Universal Annotation of Slavic Verb Forms

Abstract This article proposes application of a subset of the Universal Dependencies (UD) standard to the group of Slavic languages. The subset in question comprises morphosyntactic features of various verb forms. We systematically document the inventory of features observable with Slavic verbs, giving numerous examples from 10 languages. We demonstrate that terminology in literature may differ, yet the substance remains the same. Our goal is practical. We definitely do not intend to overturn the many decades of research in Slavic comparative linguistics. Instead, we want to put the properties of Slavic verbs in the context of UD, and to propose a unified (Slavic-wide) application of UD features and values to them. We believe that our proposal is a compromise that could be accepted by corpus linguists working on all Slavic languages.