jnivre
commented
4 years ago Thanks for bringing this interesting issue up for discussion. I think it may be instructive to think about what we currently do for (a) compounds written as single words (without space), and (b) pro-drop.
For (a), which is found in Swedish and German, for example, we currently do nothing. Maybe this is not the ideal solution, but it suggests that, as long as a lexical analysis is reasonable, maybe it is okay to simply let the two words become one. I understand that this may be applicable to nominal incorporation but not verbal incorporation.
For (b), which is found in many languages (including Chukchi, apparently), we also currently do nothing. As a result, the representation of the argument structure is in some sense incomplete for pro-drop sentences and therefore problematic for (some) downstream applications. There have been proposals that this is something that can be fixed in enhanced dependencies, but currently this is not part of the guidelines. Therefore, I think option 2 is worth considering. The syntactic structure is then annotated as an intransitive clause, which apparently it is, but the features preserve the information that there is an incorporated object. If instead we want to represent the transitive clause structure, then option 4 is my favorite, because I think it fits best into the current guidelines.
Just my two cents ...
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dan-zeman
I'm currently working on annotating a corpus of Chukchi, a polysynthetic language of Siberia. The raw data is from the Amguema dialect corpus and consists of around 1000 utterances of spoken Chukchi transcribed and glossed.
One issue I have come across is the treatment of incorporation -- when two or more lexical stems can be combined to make up a single phonological word. In Chukchi this can take two forms: either nominal incorporation (similar to noun-noun or adjective-noun compounding) or verbal incorporation. In this issue I will discuss the latter. This process is not infrequent, appearing in 5-10% of verb tokens I have annotated so far.
Verbs can incorporate a range of nominals and other verb stems, including:
In the case of incorporation of the direct object, the valency of the verb decreases. That is a transitive verb becomes intransitive. Morphologically this entails a change of inflectional agreement paradigm. Note that in Chukchi, incorporated nouns can maintain reference, that is they refer to something specific in the discourse, and incorporation is used as a foregrounding/backgrounding strategy (Dunn, 1999: ch.12)
Here is one example from the corpus containing several different kinds of incorporation:
In имԓетгынтэвъыма [imɬ-et-ɣəntew-ʔə-ma], a noun имԓ [imɬ] "water" is verbalised and then incorporated with another verb гынтэв [ɣəntew] "flee" which is in a converb form with a clitic emphatic particle.
The verb тэӈыръиԓеԓьэтӄинэ [teŋə-rʔiɬe-ɬʔet-qine] "quickly raced" the adjective тэӈ "good" is incorporated with the verb base ръиԓе [rʔiɬe] "to take part in a race" as an adverbial modifier.
Finally, гынтэвтыԓеӄинэт [ɣəntewtəɬeqinet] consists of two verb stems, the first one гынтэв [ɣəntew] "flee" acts as an adverbial clause modifier of the second тыԓе [təɬe] "go".
While I have been annotating the texts I have been marking verbs with incorporation and been considering how best to annotate them according to UD guidelines. There are no current guidelines for this, as opposed to for nominal compounding or for clitics.
There are two principle approaches to incorporation in the linguistic literature, the syntactic [generativist] approach (Baker, 1988) and the lexicalist approach (Anderson, 2000) i.a. In the syntactic approach, incorporation is seen as head movement, while in the lexicalist approach it is seen as a lexical operation combining two feature structures, with the incorporated noun saturating some part of the verb's argument structure. There are formal (dependency, HPSG) approaches to a similar phenomenon in Greenlandic (Bick, 2019; Malouf, 1999)
Dunn (1999) in his Grammar of Chukchi splits incorporation into two processes, syntactic incorporation and lexical incorporation (or compounding) and states,
In Chukchi, verbs with incorporated elements are single phonological words, and inflectional morphology goes outside the incorporated element, however as Dunn points out, incorporation certainly plays a role in the syntax.
It is worth noting that if we consider these to be single syntactic words, then could cause issues for additional annotation:
And downstream tasks:
Essentially, the lexical/morphological component of UD does not appear well adapted to deal with this kind of language typology.
Manning's Law gives a number of criteria for what makes good annotation,
And additionally (7) Ginter's razor: "Complex changes should only be made when they substantially improve things".
Bearing these criteria in mind, I have considered a number of different options for annotating incorporation and come up with some advantages and disadvantages for each one. While it might be desirable and expedient to come up with an ad hoc solution for Chukchi, there are many other languages (most of them indigenous and low resource) that have this typological feature, and I would like to come up with a good general solution to avoid having to reinvent the wheel (or reannotate!) down the line.
The examples will be based on the following sentence, showing incorporation with a definite/referential noun, ӈэг "hill" from a short text (partial annotation). Note that in 1.5 the specific hill is introduced by incorporation, it is used incorporated again in 1.6, in 1.7 it is used unincorporated with oblique suffixes (
Case=Abl,Case=Prol) and again in 1.11.Options
Option 1:
Come up with an ad hoc representation where everything goes in the
MISCcolumn, do not do any specific annotation for incorporation.Example:
Advantages:
Disdvantages:
MISCcolumn would drastically complicate downstream tasks (6)MISCcolumn is not widely used by off-the-shelf parsers (4)Option 2:
Do not do any further annotation other than annotate in the morphological features that the verb has incorporated elements. This could be done with a single feature, or with layered features. Any further processing of incorporation, e.g. for use in applications would need to be done separately, with separate data.
Example:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Option 3:
Annotate as if annotating multiword tokens, maintaining the surface form as a concatenation of the tokens.
Example:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Option 4:
Annotate as if annotating multiword tokens, with the underlying tokens as the "analytic" equivalent (thanks to @dan-zeman for this one)
Example:
^ I have made this form up based on the grammar, it is likely to be incorrect
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Valencywould be2--- that is, without incorporation the verb should be transitive. (4)Option 5:
Annotate the basic dependencies as they are, and introduce the "incorporated" nodes in the enhanced dependencies like we deal with ellipsis. The verb with incorporated noun gets the verb root as the lemma and features according to its surface form (e.g.
Valency=1for intransitive).Example:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Option 6:
Introduce a new row type in the CoNLL-U format to allow for certain kinds of syntax-like word formation, with restrictions on how it can be applied. For example it could only apply to incorporation of non-bound morphemes and parts of the word that could enter into dependency relations with other parts. The delimiter could be
:or+or some other symbol not used elsewhere.Example:
Advantages:
Disadvantages:
Final thoughts
My preferences are for options 5 or 6. Although, I would welcome comments and thoughts on each of the options I have outlined, and also ideas for options that I might have missed.