Markup and the GOLD Ontology

Figure 4. Upper taxonomy for the ontology For linguistics we are concerned with the grammatical qualities of instances of LINGUISTICUNIT, or those qualities which determine how instances of LINGUISTICUNIT behave in the grammar of a language. Instances of MORPHOSYNTACTICFEATURE include: TENSE, ASPECT, MOOD, NUMBER, PERSON, PARTOFSPEECH, etc. A MORPHOSYNTACTICUNIT is said to stand in a HASGRAMINFO relationship to particular instances of MORPHOSYNTACTICFEATURE. Features have as their values instances of the class FEATUREVALUE. That is, specific features have specific values associated with them, e.g., the feature TENSE has as its possible values {PAST, PRESENT, ..., FUTURE}. Values can be thought of as points in a particular space or region, in philosophical terms feature values are known as ‘qualia’. Tense values are points in tense space which are represented in the ontology as the class TENSEVALUE, where TENSEVALUE defines all the allowable values for tense in human language (see Gärdenfors 2000 for a discussion of this notion). Subtypes in the value hierarchy do exist. Using TenseValue as an example, we may pose the following taxonomy, in Figure 5. MORPHOSYNTACTICVALUE