A Rationale for the TEI Recommendations for Feature-Structure Markup

Abstract

In this paper, we concentrate on justifying the decisions we made in developing the TEI recommendations for feature structure markup. The first four sections of this paper present the justification for the recommended treatment of feature structures, of features and their values, and of combinations of features or values and of alternations and negations of features and their values. Section 5 departs briefly from the linguistic focus to argue that the markup scheme developed for feature structures is in fact a general-purpose mechanism that can be used for a wide range of applications. Section 6 describes an auxiliary document called a “feature system declaration” that is used to document and validate a system of feature-structure markup. The seventh and final section illustrates the use of the recommended markup scheme with two examples, lexical tagging and interlinear text analysis.

Terry Langendoen is Professor and Head of the Department of Linguistics at The University of Arizona. He was Chair of the TEI Committee on Analysis and Interpretation. He received his PhD in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964, and held teaching positions at The Ohio State University and the City University of New York (Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center) before moving to Arizona in 1988. He is author, co-author, or co-editor of six books in linguistics, and of numerous articles.

Gary Simons is Director of the Academic Computing Department of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, Dallas, TX. He served on the TEI Committee on Analysis and Interpretation. He received his PhD in Linguistics (with minor emphasis in Computer Science) from Cornell University in 1979. Before taking up his current position in 1984, he spent five years in the Solomon Islands doing field work with SIL. He is author, co-author, or co-editor of eight books in the fields of linguistics and linguistic computing.

The initial feature-structure recommendations were formulated by the Analysis and Interpretation Committee at a meeting in Tucson, Arizona in March 1990, following suggestions by Mitch Marcus and Beatrice Santorini. The authors received valuable help in the further revision and refinement of the recommendations from Steven Zepp.