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UCCA Documentation
https://universalconceptualcognitiveannotation.github.io/
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Focusing modifiers and degree modifiers: also/too/as well; even; only/just #41

Open nschneid opened 5 years ago

nschneid commented 5 years ago

Warning: Detailed linguistic explanation, but with a potentially simple solution.

The guidelines say (p. 20):

Adverbs of quantity such as “just” and “only” should be annotated as Ds whenever possible.

  1. “There_S is_F only_D [one piece of cake]_A”
  2. “[The supermarket]_A is_F just_D around_S [the corner]_A”

"Only" and "just" are complicated. In the cake example it seems to be an approximator of a quantity (#35), which we have decided is E: only one piece of cake, and not more. These can also modify a distance: "I live only/just 3 miles away." Or they serve as nonquantitative degree modifiers: "The water is only warm, not hot." I think these should be E where possible, and D only if they truly modify a scene. That way it will be consistent with "There is about one piece of cake."

Then there are what CGEL (pp. 586-595) calls "focusing modifiers": there is an emphasis on the size or expansion of a set. "Only" and "just", when used as focusing modifiers, can serve as adjectives or adverbs:

Other focusing modifiers—including "also", "too", "as well"—mark an additional item in a set, where the initial item may have been in a previous sentence.

The above are ambiguous: "JOHN, too, likes cats" (expanding the set of cat-likers to include John) or "John likes CATS in addition to the things already mentioned" (expanding the set of things John likes to include cats) or "John LIKES cats in addition to doing/feeling other things with respect to cats). It should be clear in most contexts, and it seems like it should be possible to disambiguate this in UCCA.

And there is "even", which highlights an extreme/surprising exemplar of a set:

I couldn't find guidelines for focusing modifiers. Perhaps the focusing modifier should be an E of the unit centered by the set-item, if a non-scene unit, or a D if the set items are scenes:

omriabnd commented 5 years ago

All this makes a lot of sense, but since it considerably adds to the cognitive load, I was wondering there's a way to defer that to another layer. Is "only" really an approximator in the cake example? My hunch is that it won't be outragously wrong to say all these things are part of an information structural / discourse layer, which means that maybe by right we should mark them as Fs in the foundational.

omriabnd commented 5 years ago

Nathan will write a suggestion.

nschneid commented 5 years ago

I'll try to write some guidelines to this effect.

nschneid commented 5 years ago

Floating quantifiers should probably be treated similarly:

omriabnd commented 5 years ago

makes sense

On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 5:01 PM Nathan Schneider notifications@github.com wrote:

Floating quantifiers should probably be treated similarly:

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