Toward a Cross-Linguistic Tagset

With the spread of large quantities of corpus data, the need has arisen to develop some standard not only for the format of'interchange of text (an issue which has already been taken up by the Text Encoding Inititiave), but also for any information added in some subsequent stage of (linguistic) enrichment. The research community has much to gain by such standardization since it will enable researchers to e~ectively access and therefore make optimal use of the results of previous work on a corpus. This paper provides some direction of thought as to the development of a standardized tagset. We focus on a minimal tagset, i.e. a tagset conraining information about wordclasses. We investigate what criteria should be met by such a tagset. On the basis of an investigation and comparison of ten different tagse~s that have been used over the years for the (wordclass) tagging of corpora, we arrive at a proposal for a cross-linguistic minima] tagset for Germanic languages I .