POS stands for "part of speech" such as noun, adjective, verb, adverb etc.
In Sketch Engine, POS also refers to a positional attribute which is assigned to tokens in the corpus and contains information about the part of speech only. It does not include any additional information. (Do not mistake it for
tag.) POS may not be present in all corpora. POS is the last letter of
lempos.
Here are some examples of attributes:
POS is especially useful in a situation like this:
Task: Is
reply more frequent as a noun or verb?
Using Frequency of POS tags on the concordance of the word
reply will return something like this. Verbs are divided into present/past/gerund/third person etc. Nouns are divided into plural/singular. This is impractical.
| tag |
Frequency |
| NN |
1,328 |
| VVD |
933 |
| VV |
394 |
| NNS |
205 |
| VVZ |
150 |
| NP |
125 |
| VVG |
85 |
| VVN |
53 |
| VVP |
40 |
| NPS |
1 |
To get the answer, the user would need to manually add up all the nouns tags and verb tags. Instead, set the Frequency to use the POS and the result will look like this:
| pos |
Frequency |
| noun (n) |
1,659 |
| verb (v) |
1,655 |
This is now much easier to understand.
Compare
tag
See also
positional attributes
