= Part of speech
A <part of speech> is a grammatical word category identified by patterns of distribution, combination and, where relevant, <inflection>. Categories such as <noun>, <verb> and <adjective> help describe what an expression can do in a construction. Meaning is evidence, but a rule equating a category with one broad kind of meaning is insufficient.
For example, `record` is a <noun> in `the record` and a <verb> in `record the result`. The same spelling can therefore require different labels when its context changes. A computational annotation scheme must state whether it assigns categories to lexical entries, individual occurrences or both.<Morphology: General Principles in Universal Dependencies>[Part-of-Speech Tags, context, prototypical usage and category distinctions]{ref}
<Universal Dependencies> separates a broad <part of speech> label from additional grammatical features. Two forms can share the label `NOUN` while differing in <grammatical number>. Keeping category and features distinct makes an analysis of a <text corpus> reproducible without multiplying category labels for every possible form.
Back to article page
