Question

I was reading about linguistics in relation to Natural Language Processing, but the Brown tags are confusing me.

Can you help me explaining the following tags (if you can add an example, much better)? All of them are related to interrogative pronouns and interrogative determiners.

1. WDT (wh-determiner: what, which)

2. WP$ (possessive wh-pronoun: whose)

3. WPO (objective wh-pronoun: whom, which, that)

4. WPS (nominative wh-pronoun: who, which, that)

For example, a determiner should be the in The dog because as it’s defined, it describes the reference of a noun in a context. But what about a wh-determiner? What purpose does it serve? Asking about the reference of a noun or in which way should I interpret these forms?

Thanks a lot

Answer 1

I can help you out on the wh-determiner. It’s just a wh-word (specifically, ‘what’ or ‘which’) in the place of an ordinary determiner. It replaces the ‘the’ and in so doing shows that the speaker is unclear about which or what noun is verbing. For example:

(1) I milked the cow yesterday.

(2) Which cow did you milk yesterday?

See how the ‘which’ replaces the ‘the’? It’s even clearer in the form of an echo question:

(3) You milked which cow yesterday?

Similarly, the possessive wh-pronoun takes the place of ‘his’, ‘her’, ‘their’, ‘our’ etc. in a question.

(4) Whose cow did you milk yesterday?

(5) I milked his cow yesterday.

The objective and nominative wh-pronouns, meanwhile, are ‘true’ pronouns, in that they help replace a noun phrase in its entirety.

(6) Whom did you milk?

(7) Who milked the cow?

Hope this helps 🙂