Re: venting on another topic

On 07/10/16 21:11, 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.
>

You mean  the existing @type, @subtype, @ana, @function,  @datcat, 
@valueDataCat, @lemma, @lemmaRef   (etc)  attributes are insufficient?

> I’m thinking specifically of  ‘pos’ and ‘reg’ as annotations that one 
> might want to add to a word token in addition to ‘lemma’.
>

If "pos" means "part of speech", what's wrong with @ana, @function, or 
@datcat ?

> It has never been quite clear to me why the “War on Attributes” some 
> years ago abolished attributes of this kind.
>

It didn't. It abolished the attribute "@reg" on the grounds that you 
might well want to include in its value some markup (e.g. a <g> element) 
which would then not be correctly processed since attribute values may 
not contain markup. But in the simple case you could use @lemma to hold 
a regularized form I suppose.

> 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.
>

Yes, that's exactly what we do.

> whether other people have had similar thoughts.