Obligatoriness - grambank/grambank GitHub Wiki

Many of the features in Grambank specify in the feature description or assume that the marker needs to be obligatory. By grammatical marking, it is generally assumed that always, or nearly always, when the relevant semantics is referred to, the marker is present.

Exceptions are possible, there may be suppletive forms for example or special circumstances where the marker/marking is not present. However, the marker/marking should be the most dominant way of expressing the given concept and the concept should nearly always be present when the concept is being expressed. This is in contrast to optional marking where most of the time the meaning is left under-specified but it can be marked spontaneously if the meaning is particularly relevant. For example, dual number marking is different from the use of the numeral 'two' in that dual number marking should almost always be present when there is indeed two of something, whereas the numeral 'two' can be left out and under-specified: for example if plural marking is present and the fact that there is two of something isn't important enough.

Obligatoriness is one of the three key concepts of grammar in Grambank. Grammatical markers/marking should be:

• near-universally obligatory
• productive (i.e. not restricted to only a subset of lexemes)
• dedicated