Preliminary Recommendations

 

Function

This is a language-specific feature, which should be included at Level 2a of the EAGLES proposal. It has been introduced in order to generalise over certain characteristics that Greek adverbs present, thus allowing them to be grouped together and, in this way, avoiding increase of ambiguity during corpus tagging and preparing the ground for syntactic analysis.

More specifically, we distinguish among five types of adverbs:

1. Pure adverbs: these behave only as adverbs, i.e. modifying verbs, adjectives, sentences, or other adverbs.
2. Conjunctive adverbs: under this category, we include anaphoric adverbs, which are traditionally considered as adverbs but which, unlike pure adverbs, also introduce a secondary sentence:

   ``Kathws anaferei o sughghrafeas, o sevasmos einai aghrafos nomos.''

3. Interrogative adverbs: these behave as conjunctions with the further constraint that they can only introduce main interrogative or exclamatory sentences or secondary interrogative clauses:

   ``Ghiati efughes?'' -- main int.
   ``Ti wraia pou ta perasame!'' -- main excl.
   ``Dhen xerw ghiati efughe.'' -- sec.int.

4. Comparative adverbs: these introduce comparison and, unlike pure adverbs, they may be followed by a phrase of the same category as the standard of the comparison, a noun/adjectival phrase which has the same case as the standard of the comparison, a secondary sentence introduced by the particle `na' or (as regards the adverb `san' only) a phrase in the accusative case:

   ``Etrwghe san vasilias.'' -- noun in nominative
   ``Etrwghe san to vasilia.'' -- noun in accusative
   ``Etrwghe sa na ytan vasilias.'' -- secondary clause

5. Prepositional adverbs: this class includes mainly local, and a few manner and time, adverbs that can sometimes be followed by a clitic or a noun phrase in the genitive case:

   ``Estripse aristera.'' -- nothing
   ``Aristera sou vrisketai ena kouti.'' -- clitic
   ``Dhiavazei to ``Anatolika tys Edhem''.'' -- noun phrase in genitive
   

Attribute Value Gr. example Gr. tag

Function pure akriva AvNsBaPu

conjunctive opws AvNsBaCj

interrogative ghiati AvNsBaIr

comparative opws AvNsBaCo

prepositional aristera AvNsBaPp

Note that, as shown in the above table, certain adverbs may belong to more than one class. For instance, `opws' is coded as both a conjunctive and a comparative adverb. Disambiguation can only be performed on the basis of the semantic function of this word in the specific linguistic context in which it occurs:

``Opws sas einai ghnwsto, efughe.'' -- conj.
``Auto ishuei ghia periptwseis opws y aupnia.'' - comp.