Features

Similarly to Gender, animacy is a lexical feature of nouns and inflectional feature of other parts of speech that mark agreement with nouns. It is independent of gender, therefore it is encoded separately in some tagsets (e.g. all the Multext-East tagsets).

Anim: animate

Human beings, animals, fictional characters, names of professions etc. are all animate. Even nouns that are normally inanimate can be inflected as animate if they are personified. For instance, consider a children’s story about cars where cars live and talk as people; then the cars may become and be inflected as animates.

PDT examples of masculine animate nouns:

• человек  “man”, министр  “minister”, президент  “president”, председатель  “chairman”, режиссёр  “director”

Inan: inanimate

Nouns that are not animate are inanimate.

RNC (Russian Narional Corpus) examples of masculine inanimate nouns:

• род  “year”, закон  “law”, состояние  “state”, падеж  “case”, миллион  “million”

In Russian, aspect is considered a lexical feature of verbs. While many imperfective verbs have morphologically related perfective counterparts, it is not a regular system and the two verbs are represented by different lemmas.

Imp: imperfect aspect

The action took / takes / will take some time span and there is no information whether and when it was / will be completed.

Examples

• печь  “to bake” (Imp); пёк хлеб  “he baked / was baking a bread”

Perf: perfect aspect

The action has been / will have been completed. Since there is emphasis on one point on the time scale (the point of completion), this aspect does not work well with the present tense. Russian morphology can create present forms of perfective verbs but these actually have a future meaning.

Examples

• испечь  “to bake” (Perf); испёк хлеб  “he baked / has baked a bread”

Case is an inflectional feature of nouns and other parts of speech (adjectives, numerals) that mark agreement with nouns. It is also valency feature of prepositions (saying that the preposition requires its argument to be in that case).

Case helps to specify the role of the noun phrase in the sentence. For example, the nominative and accusative cases often distinguish subject and object of the verb, while in fixed-word-order languages these functions would be distinguished merely by the positions of the nouns in the sentence.

Czech morphology distinguishes seven cases: Nom, Gen, Dat, Acc, Loc and Ins (this ordering is fixed in the grammar and the cases are also referred to by numbers 1–7).

Examples

• singular nominative мама  “mother”, genitive мамы , dative маме,  accusative маму,  locative маме,  instrumental мамой
• plural nominative мамы,  genitive мам,  dative мамам,  accusative мам,  locative мамах,  instrumental мамами

The descriptions of the individual case values below include semantic hints about the prototypical meaning of the case. Bear in mind that quite often a case will be used for a meaning that is totally unrelated to the meaning mentioned here. Valency of verbs, adpositions and other words will determine that the noun phrase must be in a particular grammatical case to fill a particular valency slot (semantic role).

Nom: nominative

The base form of the noun, also used as citation form (lemma). This is the word form used for subjects of clauses.

Gen: genitive

Prototypical meaning of genitive is that the noun phrase somehow belongs to its governor; it would often be translated by the English preposition of.

Note that despite considerable semantic overlap, the genitive case is not the same as the feature of possessivity (Poss). Possessivity is a lexical feature, i.e. it applies to lemma and its whole paradigm. Genitive is a feature of just a subset of word forms of the lemma. Semantics of possessivity is much more clearly defined while the genitive (as many other cases) may be required in situations that have nothing to do with possessing. For example, без папиной дочери  “without the father’s daughter” is a prepositional phrase containing the preposition без  “without”, the possessive adjective папиной  “father’s” and the noun дочери  “daughter”. The possessive adjective is derived from the noun папа  but it is really an adjective (with separate lemma and paradigm), not just a form of the noun. In addition, both the adjective and the noun are in their genitive forms (the nominative would be папина дочь). There is nothing possessive about this particular occurrence of the genitive. It is there because the preposition без  always requires its argument to be in genitive.

Examples

• Москва - столица Российской Федерации.  “Moscow is the capital of the Russian Federation.”

Dat: dative

This is the word form often used for indirect objects of verbs.

Examples

• Я дал подарок своему брату.  “I gave my brother a present.” (своему брату  “my brother” is dative and подарок  “present” is accusative.)

Acc: accusative

Perhaps the second most widely spread morphological case. This is the word form most frequently used for direct objects of verbs.

Loc: locative

The locative case often expresses location in space or time, which gave it its name. As elsewhere, non-locational meanings also exist and they are not rare. On the other hand, some location roles may be expressed using other cases (e.g. because those cases are required by a preposition).

