LING 567 Lab 2
Nigel Kilmer and Woodley Packard
Northern Frisian (frr)

============================================================
1.
============================================================

Frisian seems to fall into the same pattern as other similar Germanic languages in that the finite verb or auxiliary occupies the second position in simple declaratives. As can be seen in the contrast between the two examples here, additional verbs are not restricted to final position.

Source: a:233
Vetted: s
Judgment: g
Phenomena: word order
Ik haa  di  Breev  dön       tö di  Dreeng
Ik haa  di  Breev  dö-n      tö di  Dreeng
I  have the letter give-PST.PTCP to the boy
I gave the letter to the boy

Source: a:238
Vetted: s
Judgment: g
Phenomena: word order
Bi höm her          ik mal  fuul liirt
Bi höm haa-t        ik mal  fuul liir-t
by him have-1SG.PST I  very much learn-PST.PTCP
I really learned a lot from him.

In the questionnaire, we chose the 'finite verb or auxiliary in second position, else free word order' option.


Frisian has a three-way number distinction (singular, dual, plural), a three-way person distinction, a three-way gender distinction (masculine, feminine, neuter), and a two-way case distinction (subjective, objective). There are unique pronouns for many of these combinations, with the exceptions being that gender is only relevant for third-person singular pronouns and that the third-person objective dual and plural pronouns are the same. In the interests of not copying 21 examples of different pronouns from our testsuite, please see the section labeled Pronoun Examples in that file. :) Here is a pair of examples showing the case distinction, however:

Source: author
Vetted: f
Judgment: u
Phenomena: case
ik skiar hat
ik skiar hat
I cut it.SUBJ
I cut it

Source: author
Vetted: f
Judgment: g
Phenomena: case
ik skiar höm
ik skiar höm
I cut it.OBJ
I cut it


Common nouns in Frisian can occur with or without determiners in either singular or plural form, so we have chosen to mark the lexical entries for most nouns as optionally occurring with a determiner.

Source: author
Vetted: f
Judgment: g
Phenomena: determiners
luki üt  wining
luki üt  wining
look out window
look out the window

Source: a:256
Vetted: s
Judgment: g
Phenomena: determiners
diar  laap di  hingster en  di  fölken ön di  guart
diar  laap di  HORSE-en en  di  fölk-en ön di  guart
there run  the horse-PL   and the foal-PL  in the garden
there are horses and foals running around the yard

There are examples of mass nouns occuring without determiners, but not with, so it is unclear at the moment whether Frisian allows determiners to occur with mass nouns.

Source: a:256
Vetted: s
Judgment: g
Phenomena: determiners
ja  luki hat jaav ja  lön  wat  öner  weeter ging
ja  luki hat jaav ja  lön  wat  öner  weeter ging
yes look it  gave yes land what under water  went
yes, well there was land that had gone under

Pronouns can not occur with determiners, so we have marked the top-level item in the pronoun hierarchy as never occurring with determiners.

Source: author
Vetted: f
Judgment: u
Phenomena: case
mi skiar di  höm
mi skiar di  höm
me cut   the it.OBJ
I cut it


Verbs are inflected to agree with the person of singular-numbered nouns. There is no first-person affix, the second-person affix is '-st' and the third-person affix is '-t'.

Source: a:231
Vetted: s
Judgment: g
Phenomena: word order
Heest    gur slöpen?
Haa-st   gur sliip-t?
have-2SG good sleep-PST.PTCP
did you sleep well?

We don't yet have an example of third-person inflection in our test suite that is from our source.


============================================================
2.
============================================================

Auxiliaries are not covered by our starter grammar. I'm unaware of examples with multiple auxiliaries. When an auxiliary exists in declaratives, it occurs in second position.

Verbs are inflected for tense. The suffix for past tense is '-t'.

It appears that alternative word orders can occur in certain discourse situations. For example, the subject can occur after the verb when the verb is preceded by 'jaa'. It's unclear whether this would be allowed if 'jaa' were dropped.

Source: a:245
Vetted: s
Judgment: g
Phenomena: word order
jaa iit ik fuul
jaa iit ik fuul
yes eat I  much
yes I eat it a lot

The plural affix for nouns is '-en', but there are many irregular nouns (and verbs). For this reason we have chosen to target the orth-seg line in our testsuite for now.

The definite article must agree with the gender of the noun it co-occurs with. For masculine and feminine nouns, the determiner 'di' is used, and for neuter nouns the determiner 'dit' is used. We do not have an example that includes 'dit' in our testsuite yet.


============================================================
3.
============================================================

The testsuite that we used for this lab contains 50 items.

Coverage: 51.5%
Overgeneration: 0%

None of the examples for word order parsed, due to the presence of prepositional phrases, questions, auxiliaries, and other currently unsupported phenomena in the examples from our source.

For the pronoun examples, all the examples for objective-case pronouns parsed, but only the singular-number examples for subjective-case pronouns parsed. This seems to be because the set of lexical rules for verbal inflection that we set up using the questionnaire is incomplete and doesn't have a lexical rule for verbs that have to agree with a subject with non-singular number. I believe that no affix is used in this case, but I haven't seen an example in the source yet confirming that.

Many of the case examples that were expected to parse such as 'ik sliip' or 'ik skiar höm' did indeed parse, and the examples that had incorrect case did not parse. The ditransitive examples do not parse since no ditransitive verbs have been added to the lexicon.

None of the examples of noun phrase structure parsed, due to unsupported constructions like prepositional phrases, imperatives, coordinations, etc. On the bright side, the ungrammatical example of a pronoun with a determiner did not parse either, though it is simple enough that it would have if the constraint didn't work. ('ik skiar di höm')

============================================================
4.
============================================================

As Frisian is a Germanic, Indo-European language, its realization of the phenomena explored in this lab seemed to be sufficiently covered by the default questionnaire.

However, the large number of irregular forms will need to be handled in the tdl, and some of the questionable aspects of the word order (as mentioned above) may require a more complex model once we have done more investigation.
