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Preliminary Recommendations

Modification Type

This attribute, called Order in MULTILEX, specifies whether an attributive adjective precedes or follows the noun. The default value can change depending on languages: prenominal for English, postnominal for Romance languages. The different position often determines distinctions in sense (see section on Italian).

These values are important in tagging.

In the Leech & Wilson proposal, the values of Uses and Modification Type are collapsed in the attribute Uses (in their tagset called Position): the two values weak and strong are added for German adjective inflection. In the EAGLES proposal these two values are put under the attribute Inflection Type, with the value mixed for dealing with the two possibilities. All these values are only relevant for tagging, but are left in the Lexicon proposal as an example of something one might want to record, e.g. in frequency lexicons.