Theoretical Foundations of Syntactic Annotation

The article provides a comprehensive analysis of the theoretical foundations of syntactic annotation. The study presents a comparative overview of different grammatical schools and their approaches to syntactic structure. In particular, N. Chomsky‘s transformational-generative theory, the concepts of deep and surface syntax, and their role in the development of syntactic parsing programs and annotation models are examined. L. Tesnière‘s dependency grammar is highlighted as an alternative to the traditional subject–predicate dichotomy, proposing to represent the sentence as a graph. His theory of actants, centered on the predicate verb, is analyzed as a model that significantly influenced modern computational language processing practices. I. Mel‘čuk‘s Meaning–Text Theory (MTT) emphasizes the importance of formally representing syntactic valency and semantic actants, and it has been widely applied in machine translation and computational lexicography. The main aim of the research is to establish a scientific and theoretical foundation for syntactic annotation of the Kazakh language. The methodological framework includes comparative-descriptive analysis, formal grammar models, and structural-syntactic analysis. The advantages of constituency and dependency grammars are discussed, with the conclusion that the dependency grammar model is more adaptable to the grammatical system of Kazakh. The paper also evaluates the possibilities and limitations of the Kazakh syntactic annotation within the Universal Dependencies (UD) project. While UD provides an effective platform for cross-linguistic unification, the syntactic annotation of Kazakh should not be restricted to this framework. A national corpus-based annotation is required to adequately capture the language‘s unique features, such as its agglutinative structure, case multifunctionality, possessive constructions, and specific properties of complex sentences. The study contributes to strengthening the theoretical foundations of syntactic annotation in Kazakh linguistics and offers significant practical implications for the development of national corpora and further advancement of language technologies.