Comprehensive Minimal Dependency Approach to Lean Annotation of Morphosyntactic Phenomena

Viewing linguistic modelling as annotation of a variety of phenomena becomes an increasingly popular perspective in natural language processing and grammar engineering, and it changes the way grammar modularity is understood nowadays. In this contribution we shall concentrate on a generalisation of the notion of dependency in combination with a rich typology of observable relationships holding between linguistically relevant items. The result is a comprehensive minimal dependency approach to lean annotation of morphosyntactic phenomena. Although the pre-theoretical ontology of relational types has been developed on the basis of Slavic morphosyntax, it provides a meta-annotation scheme which — by design — is meant to be compatible with theory-specific annotation schemes. Due to a phenomenadriven setting, the lean annotation approach represents one plausible strategy of introducing systematicity into the interpretation of linguistic data while remaining non-committal in theoretical disputes.