Hans Uszkoreit (uszkoreit@coli.uni-sb.de)
Tue, 25 Jul 1995 16:41:43 +0200
Dick, Thanks for your analysis: >Unlike English, German has `universal raising' for non-finite verbs; i.e. >every dependent of a relevant non-finite verb is raised, i.e. also fills a >slot in >the structure of the higher clause. (`Relevant' verbs are presumably just those >that are xcomps, e.g. those which depend on an auxiliary verb.) > >E.g. "Er hat einen Apfel gegessen", `He has eaten an apple'. > > ----xcomp--> > > <-s-- <-o-- >Er hat Aepfel gegessen. > -?--> > <------------subj----------- > >In this example, the dependency labelled `?' is the `raised' dependency >between "Aepfel", the object of "gegessen" and "hat". It is semantically >empty (just like the raised subject dependency), but in this example it's also >irrelevant to word order. When a word has two heads, either of them can be >taken as the `surface' one, but in this case it makes no difference: so the >object link could equally well have been shown as the `deep' relation, with >the `?' link as the surface one. > >Now, turning to VP fronting: > > > <-o- <-x-- -s-> >Aepfel gegessen hat er. > <-------?----- > ----s---> > >This is what happens if the object dependency is surface. And this is what >you get if the `?' dependency is surface: > > --?---> > <-x- -s-> >Gegessen hat er Aepfel. > ------o---> > ----s--> Interesting approach! Before I try it with some cases that have bothered me for a long time, may I ask you what happens in your system if there are (non-finite) auxiliary verbs between the main verb and the finite aux in the hierarchical structure? E.g., "Er wird die Aepfel gegessen haben." Do these verbs also keep a dependency to all complements of the embedded main verb? Best regards, Hans ____________________________________________________________________ Hans Uszkoreit (uszkoreit@coli.uni-sb.de) DFKI - Deutsches Forschungszentrum fuer Kuenstliche Intelligenz GmbH Stuhlsatzenhausweg 3, D-66123 Saarbruecken, Germany and: Universitaet des Saarlandes, Computerlinguistik D-66041 Saarbruecken, Germany phone Univ.: + 49 (681) 302-4115 phone DFKI: + 49 (681) 302-5282 fax: + 49 (681) 302-4700 ____________________________________________________________________
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