarkable is the fact that some structural types show typical features of syntactic configurations. Most of the word categories in Southern Bantu are therefore not typical words in the lexical sense of isolating languages, but rather word constructions in the Construction Grammar sense. In this article we would like to propose a morphosyntactic tag set for Southern Bantu which is based on the constructional view of words in these languages.

Keywords:

• agglutinating
• morphological tags
• multi-level structures
• syntactic tags
• word constructions
• word construction types