Re: venting on another topic

Martin,

I think that within the worldview of the war-on-text-bearing-attributes
(i.e. within the philosophy that animates TEI P5 generally),
either your suggested @reg, etc., are used as text-bearing-attributes,
e.g.
<w reg="blogue" lemma="blog(ue" pos="n">blogge</w>, or
else they are used as links to authoritative or more fully fleshed
out entities elsewhere, <w lemma="#blogue" pos="#N">.
In the former case, they are subject to all the usual arguments
against text-bearing attributes (the need for internal markup, etc.);
in the latter, the use case can be satisfied by using existing
attributes,
especially @corresp, @function and @ana, or by using the existing
<choice> structure.  No?

pfs



On Fri, Oct 7, 2016, at 16:11, Martin Mueller wrote:
> 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.
-- 
Paul Schaffner  Digital Library Production Service
[email protected] | http://www.umich.edu/~pfs/