10 votes

What is dependency grammar and what are the possible relationships?

Dependency grammar (DG) is an approach to the study of the syntax and grammar of natural languages that is quite distinct from phrase structure grammar (PSG), which is also known as constituency ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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8 votes
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To what extent was Chomsky influenced by Tesnière?

I do not think that Chomsky ever cited Tesnière in a meaningful way, because if he had, we would know about it. I state this as the main translator of Tesnière's work Elements of structural syntax ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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4 votes

What is dependency grammar and what are the possible relationships?

The website Universal Dependencies contains a wealth of practical and readable documentation on dependency relations. Note that this is just one flavour of doing dependency grammar, there are other ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
3 votes
Accepted

The Meaning <=> Text Theory (MTT)

The answers to the four questions posed are certainly going to vary based on the expert consulted. Phrase structure grammarians view aspects of word order differently from dependency grammarians. I ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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3 votes
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In these sentences, are these direct objects and oprds?

Yes, your analyses are correct. The adjectives interesting, very happy, and green are object predicatives, that is, they are predications over the object each time (not over the subject). The ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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3 votes

German Dependency Parsing - question about dependencies between "sich ____ lassen"

Thanks for your question. This example reflects a larger problem in grammaticizing language. Roughly speaking there are two approaches: Generative and descriptive. A parser is generative, presupposing ...
Abas's user avatar
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3 votes
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Convert a non projective dependency tree to a projective one

I've just seen your question, I don't know whether it's still relevant, but here you have a paper that describes how to projectivise a dependency tree. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P05-1013
bujol's user avatar
  • 46
3 votes

How do you draw a Dependency tree diagram of a verbless clause such as "Me too"?

Honestly, because you are asking at such a high level--just "dependency grammar" or "constituency grammar", rather than a specific grammatical theory, this question is likely not really answerable. ...
limetom's user avatar
  • 1,206
3 votes

Is there a grammar of syntax that takes into account inherent syntactic ambiguity in natural languages?

Yes, cognitive and construction grammars do take ambiguity into account. However, they have to give up a lot of the formal properties of traditional constituency and dependency grammars. It resolves ...
Dominik Lukes's user avatar
3 votes

X-bar theory without movement

You might want to have a look at LFG, they use X' Theory extended with an additional "lexocentric" category S to accommodate nonconfigurational phrase structures.
Atamiri's user avatar
  • 2,570
3 votes

Why is the subject outside the VP in most theories of syntax?

First of all, it should be noted that in nearly all generative theories--even in ones which generate subjects inside the VP--the subject practically never stays there for long. Subjects generally move ...
Khove's user avatar
  • 754
3 votes

Name for ongoing syntactic dependencies after a word

In dependency grammar there is the valency of a verb, the number of dependencies it can have. So love has a valency of two: the subject and one object. But this is slightly different from your ...
Oliver Mason's user avatar
2 votes

"Toy" Tools for Dependency Parsing?

spaCy.io has a nice high-accuracy lightweight parser. If you only need English then it is a good choice.
Adam Bittlingmayer's user avatar
2 votes

Governors of adjectives in dependency grammars

No. The annotation choices referred to in the question that are currently encountered in in some dependency treebanks are not well motivated linguistically. The question is centrally concerned with ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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2 votes

How to draw the NP "so little" in "He said so little" in a tree diagram?

There are a number of possibilities for the X-bar analysis of the phrase so little. A central choice one has to make concerns viewing little as an adjective or as a derived noun, that is, as a noun ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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2 votes
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What constitutes a Long Distance Dependency, and how can it be quantified?

Long distance dependencies have to do with clauses. They occur when some element within a clause is "missing". Depending on what kind of grammar you subscribe to, you might want to think of ...
Araucaria - him's user avatar
2 votes

In what ways might dependency grammar be a better fit for free word order languages?

Dependency structures tend to be flatter than phrase structures, which produces fewer opportunities for discontinuities to occur in the syntax. These flatter structures are the reason why many ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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2 votes

Computational model of dependency parsing

Dependency parsing is constraint solving. I recommend you have a look at XDG, which is the only formally precise dependency grammar approach I'm aware of.
Atamiri's user avatar
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2 votes

Syntax trees associated with Prepositional Phrases as subject

I am part of the team that developed the SUD syntactic format mentioned by Tim in his answer. The other participants are Sylvain Kahane, Kim Gerdès and Bruno Guillaume. The third analysis presented ...
Guy Perrier's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

Do all frameworks of syntax view the string following an inverted auxiliary verb in English as the complement of the auxiliary?

Most modern phrase structure grammars will assume that the string immediately after an inverted auxiliary is the complement of the auxiliary, as the question implies. This fact is largely due to the ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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2 votes

Is there a Chinese translation of Tesniere's Elements of Syntactic Structure?

I do not think there is a Chinese translation of Tesnière's oeuvre. I recall a few years ago -- in about 2015 -- that there was someone who was planning to produce a Chinese translation, but I was ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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2 votes
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Dependency grammar on ditransitive objects

To understand the quoted figure the text around it is necessary. The reference parse (a) is the correct parse, the system parse (b) is generated by an (in this case unnamed) automatic system and ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

Analysis of relative pronouns in dependency grammar

There are at least four basic analyses of relative clauses that one encounters in the DG literature. These four analyses are illustrated with the next dependency trees/graphs of the noun phrase the ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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1 vote

Syntax trees associated with Prepositional Phrases as subject

The first dependency grammar (DG) parse given in the question looks like this: The second DG parse given in the question looks like this: Neither of those two parses is linguistically well-motivated,...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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1 vote
Accepted

How to determine grammatical complexity using quantitative features?

There is a framework named CAF (complexity, accuracy, fluency) used to measure complexity in language learning and language understanding. However, it uses rather simple measures for complexity like ...
Sir Cornflakes's user avatar
1 vote

How can one best formalize dependency structures in terms of rules?

If one wants to show that a theory of syntax is plausible, it's necessary to implement it in such a way that well-formed sentences are accepted (and assigned a sensible syntactic structure) and ill-...
Atamiri's user avatar
  • 2,570
1 vote

Do formal language theory have concepts corresponding to dependency grammars?

What you are asking about is called abstract syntax tree (AST) in the theory of formal languages. Consider a simple grammar for arithmetic expressions and the following input string: 2/(3-4). It has ...
Atamiri's user avatar
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1 vote

removing modifiers but still keep the meaning of sentence

The question actually concerns adjuncts. Adjuncts are optional constituents that can be removed from a sentence without rendering the sentence ungrammatical. The modifiers mentioned in the question ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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1 vote

Non-projective tree sentences

The analysis provided by the Stanford parser is controversial. The Stanford annotation scheme assumes that function words are dependents of content words. Hence it shows the auxiliary is as a ...
Tim Osborne's user avatar
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