The IPP effect in Afrikaans: a corpus analysis

Compared to well-resourced languages such as English and Dutch, NLP tools for linguistic analysis in Afrikaans are still not abundant. In order to facilitate corpus-based linguistic research for Afrikaans, we are creating a treebank based on the Taalkommissie corpus. We adapted a tokenizer and a shallow parser, while using a TnT tagger to do part-of-speech annotation. A first linguistic phenomenon we are investigating is the occurrence of infinitivus pro participio (IPP) in Afrikaans. IPP refers to constructions with a perfect auxiliary, in which an infinitive appears instead of the expected past participle. The phenomenon has been studied extensively in Dutch and German, but studies on Afrikaans IPP triggers are sparse. In contrast to the former two languages, it is often mentioned in the literature that in Afrikaans, IPP occurs optionally. We want to check this statement doing a corpus analysis.