[Corpora-List] Chinese and English POS

[Geoffrey Sampson]

I don't believe it makes sense to look for a theory telling us what PoS a
given word in a given context "really" is, for numerous examples such as
those mentioned by Adam Kilgarriff in this thread.  I just don't see that
there is a "truth of the matter" to which a theory may correspond or fail
to correspond.  What one can do is to try to _impose_ rules that succeed in
determining a unique PoS tagging in as many debatable cases as possible
(and that are consistent with the linguistic consensus in clear cases);
that's what I tried to do for English in my book "English for the
Computer".  But I was always clear that I wasn't claiming to discover facts
about English structure, only imposing a classification scheme on English. 
(It seemed to me that some of the contributors to this thread were not
recognising this distinction, though others perhaps do.)

Geoffrey Sampson

_______________________________________________
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora