Sentence Modality Assignment in the Prague Dependency Treebank

The paper focuses on the annotation of sentence modality in the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT). Sentence modality (as the contrast between declarative, imperative, interrogative etc. sentences) is expressed by a combination of several means in Czech, from which the category of verbal mood and the final punctuation of the sentence are the most important ones. In PDT 2.0, sentence modality was assigned semi-automatically to the root node of each sentence (tree) and further to the roots of parenthesis and direct speech subtrees. As this approach was too simple to adequately represent the linguistic phenomenon in question, the method for assigning the sentence modality has been revised and elaborated for the forthcoming version of the treebank (PDT 3.0).