[erg] farther/further away/apart

[Paul Haley]

Thanks, Dan.  That was exactly the explanation I was looking (and 
hoping) for.

On 4/17/2015 1:43 PM, Dan Flickinger wrote:
> Hi Paul -
>
> I'm not clear on what you mean by "the resulting predications have 2 arguments".  In the MRS for one of your examples, |stars are further apart than cities|, the degree predication has two arguments (the ARG0, which should perhaps be of type 'i' rather than 'e', and the ARG1 as the eventuality being modified by "farther"), and the comp_rel predication has three arguments: the inherent ARG0 of type 'i' (individual rather than event or ref-ind, since the comparison itself is neither an eventuality nor a quantified instance), and the two elements of the comparison (the ARG0 of "farther" and that of "city").  As intended, this fits in with the general treatment of comparison.  That third argument of the comp_rel remains underspecified (a "u") when the "than"-phrase is not overt in the sentence, as in "this house is taller." rather than "this house is taller than that tree."
>
> I can imagine that the comp_rel sometimes appears in an MRS with its ARG0 constrained to 'e' rather than 'i', but they should all be 'i', so I'll take a look through the treebanks to see if I can spot offenders and deal with them.  I'll also give a little more thought to degree specifiers in general, to see if I can get them all to have 'i' ARG0s rather than sometimes 'i' and sometimes 'e'.
>
>   Dan
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Haley" <paul at haleyai.com>
> To: "Dan Flickinger" <danf at stanford.edu>
> Cc: "erg" <erg at delph-in.net>
> Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2015 1:17:27 PM
> Subject: Re: [erg] farther/further away/apart
>
> These seem to do the trick, Dan.
>
> The resulting predications have 2 arguments, one of type 'i' and the
> other being the modified 'e'.
>
> Can you (or anyone) clarify why some comparatives have 3 arguments one
> of them being their own 'e' and the other 2 being the comparands
> (typically 'e', sometimes 'u') versus these (which are not unique in
> this regard)?
>
> Thank you,
> Paul
>
> On 4/8/2015 2:07 PM, Dan Flickinger wrote:
>> Hi Paul -
>>
>> I finally got around to adding the lexical entries (and types) for these comparative degree adverbs "farther" and "further".  I have checked in the improvements to the `trunk' ERG, so when you get a chance, see if the analyses look reasonable.
>>
>>    Dan
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Paul Haley" <paul at haleyai.com>
>> To: "erg" <erg at delph-in.net>
>> Sent: Monday, April 6, 2015 2:58:04 PM
>> Subject: [erg] farther/further away/apart
>>
>> I'm stumped on what to do to get the ERG to recognize sentences like:
>>
>>     * stars are further away than cities
>>     * stars are farther apart than cities
>>
>>
>> Can anyone spare a tip?
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Paul
>>
>