Denominative features

Since version 2.18, some features are associated with a layered features denom. A denominative feature is a feature that is traditionally used for the denomination of particular form, but do not correspond to the comparative concept associated with this feature. For instance, so-called past participles in French are used for the passive voice without introducing a past tense (une personne intéressée par la syntaxe). Even in the so-called passé composé, past participle is the régime imposed by the auxiliary without which we cannot have the value of past tense.

Related publication:

Status of morphosyntactic features Illustration with written and spoken French UD treebanks (Kahane et al., TLT-SyntaxFest 2025)

The following denominative feature is used (in French treebanks only for now):

• Tense[denom] with values Pres or Past, used on participle (VerbForm=Part)

Note

UD-native treebanks do not use denominative features. Moreover the fact Tense is layered with denom moves it from FEATS to MISC. To avoid confusion in UD treebanks, we have decided not to use the extension denomin UD-converted treebanks. Thus Tense[denom] is converted in Tense with a feature Status[Tense]=Denomin MISC.

See also discussion #30