Feature request for Portuguese

[adripag]

We are a group of linguists at four universities in Brazil engaged in coordinating annotation projects to build treebanks for Brazilian Portuguese.
We find it relevant to our projects to be able to annotate morphological features pertaining to Degree, more specifically to diminutives, augmentatives and superlatives.

Several POS categories can yield diminutive and augmentative forms in Portuguese: NOUN, ADJ, ADV, VERB (non-finite forms), PROPN.

We would like to request the inclusion of Degree=Dim, Degree=Augm within the features ascribable to NOUN, ADJ, ADV, VERB, PROPN. Degree=Sup within the features ascribable to ADJ, ADV and VERB in Portuguese.

Below are examples of instances we would like to annotate.

Degree=Dim:

Risquinho na sobrancelha cresce depois? NOUN
Conheça a história de Joãozinho e Maria. PROPN
Assobiava baixinho. ADV
Festa com café da manhã incluso, tudo organizadinho pela nossa equipe. VERB (past participle)
Aumentei o som e sai dançandinho. VERB (gerund)
Peça para a picanha vir bem passada se não vem bem palidazinha. ADJ

Degree=Augm

João comprou um apartamentão. NOUN
A casa da minha avó tinha um varandão imenso. NOUN
O filme foi ignoradaço pela turma. VERB (past participle)
Me lembro que foi comentadaço pela net afora. VERB (past participle)
Deu certo e foi rapidaço. ADJ
Tomo um banho rapidão. ADV
Uma doença rara, com um nome complicadão. ADJ

Degree=Sup

A atriz foi aplaudidíssima. VERB (passive past participle)
O lugar fica pertíssimo da minha casa. ADV
Você está certíssimo. ADJ

Adriana Pagano (UFMG), Ariani Di Felippo (UFSCar), Cláudia Freitas (PUC-Rio), Elvis de Souza (PUC-Rio) and Magali Duran (ICMC/USP).

[dan-zeman]

Degree=Sup already exists but given its definition, I think that Degree=Abs (which also already exists) would be more appropriate for

A atriz foi aplaudidíssima.

Degree=Dim has not (yet) been added to the universal guidelines but it is used as a language-specific value in Afrikaans (see here) and it could be documented and used for Portuguese as well. Similarly, one could document and use Degree=Aug for augmentatives.

[Stormur]

I just report that also Latin currently uses Degree=Abs (and not Sup) for the same reasons mentioned by @dan-zeman , and that Degree=Dim (not limited to ADJs) is in course of being added, especially starting with documentation and then regular implementation. Since Portuguese is a descendant of Latin, we are really speaking of the same exact features and values as you show. Augmentative is not present in Latin, but I think Degree=Aug is surely the way to go.

[arademaker]

Interesting discussion. @leoalenc and I have discussed the augmentatives and diminutives for a while. We had a paper about our approach in the HPSG Grammar for Portuguese for the evaluative morphology. Unfortunately, the paper was not accepted last year, and we are revising it to submit it again. There are also open issues that I plan to solve in the following weeks in the Bosque; see this. This discussion is all also connected with our full-form dictionary for Portuguese; see here.

As @dan-zeman also pointed out, we are also considering the reuse of the language-specific values from https://universaldependencies.org/ext-feat-index.html#degree.

[leoalenc]

Interesting discussion. @leoalenc and I have discussed the augmentatives and diminutives for a while. We had a paper about our approach in the HPSG Grammar for Portuguese for the evaluative morphology. Unfortunately, the paper was not accepted last year, and we are revising it to submit it again. There are also open issues that I plan to solve in the following weeks in the Bosque; see this. This discussion is all also connected with our full-form dictionary for Portuguese; see here.

As @dan-zeman also pointed out, we are also considering the reuse of the language-specific values from https://universaldependencies.org/ext-feat-index.html#degree.

@arademaker , thank you for pointing that out. In that paper of ours as well as in the cited issue of the Bosque repository we had argued for the representation of diminutives, augmentatives and absolute superlatives with the values dim, aug, and abs assigned to the feature degree. So I'm very glad that it seems that these values will be included into the UD standard.

[adripag]

@dan-zeman
We have discussed all comments and contributions and prepared an md file with the feature Degree for Portuguese. Not sure where or to whom we should submit this.
Thanks for your assistance.

[arademaker]

Can you send it to me?

[dan-zeman]

Degree.md for Portuguese already exists, so it should be enough to submit a pull request with the proposed additions.

In the meantime, Degree=Dim and Degree=Aug are available universally. But languages that have their own documentation of Degree must repeat the values there, otherwise they get masked.

[arademaker]

Just reporting that I already submitted the PR and this issue was solved.