[developers] Dropped arguments in DMRS

[Emily M. Bender]

I know that the FrameNet folks have thought some about unexpressed Frame
Elements,
but I haven't looked to see how thorough their annotation is in this
respect, nor whether
it is something we could try to use as a source of the fine-grained lexical
info.

At any rate, I think we're in agreement that it's non-English languages
that really bring
up the issues wrt to the representation of dropped arguments (specifically
those languages
that use dropped arguments more like pronouns).

Emily

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 2:33 PM, Ann Copestake <aac10 at cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> Thanks!
>
> Just picking up on the English case
>
> On 12/01/2016 20:58, Emily M. Bender wrote:
>
>> (ia) I already ate.
>> (ib) What? (meaning what did you eat)
>>
>> (ii) I already dined.
>> (iib) #What? (meaning what did you dine on)
>>
>
> but
> (iic) What on?
> is fine
>
> also:
>
> (iv) I understood.
> (ivb) What? (meaning what did you understand) is OK
>
> (v) They blamed me.
> (vb) #What?
> (vc) What for?
>
> I just refreshed my memory of Fillmore 1986 - I think both blame and
> understand would be cases of DNC (definite null complements)
> whereas `read' etc are indefinite null complements (because you can say
> `she's reading without knowing or caring what).
>
> (iiia) What happened to the cake?
>> (iiib) #Kim ate.
>>
>
> Right - but Fillmore attributes that to the fact that eat is an example of
> INC.  A DNC case would be:
>
> What was their reaction to the proposal?
> They accepted.
>
> I mean, for interpretation, it would indeed be nice to know that `they
> accepted' => `they accepted something' since that would no doubt help with
> producing the inference:
>
> They accepted the proposal.
>
> but then we'd need to know DNC vs INC.  And I'm not sure it's really about
> dropped arguments:
>
> What was their reaction to the proposal?
> They said `not in a billion years'.
>
> one wants to interpret this as a rejection of the proposal.
>
> One other thing - one of Fillmore's main points is that there are some
> differences between closely related word uses as to whether the complement
> may or may not be dropped.  e.g.,
>
> he lost - ok when referring to elections, not to keys
> I forgot to fix it / I forgot
> I forgot my keys / * I forgot
>
> He argues that this means fine-grained lexical entries are needed. I think
> this might be a nice class of things to experiment with distributionally,
> but, in the mean time, I'm not sure we should be trying to handle them in
> English.
>
> I guess my overall feeling about the nuances of English dropped arguments
> is that this is the sort of thing it would be nice to handle well in the
> ERG, but it looks like the sort of fine-grained lexical semantic analysis
> that doesn't tend to work out when we try and apply it beyond a few cute
> examples.
>
> All best,
>
> Ann
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
Emily M. Bender
Professor, Department of Linguistics
Check out CLMS on facebook! http://www.facebook.com/uwclma
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