New policy for passive BY phrases - Githubissues

carmls / snacs-guidelines

Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses: Annotation Guidelines

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New policy for passive BY phrases #63

Open nschneid opened 4 years ago

nschneid commented 4 years ago

One of the outcomes of our core roles discussion:

Passive BY can take the same functions as subjects, on the analysis that its meaning has become bleached and it is purely syntactic:

The tree was cut down BY George Washington. (Agent~>Agent)
The city was destroyed BY the fire. (Causer~>Causer)
The tree was cut down BY a hatchet. (Instrument~>Instrument)
The appetizer was followed BY the main course. (Theme~>Theme)
- This is a change from v1. The alternative of saying that BY construes the main course as a Causer seems counterintuitive.

nschneid commented 4 years ago

Needs review of corpus examples. Can search for BY tokens with VBN governors (not Voice=Pass because that is only for main verbs, not adjectival participles).