Lausetason

Lausetason, literally "sentence level" in Finnish, is a term used in linguistics and language technology to describe analysis, representation, or processing of language at the level of sentences as complete units. It contrasts with sub-sentential levels such as morpheme, word, or phrase analysis, and with higher-level discourse analysis. In Finnish linguistics, lausetason analyses emphasize how a sentence's syntax and semantics are organized across the entire sentence, including predicate structure, clause boundaries, and punctuation.

In corpus linguistics and natural language processing, lausetason annotation involves labeling sentences with syntactic trees, dependency relations, and predicate-argument structures. This level of annotation supports tasks such as sentence parsing, readability assessment, and machine translation that must preserve sentence-level coherence and information structure.

Relation to other levels: the unit of analysis is the sentence; within it, clauses and phrases are analyzed as components of the whole. Limitations include difficulties in handling cross-sentence phenomena like anaphora, discourse connectives, and topic maintenance that extend beyond a single sentence.

Example: the sentence "Hän näkee koiran ja hymyilee." can be treated as a single lausetason unit with a main clause containing the subject and verb, and a coordinated second verb phrase forming the predicate.

See also: syntax, parsing, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, natural language processing.