This is the only Russian case that is used exclusively in combination with prepositions.

Examples

• В июле я был в Швеции.  “In July I was in Sweden.”
• Разговаривали мы там о морфологии.  “We talked there about morphology.” (Non-locational non-temporal example)

Ins: instrumental

The role from which the name of the instrumental case is derived is that the noun is used as instrument to do something (as in писать ручкой  “to write using a pen”). Many other meanings are possible, for example the instrumental is required by the preposition s  “with” and thus it includes the meaning expressed in other languages by the comitative case.

In Russian the instrumental is also used for the agent-object in passive constructions (cf. the English preposition by).

Examples

• Этот закон был одобрен правительством.  “This bill has been approved by the government.” (Passive example)

Degree of comparison is inflectional feature of some adjectives and adverbs.

Pos: positive, first degree

This is the base form that merely states a quality of something, without comparing it to qualities of others. Note that although this degree is traditionally called “positive”, negative properties can be compared, too.

Examples

• умный человек  “young man”

Cmp: comparative, second degree

The quality of one object is compared to the same quality of another object.

Examples

• этот человек умнее меня  “the man is younger than me”

Sup: superlative, third degree

The quality of one object is compared to the same quality of all other objects within a set.

Examples

• это наиумнейший человек в нашей команде  “this is the youngest man in our team”

Gender is a lexical feature of nouns and inflectional feature of other parts of speech (adjectives, verbs) that mark agreement with nouns. There are three values of gender: masculine, feminine, and neuter.

See also the related feature of Animacy.

Masc: masculine gender

Nouns denoting male persons are masculine. Other nouns may be also grammatically masculine, without any relation to sex.

Examples

• мужчина  “man”
• замок  “castle”
• грузовик  “truck”
• председатель  “chairman”
• судья  “judge”

Fem: feminine gender

Nouns denoting female persons are feminine. Other nouns may be also grammatically feminine, without any relation to sex.

Examples

• женщина  “woman”
• роза  “rose”
• песня  “song”
• кость  “bone”

Neut: neuter gender

This third gender is for nouns that are neither masculine nor feminine (grammatically). Nouns whose nominative suffix is -о  or -е  (including a large group of deverbative nouns denoting actions) are usually neuter.

Examples

• место  “place”
• море  “sea”
• мясо  “meat”
• здание  “building”

Russian has present conditional and past conditional, both formed periphrastically using the past participle of the content verb, and a special form of the auxiliary verb бы. The special form is historically aorist tense, but the tense does not exist in modern Russian, so the auxiliary form is better described by Mood=Cnd.

The past participle of the content verb is not marked as conditional because it can also be used in past indicative.

Examples

• Если бы я был умным, учился бы в университете.  “If I were smart I would study at the university.”

Classification of named entities (token-based, no nesting of entities etc.) The feature applies mainly to the ru-pos/PROPN tag; in multi-word foreign names, adjectives may also have this feature (they preserve the ADJ tag but at the same time they would not exist in Russian otherwise than in the named entity).

Conversion from the Prague Dependency Treebank

Lemmas in PDT contain features that also encode types of named entities. When converting the PDT annotation to UD, these lemma features are removed and the feature NameType is added to the universal features to preserve the type.

The following table lists the name types together with the most frequent examples. See http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/techrep/tr27.pdf, page 8, section 2.1 (Lemma structure) for more details.

Geo: geographical name

Names of cities, countries, rivers, mountains etc.

Examples

• Praha  “Prague”, Kostelec nad Černými lesy, Německo  “Germany”

Prs: name of person

This value is used if it is not known whether it is a given or a family name, but it is known that it is a personal name.

Giv: given name of person

Given name (not family name). This is usually the first name in European and American names. In Chinese names, the last two syllables (of three) are usually the given name.

Examples

• Jan, Jiří, Václav

Sur: surname / family name of person

Family name (surname). This is usually the last name in European and American names. In Chinese names, the first syllable (of three) is usually the surname.

Examples

• Klaus, Havel, Němec

Nat: nationality

Name denoting a member of a particular nation, or inhabitant of a particular territory. This does not include derived adjectives, nor nouns denoting languages (both groups are written in lowercase). Thus Čech  “Czech [man]” belongs here but český  “Czech” and čeština  “Czech [language]” do not.

Examples

• Čech  “Czech”, Němec  “German”, Pražan  “Praguer”

Com: company, organization

Pro: product

Oth: other

Names of stadiums, guerilla bases, events etc.

