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On 07/29/2014 03:15 AM, Jean-Luc Léger
reiga@**************** [edict-jmdict] wrote:
What is and is not a conjugation is obviously subject to debate. For example. I have seen some sources that give a "desirative" conjugation, eg. 書く -> 書きたい. But one has to draw a line somewhere because otherwise one would have to include zillions of various auxiliary verb suffix forms. I based my choice of conjugated forms on what I commonly saw in JSL textbooks, on the internet (eg wwwjdic's conjugations) etc. I realize *any* specific choice can be criticized as including too many or not enough. Honorific and humble forms do not seem to be included in many (or perhaps any) of the conjugation tables I've seen. When I first tried to come up with code to do conjugations, that is an approach I tried: view conjugations as the outcome of a series of sequential primitive conjugation transforms. Thus v5* verbs (eg 書く) would not have a negative past form but rather only a negative form that results in an adj-i and it is the i-adj that has a past form:
or
In the above, the second row of each table shows the PoS of each verb form and the transformations (in parens) applied. It is interesting to try to reduce conjugations to a minimal sequence of primitive conjugations but I came to the conclusion that it is hard to display such results in a convenient form to a user. That is, you'll likely end up presenting the above in a row labeled: "neg-past" regardless of whether it was generated stepwise or directly. And the same for conjugations of だ/です. I agree. And having a cop-desu (and masu) PoS tags would indeed make it easier to do conjugations in a minimal stepwise manner. However that is not a co-requisite for having a cop-da PoS tag. I thought that 暑いでした is considered grammatically incorrect. My point was: re René's comments, when is viewing です as an independent auxiliary verb more advantageous than as a "formal" conjugation form of だ? 綺麗です (to borrow from Nil's post) does not seem to be an example since です is that usage (ISTM) a form of だ. The only case I can think of where です is not a form of だ is something like 暑いです. Yet that is not an example either because です does not conjugate (AFAIK) in that usage. Before that, the question is, do you want to present conjugations of です at all? If one takes the view that it is a form of だ, then one would look at the conjugations of だ and find です therein. If one takes the view that it is an independent, conjugatable auxiliary verb, then indeed, what would one want to see? I suppose it would be the same as the affirm-formal and neg-formal columns of a だ conjugation table. I would like to see such xrefs. (They seem to be mostly already there but as "see:..." xrefs rather than being marked more specifically.) But I am doubtful about using them as the basis for doing conjugations. Most verbs in JMdict are only in dictionary form and not in any conjugated forms. Thus, any conjugations presented to a user will need to include the formal forms as conjugations of the dictionary form or the formal forms will not be presented at all. (I.e. unlike だ/です there is no 食べます entry from which to derive the formal forms of 食べる.) Having a few words such as だ use a different method (present only the "plain" conjugations, use an xref to find a "formal" pseudo-dictionary form, and then generate conjugations of that) seems to be introducing a lot of gratuitous inconsistency. I would not object if です got a dedicated PoS tag like "cop-desu" -- I was just wondering how useful it is to be able to treat it as a conjugatable word in its own right given it has a link to だ, and だ's conjugations would likely have です and its conjugations per the reasoning above. |