Lexical category

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Lexical category is the topmost level of the part of speech. It indicates the general morphological, syntactic and semantic behaviour of the entry.

Natural Language

The UNLarium framework acknowledges 11 different lexical categories in natural languages:

{{#tree:id=lex|openlevels=0|root=Lexical Categories|

  • adjectives (J) (adjectives and participles)
  • adpositions (P) (prepositions, postpositions, circumpositions)
  • adverbs (A) (specifier adverbs, adjunct adverbs, conjunts and disjuncts)
  • affixes (I) (prefixes, infixes, suffixes and circumfixes)
  • conjunctions (C) (subordinating and coordinating conjunctions)
  • determiners (D) (articles, quantifiers, possessives and demonstratives)
  • nouns (N) (common nouns and proper nouns)
  • numerals (U) (cardinal, ordinal, multiplicative, partitive, distributive)
  • pronouns (R) (demonstrative, personal, possessive, indefinite, interrogative, reflexive, reciprocal, relative, emphatic)
  • verbs (V) (full verb, auxiliary, modal, copula)
  • others (O) (particles, classifiers, interjections)

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UNL

As UWs represent only open-class items, there are only four lexical categories in UNL: {{#tree:id=tagset|openlevels=0|root=Lexical Category (LEX)|

    • Adjectival UWs (J) designate attributes.
    • Adverbial UWs (A) designate circumstances.
    • Nominal UWs (N) designate things.
    • Verbal UWs (V) designate occurrence or performance of an action, or the existence of a state or condition.

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