Introduction
We largely follow the general annotation principles of the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English. However, our labels are adapted to the specifics of historical German. The syntactic tags described here are most similar to those of the Corpus of Historical Low German.
This annotation guide is not intended to be exhaustive. Rather, it serves to help with the most frequent types and highlight the differences between our annotations and those of other corpora. For detailed descriptions, see the manuals for PPCHE and HeliPaD.
Penn-style corpora are annotated in a version of generative grammar that is designed for each of annotation and querying:
- There is no VP (except in rare cases such as VP topicalization); rather, verbs and their arguments are housed in IP.
- There are no intermediate (X') projections nor many functional projections.
- Some heads (verbs, particles, determiners, and clause-initial conjunctions) never project a phrase.
- Most modifiers (ADJ, ADV, NUM, Q) do not project a phrase unless predicative (ADJP-PRD), sentential (ADVP), or multi-word (e.g. modified by a degree adverb).