NounClass
#
Universal
#
Definition from de
UD website
NounClass is similar to Gender and Animacy because it is to a large part a lexical category of nouns and other parts of speech inflect for it to show agreement (pronouns, adjectives, determiners, numerals, verbs).
The distinction between gender and noun class is not sharp and is partially conditioned by the traditional terminology of a given language family. In general, the feature is called gender if the number of possible values is relatively low (typically 2-4) and the partition correlates with sex of people and animals. In language families where the number of categories is high (10-20), the feature is usually called noun class. No language family uses both the features.
In Bantu languages, the noun class also encodes Number; therefore it is a lexical-inflectional feature of nouns. The words should be annotated with the Number feature in addition to NounClass, despite the fact that people who know Bantu could infer the number from the noun class. The lemma of the noun should be its singular form.
The set of values of this feature is specific for a language family or group. Within the group, it is possible to identify classes that have similar meaning across languages (although some classes may have merged or disappeared in some languages in the group). The value of the NounClass feature consists of a short identifier of the language group (e.g., Bantu), and the number of the class (there is a standardized class numbering system accepted by scholars of the various Bantu languages; similar numbering systems should be created for the other families that have noun classes).
Values
#
See the
UD page for more informations about the values.
French
#
TODO
Overview
#
Specific Pattern
#