5.6.1 Multext morphology formalism The main reason for having morphology is to facilitate maintenance of lexical lists, both during the project and afterwards. It follows that the rule formalism for morphology itself should not be a source of complexity. The designers of the Multext morphology tool have therefore decided to use fairly common, well-known methods, avoiding any adventurous modernism. The tool has two parts: morphosyntax and morphographemics. For morphosyntax, a user-friendly version of context-free grammar is used. The friendlyness comes with the possibility to annotate rules with features, and to set features to the same values through variables. For morpho-graphemics, a version of two-level morphology is used. The system can be used to generate a word list from an input word list, as well as to look words up in a given word list. The full description and detail of the rule formalism are given in the report on the Multext morphology tool (Report nr. 2.3.1B) and the manuals accompanying the tool. Extensive exemplification can be found in the report on Multext morphology resources, Report nr. 5.3.1B. 5.6.2 Dutch word classes The Dutch word classification used for Multext approximates as closely as possible the proposal in Deliverable A, section 1.6.1. It can be summarized best in terms of (the relevant selection from) the types and attributes used in the actual Dutch description (Report 5.3.1B, section on Dutch). There are 10 word class types: V : Vtype Vform Person Number Tense N : Ntype Semgender Gender Number A : Inflected Degree Adp : AdpType Det : DetType Number Gender Defness Pron : PronType Number Defness Person Semgender Case Adv : Nil Num : Nil Conj : ConjType Interj : Nil where: Vtype : Main Aux Copula Impersonal Tense : Pres Past Person : 1 2 3 Number : Sg Pl Vform : Inf ImPart PerfPart Fin Ntype : Common Proper Semgender : M F N Gender : De Het none Degree : Pos Compar Super Inflected : 0 1 AdpType : Post Pre DetType : Article Quantificational Possessive Demonstrative Defness : Def Indef PronType : Reciprocal Reflexive Personal Relative Demonstrative Quantificational Interrogative Case : 1 4 ConjType : Coord Subord Dutch is not a morphologically rich language. A distinction that it makes which is different from most other Multext languages is that between `syntactic' and `semantic' gender. A good example is `meisje' (girl). The syntactic gender is `het' (`het meisje' *`de meisje') but the semantic gender is female (`het meisje(i) dacht dat ze(i)/*hij(i)/??het een jongetje was'). It can be seen in the example that articles agree with their nouns in syntactic gender and that pronouns (usually) agree with their antecedents in semantic gender. For the rest, the distinctions given differ from other languages mainly in what Dutch does not express. The distinction between pronouns and determiners has been implemented as follows: for any X that could be either a det or a pron: if X distributes like NP, then X is a pronoun; if X distributes like Det (i.e. NP-initial), then X is a determiner It is hoped that this is a good starting point for tagging but this remains to be seen. As a consequence, a word like `mijn' which is often called a pronoun is analysed as a determiner here. Decisions like this one on function words can easily be changed; e.g. in the lexicon supplied for Dutch (Report nr. 5.4.1B), 59 words are classified as pronouns and 27 as determiners.