venting on another topic

David Sewell’s post makes me utter another wish: why not allow  attributes  to <w> elements that let you introduce light linguistic annotation into a text in a manner that does not interfere with the larger structure of the document and is easier to process.

I’m thinking specifically of  ‘pos’ and ‘reg’ as annotations that one might want to add to a word token in addition to ‘lemma’.  It has never been quite clear to me why the “War on Attributes” some years ago abolished attributes of this kind. The Stuttgart corpus query language had the very useful concept of “positional attributes”. The BlackLab uses the same concept, and it is very intuitive to think of  a word token as something that has a number of “properties” among which the spelling at a location is privileged in some ways.  If you allow for the annotation of a <w> with attributes, you create an intuitively plausible environment in which the actual textual data appear in the text stream, but linguistic metadata are added as properties of the token. The resulting data structures are perfectly respectable and have analogues in many computing environments.

I’m going to make a more formal recommendation along those lines, but I would be interested to hear whether other people have had similar thoughts.