Some attachment errors

[nschneid]

http://match.grew.fr/?corpus=UD_English-EWT@dev&custom=61f5a7ad0ac4c

[nschneid]

• [x] as long as you keep your mouth shut and your pants zipped, you will be alright.: Non-constituent coordination. Ordinarily it would be obj(keep, mouth), xcomp(keep, shut), E:nsubj:xsubj(shut, mouth).

Should the coordination be mouth/pants or shut/zipped? Taking advantage of the fact that xcomp indicates a predicate complement, one option would be conj(shut, zipped), nsubj(zipped, pants). Another option would be conj(mouth, pants), orphan(pants, zipped). (Is "pants" really an object of "keep" alongside "mouth"? I suppose you could say "Your mouth and pants were kept shut and zipped, respectively".)

• [x] "A person cannot call a company, if you have no idea its name": what should this be? A second direct object (obj)? dislocated?

Note that it sounds casual but not ungrammatical to omit "of" after "have no idea". I checked COCA to be sure, and in fact it is quite well-established:

• they have no idea the value of what they are giving up
• You have no idea the amount of pressure I'm under.
• You have no idea the sacrifices your father makes to keep you out of trouble.
• People have no idea the irreparable harm such an accusation can cause.

etc.

[nschneid]

"A person cannot call a company, if you have no idea its name"

CGEL p. 978 notes the following verbal idioms that license declarative and interrogative complements:

Maybe the idiom "have no idea" mainly licenses complement clauses, but has been extended to license an NP complement?

[nschneid]

"have no idea" has attracted a lot of discussion on Twitter.

For UD purposes, the most salient thing seems to be that it's an idiom taking the same kinds of complements as "know". Thus, rather than give it 2 objects, I'm inclined to treat this as an (exceptional kind of) V+N compound, with compound(have,idea).

In most cases we do not consider semantic idiomaticity, but here (and perhaps only here) the idiomaticity has strong syntactic consequences that make a more historically transparent analysis impossible. We could stick with treating "idea" as an object if there is not another NP object, e.g. "I have no idea whether...".

Also relevant to #282.

[nschneid]

@amir-zeldes Thoughts on "keep your mouth shut and your pants zipped"?

[amir-zeldes]

For UD purposes, the most salient thing seems to be that it's an idiom taking the same kinds of complements as "know"

Personally I think for UD the most salient thing is to treat it the same as other parallel constructions, such as "you have no clue (about)", "I don't have an inkling/the foggiest/any notion...".

has attracted a lot of discussion on Twitter.

I see several appeals to an elliptical analysis suggesting this is short for "if you have no idea (about) it's name". For me "if you have no idea its name" is a dysfluency. I would continue to analyze this as nmod (with an unrealized case) and annotate it as an error.

Thoughts on "keep your mouth shut and your pants zipped"?

I think it's orphan with promotion of pants and an empty node in edeps:

obj(keep, mouth) xcomp(keep, shut) conj(keep, pants) orphan(pants, zipped)

And in edeps there would be a keep2 (CopyOf=keep), which would be:

e:conj(keep1,keep2) ...

[nschneid]

"You have no idea/clue its name" is borderline for me, but I'm willing to accept it by analogy to other uses of the idiom with an NP complement, e.g. "Do you have any idea the size of that thing?!"