Preliminary Recommendations

 

Application to Italian

Conjunctions in Italian constitute an open class: the same elements can often have the function of conjunctions, prepositions or adverbs. Consider the following:

Conjunction

-- ``Ti sentirai tranquillo, dopo aver sostenuto l'esame''

Preposition

-- ``Ti sentirai tranquillo dopo l'esame''

Adverb

-- ``Sostenuto l'esame, dopo ti sentirai tranquillo''

For these classes, as far as possible, application tests have to be employed:

Conjunction

-- The sentence introduced by the elements is in a dependency relation with the governing predicate;

Preposition

-- The argument is an NP;

Adverb

-- It semantically modifies the whole sentence and the predicate in particular.

In grammars, no agreement is reached as to the inclusion of some elements in the conjunction or the adverb class (e.g. `anche', `pure', `dunque', `pertanto').

In some recent linguistic theories, all these elements go into the wider class of connettivi (`connectives'), which link various parts of a text.

In tagging Italian, the problem of subordinating multiwords has to be dealt with, e.g. ``dal momento che''.

 
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