Description of the proposal

The methodology adopted to design the set of Central & Eastern specifications has been, as already mentioned above, that experimented in MULTEXT .

The proposal has been prepared in the usual MULTEXT table format, which displays the specifications (as sets of attribute-values, see below for further details about the notation), with the respective code, used to mark them in the lexicons:

(i)

the minimal core features, i.e. those shared by most of the languages, have been highlighted in the tables. We tried to keep this set in common to all the MULTEXT and MULTEXT-East languages. In such a way, the comparability across the information encoded in the lexical lists of Central & Eastern and of the six original MULTEXT languages is ensured to a certain extent.

The features of the common core are highlighted with asterisks (*) to distinguish them from the

(ii) purely language-specific values.

The formulation of this set has been, as already mentioned, highly delicate, due also to the fact that, many language-specific values were presented in the applications and sometimes, the same morphosyntactic phenomenon was referred to with two different attribute or value names. The phase of recognition and harmonization of semantics of some attributes, values and naming conventions has, hence, required much effort.

If a feature presents value(s) that are used by only one MULTEXT-East language (i.e. if a value is language-specific) then these have been marked with l.s.. This marking is used only when a subset of the feature values is language specific --- in case a whole attribute, along with all its features is language specific, then the mark l.s. is not used.

Experience shows that the adopted representation described above, with the concrete applications which display and exemplify the attributes and values, also providing their internal constraints and relationships, makes the proposal self-explanatory. Other groups can easily test the specifications on their language, simply by following the method of the applications. The possibility of incorporating idiosyncratic classes and distinctions after the common core features, makes the proposal adaptable and flexible enough, without ruining the compatibility.