<div dir="ltr">Thank you, Ann. I think one of our questions is whether we should ever treat the adverbs<div>as contentful, and if so what that looks like. Mandarin gives us several examples of these,</div><div>including pairs like"虽然 ... 但是" ('although ... but'; I'm not at the office today, so I can't</div><div>look through my grammar books). It seems like rather than treating one (or both) as semantically</div><div>empty, we might want something like:</div><div><br></div><div>h1:although(h2,h3)</div><div>h2:but(h4)<br></div><div>h5:main-clause-ltop</div><div>h6:subord-clause-ltop</div><div><br></div><div>h4 qeq h5, h3 qeq h6</div><div><br></div><div>Does that sound sensible?</div><div><br></div><div>Emily</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jun 17, 2017 at 5:25 AM, Ann Copestake <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:aac10@cl.cam.ac.uk" target="_blank">aac10@cl.cam.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi Kristen,<br>
<br>
I can discuss the way the MRS might look, though not the details of how you get there.<br>
<br>
If there's a semantic relationship between the two clauses, then there needs to be some sort of two-place predicate taking the LTOP of each clause as an argument (usually via a qeq). If the two elements of the pair always go together, and there is a restricted range of options, this two-place predicate might be the only element of the semantics. If both elements are adverbial, the semantics might have to be associated with the construction rather than trying to do it via unusual semantics for an adverb.<br>
<br>
Looking at the ERG demo and delphin-viz, it seems that if_x_then is used for a range of situations, including ones without any lexical marking - e.g.,<br>
<br>
"Had I slept, it rained." (actually I find that ungrammatical, but never mind ... "Had I slept, it would have rained." is fine)<br>
<br>
In terms of the actual semantics, one could say there are two things going on with if_x_then - one is a causality relationship and the other is a hypotheticality marking.<br>
<br>
"I slept, so it rained."<br>
<br>
is just causality. So one could analyse<br>
<br>
if X then Y.<br>
<br>
as (schematically)<br>
<br>
cause(hyp(X),hyp(Y))<br>
<br>
and<br>
<br>
X so Y<br>
<br>
as<br>
<br>
cause(X,Y)<br>
<br>
I don't think this would be a good idea for English (too much decomposition, so it probably doesn't capture the nuances), but it might be more convenient for other languages.<br>
<br>
It is not the case that we can always capture the meaning directly for English. For instance:<br>
<br>
"I slept and, as a consequence, it rained."<br>
<br>
implies causality, but we won't capture that directly in the MRS. I'd say that what's going on is that `and' gives a two place relationship of the right form, but highly underspecified. "as a consequence" means it has to be interpreted causally.<br>
<br>
In context:<br>
<br>
"I slept and it rained."<br>
<br>
can do the same thing.<br>
<br>
To sum up, what I'm saying is that I think you'll always want some type of two-place clausal connective, but it might be underspecified to some extent with additional meaning conveyed via additional predications on individual clauses.<br>
<br>
All best,<br>
<br>
Ann<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
</blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature" data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr">Emily M. Bender<br>Professor, <span style="font-size:12.8px">Department of Linguistics</span></div><div dir="ltr">Check out CLMS on facebook! <a href="http://www.facebook.com/uwclma" target="_blank">http://www.facebook.com/uwclma</a><br></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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