It applies to verbs, adjectives, sometimes also adverbs and even nouns. (Most nouns have just Negative=Pos; deverbative nouns can have also Negative=Neg.)

Note that Negative=Neg is not the same thing as PronType=Neg. For pronouns and other pronominal parts of speech there is no such binary opposition as for verbs and adjectives. (There is no such thing as “affirmative pronoun”.)

Pos: positive, affirmative

Examples

• он пришёл  “he came”
• разумный  “wise”
• хорошо  “nicely”
• приятие  “acceptance”

Neg: negative

Examples

• он не пришёл  “he did not come”
• неразумный  “unwise”
• нехорошо  “nastily”
• неприятие  “non-acceptance, rejection”

Number is an inflectional feature of nouns and other parts of speech (adjectives, verbs) that mark agreement with nouns.

Sing: singular number

A singular noun denotes one person, animal or thing.

Examples

• стырый мужчина пришёл  “an old man came”
• молодая женщина пришла  “a young woman came”
• маленький цыплёнок пришёл  “a small chicken came”

Plur: plural number

A plural noun denotes several persons, animals or things.

Examples

• старый мужчины пришли  “old men came”
• молодые женщины пришли  “young women came”
• маленькие цыплята пришли  “small chickens came”

Ptan: plurale tantum

Some nouns appear only in the plural form even though they denote one thing (semantic singular); some tagsets mark this distinction. Grammatically they behave like plurals, so Plur is obviously the back-off value here; however, the non-existence of singular form sometimes means that the gender is unknown. In Czech, special type of numerals is used when counting nouns that are plurale tantum (NumType=Sets).

Examples

• ножницы, штаны  “scissors, pants”

Coll: collective / mass / singulare tantum

Collective or mass or singulare tantum is a special case of singular. It applies to words that use grammatical singular to describe sets of objects, i.e. semantic plural. Although in theory they might be able to form plural, in practice it would be rarely semantically plausible. Sometimes, the plural form exists and means “several sorts of” or “several packages of”.

Examples

• человечество  “mankind”

Diffs

Russian National Corpus

The RNC tagset does not distinguish Ptan from Plur and Coll from Sing, therefore this distinction is not being made in the converted data.

Person is a feature of personal and possessive pronouns, and of verbs. On verbs it is in fact an agreement feature that marks the person of the verb’s subject. Person marked on verbs makes it unnecessary to always add a personal pronoun as subject and thus subjects are sometimes dropped (Russian is a pro-drop language).

1: first person

In singular, the first person refers just to the speaker / author. In plural, it must include the speaker and one or more additional persons.

Examples

• делаю  “I do”
• делаем  “we do”

2: second person

In singular, the second person refers to the addressee of the utterance / text. In plural, it may mean several addressees and optionally some third persons too.

Examples

• делаешь  “you.Sing do”
• делаете  “you.Plur do”

3: third person

The third person refers to one or more persons that are neither speakers nor addressees.

Examples

• делает  “he/she/it does”
• делают  “they do”

While many tagsets would have “possessive” as one of the various pronoun types, this feature is intentionally separate from PronType, as it is orthogonal to pronominal types. Several of the pronominal types can be optionally possessive, and adjectives can too.

Yes: it is possessive

Note that there is no No value. If the word is not possessive, the Poss feature will just not be mentioned in the FEAT column. (Which means that empty value has the No meaning.)

Examples

• possessive personal pronouns/determiners: мой, твой, его, её, наш, ваш, их  “my, your, his, her, our, your, their”
• possessive reflexive pronoun/determiner: свой  “one’s own”
• possessive relative pronoun/determiner: чей  “whose”
• possessive adjectives: папин  “father’s”, мамин  “mother’s”

This feature typically applies to pronouns, determiners, pronominal numerals (quantifiers) and pronominal adverbs.

Prs: personal or possessive personal pronoun or determiner

See also the Poss feature that distinguishes normal personal pronouns from possessives. Note that Prs also includes reflexive personal/possessive pronouns (e.g. себя / свой; see the Reflex feature).

Examples

• я, ты, он, она, оно, мы, вы, они, себя  “I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they, they, they, oneself”
• мой, твой, его, её, наш, ваш, их, свой  “my, your, his/its, her, our, your, their, one’s own”

Int: interrogative pronoun, determiner, numeral or adverb

Note that possessive interrogative determiners (whose) can be distinguished by the Poss feature.

