Tagging modality in Oceanic languages of Melanesia

Primary data from small, low-resource languages of Oceania have only recently become available through language documentation. In our study, we explore corpus dataof five Oceanic languages of Melanesia whichare known to be mood-prominent (in the senseof Bhat, 1999). In order to find out moreabout tense, aspect, modality, and polarity, wetagged these categories in a subset of our corpora. For the category of modality, we developed a novel tag set (MelaTAMP, 2017),which categorizes clauses into factual, possible, and counterfactual. Based on an analysis of the inter-annotator consistency, we argue that our tag set for the modal domain isefficient for our subject languages and mightbe useful for other languages and purposes