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to be verb features for collective nouns #51

Open AngledLuffa opened 2 years ago

AngledLuffa commented 2 years ago

Wondering if this is intended or a mistake:

# sent_id = GUM_academic_implicature-2
# text = We hypothesized that the children, who were over the age of six at the time of collection, would have adult-like SI interpretations.
8   were    be  VERB    VBD Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Past|VerbForm=Fin   5   acl:relcl   5:acl:relcl _

I would think Number=Plur in this case. Later in the sentence, would does get a Plur feature

amir-zeldes commented 2 years ago

It's a mistake. This particular case is possibly avoidable by assuming that "were" is generally plural (though in hypotheticals it can also be a singular past subjunctive). The general problem is that "who", the subject of the relative clause, does not indicate number, so it defaults to the more frequent Sing. We could also fix this one case manually, but I think for now I'll just add a rule which assumes that 'were' is plural if there is no plural subject. Thanks for reporting!

nschneid commented 2 years ago

if there is no singular subject?

The alternative would be to follow the ref edge from "who" to find the antecedent and use its number.

amir-zeldes commented 2 years ago

if there is no singular subject?

Yes, sorry!

The alternative would be to follow the ref edge from "who" to find the antecedent and use its number.

You're right, that's better - it looks like there are 52 such cases in the corpus...

https://corpling.uis.georgetown.edu/annis/#_q=cG9zPS9OLipTLyAtPmVkZXBbZnVuYz0icmVmIl0gdG9rX2Z1bmM9Im5zdWJqIiAmIHBvcz0vVi5ELyAmICMzIC0-ZGVwICMy&_c=R1VN&cl=5&cr=5&s=0&l=10