Inter-treebank co-ordination of similar tags: secondary predications, adverbials and comparative constructions

[Stormur]

I have recently noticed from one of the recent discussions that Ukrainian treebanks make use of the subtype sp with advcl or xcomp for so-called secondary predications. Now, this subtype happens to be a doppelgänger of what we are using for Latin: pred.

So the question is: can we converge on one common tag (that will hopefully be used by other treebanks, too)? xcomp:pred seems to be used in a very similar sense by other treebanks, too. Some considerations about the possible tag:

• I would prefer a trasparent as possible subtype, that's why we chose pred;
• we forwent specifying "secondary" because this should be already implied by its being attached to advcl or xcomp.

So what should we choose? Maybe something like secpred in the spirit of relcl? Should we maybe converge on pred or on sp? pred is slightly more used currently, but I am not sure if it always has the same meaning.

---

For AdvType, we have Loc (of location) and Tim (of time), but there is also a Temp. Probably we should just converge to Tim keeping the overall trilitteral symmetry.

---

For comparative constructions, there are both relation subtypes and feature values oscillating between [Cc]mp, comp, cmpr, which are variously distributed. We should probably choose only one for coherence. Maybe the best choice could be cmp/Cmp, in "deference" to the "original" value for adjectival degrees.

[dan-zeman]

I wonder whether each of the three issues should be a separate Github issue?

Regarding the first one, here is the current usage in treebanks:

• xcomp:pred is used in Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, North Sami, Latin, and Polish (at least in some treebanks of those languages)
• xcomp:sp is used in Ukrainian
• advcl:pred is used in Latin
• advcl:sp is used in Ukrainian
• nmod:pred is used in Polish for a similar purpose (with nominalized copulas)
• ccomp:pred in Hungarian is probably also related

Probably unrelated:

• case:pred in Welsh is used for predicative particles
• discourse:sp is used in Classical Chinese, Chinese and Cantonese and it stands for "sentence particle"

[Stormur]

I wonder whether each of the three issues should be a separate Github issue?

They are in fact more or less uncorrelated, but I felt like compacting them so as not to clog the issues... but if we agree, we can split them and I will present them separetely in future, too!

[dan-zeman]

My point was that the discussion for each of them may diverge in the future, and it could become a mess if interleaved in one thread. Although there is obviously the common goal of annotating the same thing the same way across treebanks.

[msklvsk]

We used :sp more as a placeholder in an anticipation that the community will eventually come up with a proper name. No problem renaming to :pred.

[msklvsk]

@Stormur, done, renamed to :pred.