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English Resource Grammar
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every_all_rbst needed for good sentences #5

Closed fcbond closed 5 years ago

fcbond commented 6 years ago

Sentences like "Every now and then I laugh" parse with this rule (and not without it), but I think they are ok.

Maybe "every" is ok with coordinated singulars? "Every dog and cat is important to me", "A Happy Home for Every Dog and Cat.", ...

guyemerson commented 6 years ago

Those sound okay to me.

Isn't "every now and then" a fixed multiword, though? some now and then, a now and then

fcbond commented 6 years ago

I think it is established but that the pattern is productive. Note the others are ruled out on independant grounds: *some cat and dog

On 4 Nov 2017 00:26, "Guy Emerson" notifications@github.com wrote:

Those sound okay to me.

Isn't "every now and then" a fixed multiword, though? some now and then, a now and then

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goodmami commented 6 years ago

I was gonna be snarky and say "The LSA has found no difference in meaning from _rbst-treated analyses and non-_rbst-treated analyses", but I'm afraid the reference might be US-specific....

But I agree that there should be a _every+now+and+then_a_1, like there is for _every+so+often_a_1, as the meaning isn't compositional.

I get a parse for "Every dog and cat chases mice.", but with a weird id predicate MOD/EQ to the _and_c and ARG1/NEQ to _dog_n_1. If I use a different verb, like "sleeps" or "barks", I have a hard time getting the analysis where those aren't fragments with _sleep_n_1 and _bark_n_1.

guyemerson commented 6 years ago

"I'd like to get a cat or dog" sounds fine to me. There are a lot of hits for "a cat or dog" on Google. So maybe "some cat and dog" is bad on semantic but not syntactic grounds.

If "every now and then" is productive, what are other examples?

guyemerson commented 6 years ago

On second thought, I'm not sure "some/a cat and dog" is bad, anyway. Here are the first two examples on Google, which sound fine to me:

I wouldn't be surprised if there's some dialectal variation here.

goodmami commented 6 years ago

I don't have a problem with "some cat and dog", and its even better with "or".

If "every now and then" is productive, what are other examples?

Are you asking for more coordinated MWEs with "every"? I think it's productive with abstract times or places:

"Every once" is productive, too:

But it's also used in other things:

Google Ngrams helped find some of these.

guyemerson commented 6 years ago

"every time and place" and "every nook and cranny" are also coordinated nouns, so I think they pattern with the cat and dog. (Unless I'm missing something?) But that still leaves two cases mentioned so far that are not nouns:

I agree that "every once in a..." is weakly productive, but maybe this is like other cases of modifying idioms, like spilling the juicy beans. "every once in a long time" sounds bad to me. The modified examples remind me of Francis's talk about quantum MRS.

I agree that "every {so many, 2, 3, ...} Xs" is productive, and well as "every {other, 2nd, 3rd, ...} X". I think it's reasonable to group those cases with numbers, but maybe I've overlooked something.

goodmami commented 6 years ago

...so I think they pattern with the cat and dog. (Unless I'm missing something?)

Sorry I guess I wasn't clear on what the pattern we're looking for is.

fcbond commented 6 years ago

When I was thinking of "every now and then" I was analyzing "now" and "then" as nouns (as does the ERG).

I can find many examples of coordinated NPs: "Bill said that he came back much smarter after enduring educational hikes learning the names of every tree and bush from Jim." Just pick two similar nouns and google for "every X and Y". I can also find examples with "a", but they are fewer and IMHO worse "He recently removed a tree and bush for me" (I want to correct it in a way I don't want to for the other one).

For me "a dog and cat" is clearly bad (I need "a dog and a cat") and I can only get "some" if it is the "some guy" some. I am sure people say "a dog and cat" but I want to mark it as a production error. But there could be variation here :-).

"I like to sing now and then" is also good for me, with "I like to sing every now and then" being somewhat surprisingly less frequent, so I guess the meaning is idiomatic. However, I am arguing that the syntax is productive :-).

On Sat, Nov 4, 2017 at 12:59 PM, Michael Wayne Goodman < notifications@github.com> wrote:

...so I think they pattern with the cat and dog. (Unless I'm missing something?)

Sorry I guess I wasn't clear on what the pattern we're looking for is.

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-- Francis Bond http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/fcbond/ Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies Nanyang Technological University

guyemerson commented 6 years ago

For adverbial uses, like "I'm laughing now", "now" introduces four EPs: loc_nonsp, time_n, def_implicit_q, _now_a_1. And similarly for "then", except with _then_p_temp. Is there a different construction where the ERG treats them as nouns? "every now" and "every then" sound bad.

Based on the examples given so far, I think we have two separate constructions:

guyemerson commented 6 years ago

I think a related idiom is "time and again", which is already in the ERG as _time+and+again_a_1

danflick commented 5 years ago

Thanks for the clarifying discussion. Even though the ERG allows each of "now" and "then" to be nominals, they are then NPs, so we can't build "every now and then" analogously to "every cat and dog". So I've added idiomatic (MWE) entries for "every now and then" and for "every now and again". As for "every philosopher and linguist suffers from divided loyalties" or even "a philosopher and linguist, she could see both sides", the ERG only admits such coordinated nominals with a normally singular-only quantifier when it also asserts an identity relation between the two variables introduced by the nouns. This is currently done clumsily via an id_rel, but should probably get replaced by an ICONS of some kind.