ESD Test Suite Examples

The dog arrived barking.
Very tired, the dog arrived.
Chased by the cat, the dog barked.

Linguistic Characterization

Several types of sentence-level modifiers lacking a finite verbal head nonetheless project a clausal semantics which is related to the modified clause’s semantics by a two-place subordinating predication. These modifiers include depictive phrases as in Angry at Browne, he stormed out, and absolutives as in His plans ruined, he despaired. Like finite subordinate clause modifiers, these modifiers can appear either sentence-initial or sentence-final, and can also appear as VP modifiers particularly inside of conjoined VPs. For the depictives, the external argument of the head of the modifier phrase is left unbound, though the modifier is often interpreted most naturally as a modifier of the syntactic subject of the modified clause. Since absolutive phrases include an overt first daughter whose semantics supplies the external argument of the second daughter, the elliptical nature of these modifiers is more readily seen.

Motivating Examples

  • Depictives can be single-word modifiers or complex predicative phrases: Furious, he stormed out.
  • Depictives cannot always be interpreted as modifying the main clause subject: Furious at Browne, there was nothing left (for me) to do but storm out
  • In both absolutives and depictives, the daughter supplying the semantic head is predicative, whether headed by a verbal present or passive participle, an adjective, or a predicative nominal: Singing, Browne departed, Amused, she smiled, Indifferent, he yawned Her friend a veterinarian, Browne’s pets were well cared for.
  • These modifiers may include negation or internal scopal modifiers: Her friend not yet a licensed nurse, Browne had to get vaccinated elsewhere.

ERS Fingerprints

  subord[ARG1 h1, ARG2 h2]
  h3:[ARG0 e1]
  h4:[ARG0 e2]

  { h1 =q h3, h2 =q h4 }

Interactions

  • These non-lexicalized clausal modifier constructions are closely related to clausal modifiers with a prepositional head, including with as in With Abrams not speaking to Browne, the dinner was awkward, and while as in While furious with Browne, he still had to be polite. So the non-lexicalized modifiers introduce a generic subord relation which might be specialized to one of these lexically introduced ones.

Reflections

  • Another construction that one might think could be treated as subordination involves sentence modifying indefinite or definite frame-setting noun phrases as in A wealthy woman, she was admired for her generosity. At present, the ERG introduces an implicit conjunction predication taking as arguments the instance of the modifying noun phrase and the modified clause’s handle. Treating these instead like the depictives would be challenging, since we would have to project the NP’s semantics into some implicit event relation whose handle could serve as the other argument of the subord relation.

Open Questions

Expert External Commentary

Grammar Version

  • 1212

References

More Information

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