Examples:

• кто  “who”
• что  “what”
• какой  “what kind of”
• который  “which”
• чей  “whose”
• сколько  “how many”
• где  “where”
• куда  “where to”
• когда  “when”
• как  “how”
• почему  “why”

Dem: demonstrative pronoun, determiner, numeral or adverb

These are to some extent parallel to interrogatives.

Examples

• этот  “this”
• тот  “that”
• такой  “such”
• такой же  “same”
• столько  “so many”
• здесь  “here”
• там  “there”
• так  “so”

Tot: total (collective) pronoun, determiner or adverb

Examples

• каждый  “every, everybody, everyone, each”
• всё  “everything, all”
• везде  “everywhere”
• всегда  “always”

Neg: negative pronoun, determiner or adverb

Examples

• никто  “nobody”
• ничто  “nothing”
• никакой  “no (kind)”
• ничей  “no one’s”
• нигде  “nowhere”
• никуда  “(to) nowhere”
• никогда  “never”
• никак  “no way” (lit. “no-how”)

Ind: indefinite pronoun, determiner, numeral or adverb

Examples

• кто-то  “somebody”; кто-нибудь  “anybody”; некто  “somebody”
• кто-то  “something”; что-нибудь  “anything”; нечто  “something”
• какой-то  “some kind of”; какой-то  “any kind of”; любой  “just any”; некий  “some, certain”
• некоторый  “some”;
• чей-то  “someone’s”; чей-нибудь  “anyone’s”;
• несколько  “several”; мало  “few”; много  “many”
• где-то  “somewhere”; где-нибудь  “anywhere”;
• когда-то  “sometimes”; когда-нибудь  “anytime”; некогда  “once (long ago)”
• как-то  “somehow”; как-нибудь  “anyhow”.

Boolean feature of pronouns or determiners. It tells whether the word is reflexive, i.e. refers to the subject of its clause.

In Russian, reflexive pronouns do not have various functions:

Reflexive object of a verb means that the object is the same entity as the subject: Ян купил себе машину  = “Jan bought himself a car” vs. Ян купил ему машину  = “Jan bought him [someone else] a car”

Reflexive possessives indicate that the subject of the clause is the possessor:

• Ян продал свою машину.  “Jan sold his [own] car.”
• Ян продал его машину.  “Jan sold his [someone else’s] car.”

Yes: it is reflexive

Note that there is no No value. If the word is not reflexive, the Reflex feature will just not be mentioned in the FEAT column. (Which means that empty value has the No meaning.)

Examples

• reflexive personal pronouns: себя, себе, себя, собой, себе (occurs in various cases but not in nominative; does not distinguish Number)
• reflexive possessive pronoun: свой

Even though the name of the feature seems to suggest that it is used exclusively with verbs, it is not the case. The Part value can be used also with adjectives. It distinguishes participles from other verb forms, and participial adjectives from other adjectives.

Fin: finite verb

Rule of thumb: if it has non-empty Mood, it is finite. In Russian this applies to indicative and imperative forms, and to the special conditional forms of the auxiliary verb быть.

Examples

• несу, несёшь, несёт, несём, несёте, несут  “I carry, you carry, he/she/it carries, we carry, you carry, they carry”
• неси, несите  “carry” (imperative in different persons and numbers)
• буду, будешь, будет, будем, будете, будут  “I will be, you will be, he/she/it will be, we will be, you will be, they will be”
• будь, будьте  “be” (imperative in different persons and numbers)

Inf: infinitive

Infinitive is the citation form of verbs. It is also used with the auxiliary быть  to form periphrastic future tense, and it appears as the argument of modal and other verbs.

Examples

• нести  “to carry”
• быть  “to be”

Part: participle

Participle is a non-finite verb form that shares properties of verbs and adjectives. Russian has two types of participles:

• The active past participle is used to form the active voice.
• The passive participle is used to form the passive voice.

Participles inflect for Gender and Number but not for Person.

Examples

• пишущий, пишущая, пишущее, пишущие  “writing”
• писаный, писаная, писаное, писаные  “carried”

Trans: transgressive

The transgressive, also called adverbial participle, is a non-finite verb form that shares properties of verbs and adverbs.

Imperfective verbs form present transgressive, meaning “while doing”.

Perfective verbs form past transgressive, meaning “having done”.

Examples

• _неся;“carrying”)

• принеся  “having brought”

• они смотреля на меня держа ружья; “they stared at me while gripping their guns”
• приготовив обед, она позвала семью к столу; “having prepared the dinner, she called her family to the table”