Морфологический трансдуктор русского языка

Comments

• Zaliznjak does not put accents on uninflectable monosyllables like вдруг. It is probably best to go with that convention. It is possible to have some misgivings there since some uninflectable monosyllables (like this adverb) do get a stress, and others (most instances of prepositions) don't, and there are situations where the latter will attract stress that they otherwise lack, etc. But let's go with the convention of not marking those. We can return to that later if needed. (In the long run I am hoping that we can use the stress not only to help students learn the paradigms but also to learn all the morphophonemics that go with stress alternations, and ultimately it would be spectacular to be able to generate phonemic transliterations for a structure of Russian class -- this is normally so tedious that they never see very many examples...)
• Indeclinables. I take it that either you could say that they have no forms at all or that they have full paradigms where all the forms are identical, right? What is more desirable computationally? I think that conceptually this is experienced more like the latter with a lot of syncretic forms. So in a sense I would vote for the latter. It is like the syncretism of fish in English with a) My poor little fish named Ben died yesterday vs. b) Look at all those fish! The lack of a sg vs. pl distinction morphologically does not prevent us from experiencing the difference grammatically when we have syncretism. We will have a big issue with several hundred biaspectual verbs in Russian. These can express both perfective and imperfective, however in context they are NEVER ambiguous, at least that is what native linguists always claim... At any rate, we should have a consistent policy for uninflected nouns and biaspectual verbs, etc. Actually, come to think of it, there is an uninflected verb in Russian: na! It has only that form and it interpreted as an imperative, 'here, take it', although you can get a plural: nate! (600+ attestations in RNC).
• I personally would vote for interpreting вечером as both an adverb and the instrumental sg of вечер. Obviously it will mostly be the adverb, but the noun is always possible.
• About the adverbs that are regularly formed from adjectives -- what is the convention with other languages that do this? What are the tradeoffs? What do I lose or gain by making one decision over the other? It might be easier to have them as separate entries and then one can also separate the comparative forms for the adjective from those for the adverb since they would come in different entries, and that might be cleaner.
• About the pronouns: My intuition would be to separate them and have a different entry for singular vs. plural. In other words, I would have one entry each for я, мы, ты, вы, он, она, оно, они. I think that is conceptually easier. Each of those would inflect only in one number, but I think that would make more sense for users than looking for нам under я.

Comparison

        Tore and I are sitting here talking about the comparatives.
        There are a couple of issues that need to be taken seriously.
        One is that the (synthetic) comparative forms of adjectives and adverbs
are nearly always (maybe always?) identical. This is something that a
native speaker would be aware of and it would be desirable somehow to
represent this in our grammar too.
        However, there is a lot of noise in the system and the adverbs are not
strictly just forms of the adjectives either.
        The synthetic comparative adjectives are like the short forms of
adjectives in that they do not inflect for case and they also appear in
predicate position, not attributive. There are analytic comparative forms
that have regular adjective endings and appear in attributive position
(более красивый, самый красивый).
        The synthetic comparative can also serve as a superlative, but only in
predicate position, and only in collocation with всех, всего. Since it
requires the collocation with всех, всего, it is not really synthetic.
There is also the analytic superlative with самый, but that one is only
attributive.

There is also the issue of the pseudosuperlatives prefixed in наи-, but I don't know as I have the energy for those right now...
        So we have:

        быстрый -- adjective ‘fast’
        быстро -- adverb ‘fast’
        быстрее -- ‘faster’ synthetic comparative adjective for predicate position, plus comparative adverb
        более быстрый -- ‘faster’ analytic comparative adjective, primarily used for attributive position, but might also leak to predicative
        более быстро -- ‘faster’ analytic comparative adverb (less common than быстрее)
        самый быстрый -- ‘fastest’ analytic attributive superlative adjective
        быстрее всех, всего -- ‘fastest of all’ analytic predicative superlative adjective and adverb
        наиболее быстрый -- ‘fastest’ analytic superlative adjective, relatively rarely found
        наиболее быстрo -- ‘fastest’ analytic superlative adverb, very rarely found 
        быстрейший -- ‘fastest’ synthetic attributive superlative adjective, but it can have the meaning ‘very’ instead of ‘most’
        наибыстрейший -- ‘fastest’ synthetic attributive superlative adjective, but it can have the meaning ‘very’ instead of ‘most’, these last two are rather synonymous.