ESD Test Suite Examples

Abrams and Browne arrived.
Abrams, Browne, and Chiang arrived.
The dog and cat arrived.
The dog, cat, and picture arrived.
My friend and colleague arrived.
Abrams barked and was old.
Abrams arrived, barked, and was old.
Abrams arrived and the dog barked.
Abrams wanted and expected to arrive.
The old and fierce dog barked.
The dog is old and fierce.
The dog barked on Monday and on Wednesday.

Linguistic Characterization

Coordination of two phrases introduces a relation which takes two arguments; in coordination of nominal phrases these are the instances (the ARG0) of the left and right conjuncts, while in all other coordination the two arguments are the handles (the LTOP) of each of the two conjuncts. N-ary coordination introduces an additional conjunction relation for each additional conjunct, working from right to left, in each step taking as arguments the instance or handle of the new conjunct and that of the conjoined phrase to its right.

Motivating Examples

ERS Fingerprints

Nominal coordination:

  abstract_c[ARG0 x1, ARG1 x2, ARG2 x3]
  [ARG0 x2]
  [ARG0 x3]

Non-nominal coordination:

  abstract_c[ARG0 e1, ARG1 h2, ARG2 h3]
  h2:[ARG0 e4]
  h3:[ARG0 e5]

Interactions

  • Across-the-board extraction – The grammar imposes the well-formedness condition that if in a coordinate structure there is an extraction from one of the conjuncts, the other conjunct must also exhibit the same unbounded dependency. This presents a challenge for specifying the desired MRS in the extraction of scopal arguments, since the one filler of the unbounded dependency supplies (of course) only one handle, which should then be identified with each of the two holes in the two conjuncts. An example is That we won the game, nobody will believe or admit.
  • Right-node raising – Another instance of this one-handle-two-holes problem presents itself in right-node-raising constructions such as in We ought to but probably won’t visit Paris, where each of the modals need a handle argument, but there is only one supplied by the rightward-moved verb phrase.
  • Run-On sentences – The ERG returns one MRS representation per analysis per input. That is, even if the input is linguistically best analyzed as two separate sentences (or sentence fragments) which have been stuck together (e.g. Abrams arrived, the dog barked.), the ERG still needs to produce a single, connected MRS representation for any analysis of the input. In order to handle these cases, the ERG introduces an EP with the predicate implicit_conj, treating the run-on as the coordination of two utterances (or recursively, of more). When part of a run-on consists of a sentence fragment, the fragment rules are also invoked, leading to unknown mediating between the implicit_conj predication and the internal semantics of the fragment constituent. It follows that the coordination involved in run-on constructions is always non-nominal coordination.

Reflections

  • Implicit conjunction – Lexical conjunctions each introduce a relation which serves for binary coordination, and in n-ary coordination, an implicit_conj relation is used for each additional conjunct.
  • Identity in N-bar coordination – One interpretation of N-bar coordination as in my friend and colleague has the two nouns referring to the same individual; this is expressed in the corresponding MRS by use of an additional id relation taking the two referential indices as arguments.
  • N-bar coordination – Note that for each nominal conjunct, a separate quantifier relation is introduced to bind the instance which is the inherent argument of that conjunct, where for coordination of NPs, each NP supplies its own quantifier; in N-bar coordination, the coordination construction introduces a udef_q relation for each of the two conjuncts.
  • Subordination - While the subordination relations appear similar to clausal coordination, note that for subordination the ARG1 is always the handle of the main clause, independent of surface order of the main and dependent clauses, while in coordination, the ARG1 is always the handle of the left clausal conjunct in surface order.
  • Nominal coordination - In the fingerprint, it may be unnecessary to stipulate the second and third lines, since these might follow from the more general inherent argument principle.

Open Questions

  • The general fingerprint above does not currently work in practise, because we still have to add hierarchical relations among predicates

    (i.e. predicate generalizations) to the ERG SEM-I; also, in 1214 what we call ARG1 and ARG2 above are still differentiated as L-iNDEX and R-INDEX and L-HNDL and R-HNDL, respectively.

  • The current analysis only accommodates constituent coordination, where each of the conjuncts is of the same broad syntactic category. So far, this does not extend to coordination of predicate nominals with other predicative phrases, as in My friend is a Republican and proud of it, even though the current analysis does admit My friend is in Washington and proud of it.

Grammar Version

  • 1212, but forward-looking in naming conventions for the fingerprints.

More Information

Last update: 2015-06-04 by EmilyBender [edit]