Category

Category

A syntactic category is a part-of-speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc). Word forms can have more than one category. e.g. "square" can be an noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb. The categories a word form can have are represented in the lexical tools as a bit vector. Each bit represents the presence or absence of a category. In the Java implementation, a Category class is an extension of the BitMaskBase class.

• Category variants
  Category variants are described in the following table:

  Bit	Value	Name	Other Symbols	Example	Possible Inflections
  0	1	adj	adjective ADJ	red redder reddest red	base (1) comparative (2) superlative (4) positive (256)
  1	2	adv	adverb ADV	fast faster fastest fast	base (1) comparative (2) superlative (4) positive (256)
  2	4	aux	auxiliary	be being did been is be do didn't don't am weren't were wasn't are aren't was isn't	base (1) presPart (16) past (32) pastPart (64) pres3s (128) infinitive (1024) pres123p (2048) pastNeg (4096) pres123pNeg (8192) pres1s (16384) past1p23pNeg (32768) past1p23p (65536) past1s3sNeg (131072) pres1p23p (262144) pres1p23pNeg (524288) past1s3s (1048576) pres3sNeg (4194304)
  3	8	compl	complementizer	that	base (1)
  4	16	conj	conjunction CON con	and or but	base (1)
  5	32	det	determiner DET	a the some each	base (1)
  6	64	modal		dare may must ought shall will can could couldn't can can't	base (1) past (32) pastNeg (4096) pres (2097152) presNeg (8388608)
  7	128	noun	NOM NPR	dog gods dog	base (1) plural (8) singular (512)
  8	256	prep	preposition PRE pre	to on in at by	base (1)
  9	512	pron	pronoun	it he they	base (1)
  10	1024	verb	VER ver	break breaking broke broken breaks break break	base (1) presPart (16) past (32) pastPart (64) pres3s (128) infinitive (1024) pres123p (2048)

• Combination of multiple categories
  As described in the BitMaskBase page, in addition to use a value to represent a single category, it can be represented a combination of multiple categories.

  For examples, "saw" is a noun (128) and a verb (1024). It can be represented as a value of 1152 (= 128 + 1124). This is useful when the -CR:o (combine records by outputs) options is used. This value can be viewed as names <noun + verb> by using -SC (show category) options. In some Lexical tools flow operations, there is no information about the category, such as lower case (-f:l). In such case, a value of 2047 is used to represent all categories <all> because:
  2047 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 + 128 + 256 + 512 + 1024