A RATIONALE FOR THE TEI RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FEATURE-STRUCTURE MARKUP

In this paper, we concentrate on justifying the decisions we made in d eveloping the TEI recommendations for feature structure markup. The fi rst four sections of this paper present the justification for the reco mmended treatment of feature structures, of features and their values, and of combinations of features or values and of alternations and neg ations of features and their values. Section 5 departs briefly from th e linguistic focus to argue that the markup scheme developed for featu re structures is in fact a general-purpose mechanism that can be used for a wide range of applications. Section 6 describes an auxiliary doc ument called a ''feature system declaration'' that is used to document and validate a system of feature-structure markup. The seventh and fi nal section illustrates the use of the recommended markup scheme with two examples, lexical tagging and interlinear text analysis.