No abstract

This paper describes the results of a series of annotation experiments that focused on a number of prototypical expressions of dynamic modality in English and Spanish. This kind of modality may be defined as possibility and necessity due to natural factors (Perkins, 1983) and comprises meanings such as inevitability, tendency, ability and circumstantial possibility. The work reported is part of a larger project – CONTRANOT – aimed at the creation and validation of contrastive functional descriptions through corpus analysis and annotation, and at the production of a bilingual English-Spanish corpus annotated with different layers of discourse and grammatical features (see Arús et al., this volume; Lavid, 2008; Lavid et al., 2007, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). The results display striking similarities between inter-annotator agreement in the two languages, in terms of both the global percentages of agreement and the percentages of the individual expressions and their respective correlates in the other language. The main problem for inter-annotator agreement was the distinction between dynamic modality and the other two modalities (epistemic and deontic).

In this paper we present current work on the design and validation of a linguistically-motivated annotation model of modality in English and Spanish in the context of the MULTINOT project. Our annotation model captures four basic modal meanings and their subtypes, on the one hand, and provides a fine-grained characterisation of the syntactic realisations of those meanings in English and Spanish, on the other. We validate the modal tagset proposed through an agreement study performed on a bilingual sample of four hundred sentences extracted from original texts of the MULTINOT corpus, and discuss the difficult cases encountered in the annotation experiment. We also describe current steps in the implementation of the proposed scheme for the large-scale annotation of the bilingual corpus using both automatic and manual procedures.