ESD Test Suite Examples

Three of the dogs bark.
Who is the oldest of all?
Some of them arrived.

Linguistic Characterization

Several varieties of noun phrases appear without an overt head noun, with the semantics of the phrase identifying some subset of a set of entities supplied overtly by an of-PP within the NP. The partitive relation `part_of’ is introduced by each of a set of unary rules that accommodate the missing head noun by licensing a nominal phrase whose daughter is either a determiner or an adjective of the appropriate type, where this daughter’s semantics imposes the partitive restriction on the set of entities given by the of-PP’s semantics.

Motivating Examples

The following are examples involving this phenomenon:

  • Three of the dogs bark.
  • Who is the oldest one of all?
  • Some of them arrived.

ERS Fingerprints

Analyses of strings involving this phenomenon are characterized by the EP part_of, which is a relation between two sets of individuals, one a subset of the other.

  part_of[ARG0 x1, ARG1 x2]

The variable x2 corresponds to the full set of entities identified by the of-PP, while x1 identifies the relevant subset constrained by the overt determiner or adjective.

Interactions

The variants of these partitive noun phrases where the of-PP is absent do not introduce a part_of relation (since there is no overt full set identified), but instead supply a generic_entity relation. Thus in the example

  • Some arrived.

there is no information in the sentence identifying the larger set of individuals of which some subset arrived.

Reflections

There is a connection with one-anaphora as an overt variant, which should be elaborated on here.

Open Questions

Expert External Commentary

Grammar Version

  • 1212

References

More Information

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