Abstract
Dependency Grammar has been taken as a formalism for syntactic representation, comparable to close competitors such as phrase structure grammar or categorial grammar. This paper argues that in fact the dependency graphs (DGs) should—like semantic frames—be seen as a semantic formalism like e.g. FOL, Montague’s IL or Discourse Representation Structures. For this, arrows must have semantically interpretable labels and two additional kinds of arrows need to be added: scope arrows and anaphoric arrows.
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Notes
- 1.
Since Lin (1998) parser correctness is measured on the correctness of the derived DGs, leading to many algorithms that map trees to dependency structures.
- 2.
Needed to keep nodes with the same labels separate. This is not necessary when one thinks of DGs as graphical objects where such nodes can be distinguished by their spatial position. The assumption made is that different nodes have different indices, even in contexts.
- 3.
An alternative is to make contexts into graphs. Then these anap-arrows are normal graph arrows. The current presentation seems marginally more perspicuous, since it unburdens the graph notation by some set-theoretic notation.
- 4.
The number of readings of sentences can be estimated as \(m^n\) where n is the number of words and for a language like English m is roughly 5 of which 2.5 is due to lexical ambiguity alone.
- 5.
Taken from the tikz-dependency package documentation.
- 6.
Also has a syntactic associate X. The presupposition associated with also is that the clause already holds for some Y distinct from X. This can be checked if Y is connected by an anap-arrow to also. Such a treatment is however difficult, because the associates can be syntactically complex which needs a treatment of anap-arrows which allows for complex antecedents.
- 7.
While this constraint seems correct for indefinite NPs, it is unlikely to exhaust the contribution of indefiniteness marking.
- 8.
A comprehensive discussion of definiteness within a related framework is in Chap. 5 of Zeevat (2014).
- 9.
The restriction captures the accessibility relation in Discourse Representation Theory: a pronoun cannot be bound by a bound variable. There are cases where the accessibility does not seem to operate. A famous case is: A wolf might come in. It would eat you first. A proper treatment of these cases is outside the scope of this paper.
- 10.
This means there is a problem with the operators. A semantics of this kind requires that operator nodes also denote. A solution to this problem is in preparation.
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Zeevat, H. (2017). Semantic Dependency Graphs. In: Hansen, H., Murray, S., Sadrzadeh, M., Zeevat, H. (eds) Logic, Language, and Computation. TbiLLC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10148. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54332-0_10
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